What ails the Left?
When I read Das Kapital, the treatise on Marxism by Marx and Engels, I was very convinced by the socialist approach Marx and Lenin adopted. Karl Marx was a huge influence on Russian society and his theories seem to have generated a lot of interest. China and West Bengal are still adopting Communist theories and China is set to be the next superpower, probably even succeeding India. The world over Capitalism is biting the dust and many great economies like the US and Germany have faced the ill-effects of Capitalism. So, has another ‘ism’ fallen into a great schism? Or is it the revival of Communism all over again?
If you read Animal Farm, the famous parody on Communist leaders, you will find out that Stalin was the villain and the downfall of Communism was due to the greed of one man. It was he who reversed the effects of Communism and due to his gluttony, the Communist Soviets came apart and everyone was in for the running. Lenin, Marx and Engels were the true followers of Marxism and were not the reason for the corruption and rot that had set into the system then. So, it was the capitalist, greedy, ambitious Stalin due to which Russian society spun from being equal to being polarized. Up till Stalin’s rule Communism flourished abundantly and had many followers, but once Stalin came into reckoning; the system just collapsed and degenerated into a free for all. So, when we look at the reasons for the failure of Communism, there is nothing we observe attributed to the system per se. But it is the distortion of Communism into a capitalist state that brought out the mess. And from then on, Communism became totally irrelevant and Capitalism took over only to meet its nemesis in the 21 st century. As of now, the attempts of several governments to organize the polity and work effectively have all come to zero. The utopian state in which all are equal and everyone gets the same is history and will probably never be realized. Equality, as is mentioned in the Indian constitution, can only be achieved in a socialist and communist system which has no takers left in the world. So, what are we going to do except wait for another miracle, another ‘ism’?
Neha Singh
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