The Promise that Never Was: A Critique of Post-1968 European “Autonomous” Left
Mithilesh Kumar
Researcher, Western Sidney University, Australia
Mithilesh kumar presenting his paper
We have seen and heard people coming up with ideas where party has to be a tail end of the working class instead of providing a conscious leadership. The transition or the leap that they take from the classes and the masses and their willingness to learn see them forming strange alliances with reactionary elements. However, one of the problems of the left movement in India is that they have to invoke Marxism-Leninism in order to gain legitimacy and when all has been said and done one has to ask them that despite their original thinking on almost every aspect of Marxism have we decisively moved away from the world-historic moment where the dictatorship of the proletariat, the question of the Bolshevik party and the question of the state is redundant. If not, can we not then infer that their seduction with the new comes at the cost of dialectics. And less said about the NGOs the better. But we do see a change in modus operandi of the NGOs. They are now coming in the garb of Marxist-Leninists but armed with the concept and lots of emotions about some esoteric “community”. The question to them remains the same. And it’s no strange coincidence that the two find themselves on the same side.