Stalin who?

Pinarayi Vijayan, the man who could be Kerala8217;s Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, will of course have to win the elections to secure his position against the orthodox faction. A new political idea often dies upon its first encounter with electoral defeat. So, if Kerala departs from its recent electoral pattern 8212; the Congress or the Left is voted out whenever either is the incumbent 8212; and the Congress surprises itself, the CPM risks much more than just losing a state. It loses an opportunity to be taken seriously across the nation.

The party is identified at the national level with politics that refuses to recognise that while poverty and exploitation are still terrible realities, millions have broken the social mould because of greater and newer opportunities. The CPM8217;s is also politics that frames the question of social inequity in terms of industrial labour in the organised sector. Fighting for the privileges of a well-protected group doesn8217;t even pass theoretical muster 8212; 8216;economism8217; has been much sniffed at in Marxist literature. In, as they say, praxis, it makes the CPM unappealing to urban classes experiencing social mobility and irrelevant to those whom the markets do not as yet protect, workers in the unorganised sector being the prime example. Every communist party that has flourished after the Soviet project imploded has learned to respect the market while interrogating its distributive capabilities. They have recognised the value of enterprise and the nuances of exploitation. They have become smartly mainstream. So must the CPM.