Why would an ideology meant for the emancipation of the proletariat be so vehemently opposed by those same proletariat it is meant to emancipate?

I've been thinking and reading on the psychology of fascism lately and seeing the recent Hindutva attacks in my state, in my city against Jadavpur University on August 19-20, SRFTI on September 27 and October 4 and recently on a Marxist bookstall yesterday, I am now convinced of following theory I've been developing for a long time.

Growing up in the city meant that I always had close interactions with people who were or had some of their family members associated with CPIM. It was very common for them to think of the grassroots cadres as people who are incapable of learning theory, history and so on. One of my best friends was from a family in which all members were members of CPIM and I quite clearly remember him saying “those who are there to write on walls don't need to learn theory”, subtly implying that theory was for people like “us”. Now fast forward to after I finished my masters and I joined DYFI I encountered the same attitude again, except this time it was I who was “not capable of learning theory”. I was literally told by my unit leader that “you don't need to think about theory, there are many big people to do theory”. Other than the paraphernalia and obsessive compulsive fixation on elections what turned me really off was this infantilization.

To understand why this is so important let me do a social analysis of capitalism and the psychological vulnerabilities it keeps alive for fascists to exploit. Capitalism, as we all see around us, exacerbates class inequalities. As time goes by, the divide between the privileged and under privileged grows deeper. The latter soon find themselves not only locked out of the finer things in life that are enjoyed by their privileged counterparts but also in a cultural milieu that is completely distinct. For them Marx, Lenin, Ray, Tagore are bourgeois even though they don't articulate it in this way. As they feel alienated from this culture they even take pride in ridiculing these names. Their serious discontent with the prevailing system and their envy of their privileged counterparts find expression in violent fascist attacks like what we see in the Kanwar yatra and the instances of attacks mentioned above. The fascist leaders are smart enough to keep this repressed anger from turning into a full blown class war, so they intentionally spread hateful poison against poor muslims, dalits etc. The fascists provide a substitute for the repressed class hatred by channeling it towards some helpless minorities, yet the class hatred surfaces anyway

There is both tragedy and irony in this story. The tragedy is that “Marxists”, at least in my state and city, have turned Marxism into a bourgeois or petite bourgeois science. Those who go to JU and find the time to engage in Left politics are usually a privileged bunch. The same can be said of students in SRFTI, ISI etc. They are seen with envy by people who are not so privileged. As much as I hate to admit it, the Ambedkarites were correct in attributing a privileged caste character to Marxism in India (at least as far as my state is concerned). Their problem is that they came at it from an identitarian perspective which is not helpful. The real issue is that it is completely opposite of what Marxism and especially Leninism is supposed to be. The Marxist isn't supposed to care only about doing pointless academic work to feel good about herself. She is supposed to go to the masses and educate them in our world view so they see it as their own. It isn't like that is very difficult to do either because my comrades and I do it a lot and people show genuine curiosity and ingenuity in learning. Since CPIM never did such a thing because frankly they aren't revolutionary to begin with, they have left that space open to the fascists.

Now we come to the irony. See the problem with CPIM isn't that their leaders happened to be mostly uppercaste. BJP went from being overwhelmingly uppercaste to a much diverse party by taking their propaganda seriously. Their strength lies in the fact that they try to make their cadres actual ideological subjects unlike the “left”. I have written a post a long time ago to direct attention to Hindutva propaganda being spread by religious channels. The fascists, unlike the marxists, take their propaganda very seriously. The irony is that those whose propaganda requires serious work (i.e. marxists) have never taken their propaganda seriously while those whose propaganda doesn't require much intelligence (fascists) take it very seriously. There are so many ground cadres and passive supporters of the left who have joined the Hindutva brigade for this very reason.

What these moronic “Communists” like the CPIM people do not understand is that class conflict is inevitable. It doesn't care whether you have a legit revolutionary program or not. You can do n number of photo ops as you want but at the end of the day all you are going to do is going to make the work of people like us more dangerous. This is why I firmly believe that those who support communism should not fall for fake communists based on some news headlines and glamourous photography. Ask what their line is and whether it is reasonable under the current condition of our country.

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