In an interview to this paper last week, CPM general secretary Prakash Karat admitted that the central leadership of his party must take responsibility for its failure to expand influence. Karat took charge of the CPM in 2005, and since then, the party has lost office in its bastion of West Bengal, and its strength in the Lok Sabha plunged from 44 seats in 2004 to 16 in 2009 and nine in 2014. His diagnosis of why this has happened is unexceptionable. But the new leadership, expected to take charge after the party congress this month, will also need a plan of action.
Karat notes the obvious: the Left has failed to communicate with the youth. More significantly, he says the organisation may have fallen into a “stereotyped mould”, become “a barrier for innovations and adopting new forms of struggles, movements and campaigns”, and that a younger leadership is needed to revamp the party. By all accounts, change in the party isn’t going to be easy, given its rigid ideological positions and organisational frameworks that draw from and belong to a different historical era. But Karat’s admission that traditional ways of organising people, especially the urban working class, are insufficient could be the starting point for a fuller acknowledgement of the reasons for the decline of the Left in the cities. The character of the working class has changed and old forms of industrial action have become impossible with the fragmentation of labour.
