2026 is the year of two important global milestones: 250 years of the US and Adam Smith’s cult classic Wealth of Nations. A perceived fusion of the two is the bedrock of the global economic order as we knew it until recently. Right now, a dialectic between a dogmatic belief — it is unfair to put capitalism’s recent failures on Smith — in the invisible hand of free markets and the backlash from its politically radioactive waste in the form of a precarious and reactionary underclass in the US and most parts of the advanced capitalist world is pretty much sledgehammering this order to pieces. I have been using this as an excuse to wriggle out of my editor’s multiple nudges to write on 250 years of Wealth of Nations. My lackadaisical attitude towards Wealth of Nations aside, 2026 is also the year of another, now obscure, historical milestone.
It is 125 years since Lenin first penned the ideas that he eventually developed in What is to be Done one of the most important political treatises by the Russian revolutionary which was published in 1902. What makes What is to be Done important to communists is that Lenin outlined the need for a new kind of party to carry out the revolution. He spoke about a party which was vanguardist (more politically conscious than things such as trade unions), centrally organised and capable of braving the repression which any revolutionary effort would face in Tsarist Russia. Soon, it became the organisational bible for communists across the world.
Soviet Russia, communism, socialist revolution etc. are now distant history. To be sure, things did not exactly go the ‘end of history’ way after communism failed. 2026 is also the first time in 50 years that communists are not running a state government in India. They first won an election in 1957 in Kerala. Their continuity in running at least one state government ended with the 2026 loss in Kerala. Some optimists among the Indian communists see a silver lining in the otherwise dark clouds right now. It is because Mamata Banerjee and her party, Trinamool Congress (TMC), the nemesis of the Left in West Bengal – a state the communists ruled continuously from 1977 to 2011 until the TMC threw them out – is imploding after its loss to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state.
With the TMC gone, the communists are hoping to first reclaim the opposition space and then, hoping that they shall, someday, overcome. Bengali communist lexicon even has had a catchy slogan theorising this understanding: Age Ram, Tarpore Bam: First Ram (BJP), and then Bam (Left). Until recently Bengali communists and the CPI (M) used to have animated theoretical debates about whether or not the BJP was a fascist force. An answer in the affirmative would have justified an alliance with the Congress on the lines of Stalin joining hands with capitalist countries against Hitler.
To be sure, and also to be fair, there are some committed and fighting young leaders among the ranks of the communists in West Bengal right now. Some of them have been seen at the barricades protesting against eviction drives targeting the poor and the Muslims by the new BJP government. Can they revive the Left’s fortunes in the state? This lends itself to another theoretical question.
Is resistance alone enough to revive the fortunes of Left politics?
Lenin would perhaps disagree. What he would ask for is a programmatic understanding and a political programme to execute it. The Left’s historical advance in West Bengal and Kerala, the only two large states in which it made political headway in India, rested on championing land redistribution. Their party programme identified landlords as an integral part of state power in India at the time. While social reform in Kerala and mobilising partition’s refugees in West Bengal helped their cause, land to the tiller – whether in ownership or tenancy rights – was the core promise on which power was captured and consolidated. It was useful to begin with, but its limitations became obvious when the communist government in West Bengal alienated the peasantry while trying to forcibly occupy land for industrialisation. Agrarian economic gains had stalled and the communists were desperate for a new economic engine. So, where will the next economic core for advancing the cause of the Left come from?
Land redistribution again? Extremely unlikely. Land parcels are becoming increasingly smaller with generational transfers. Farming itself is becoming unviable. Rural poor want to get out of farming rather than fight pitched battles for small parcels of land. The landlords themselves have become renegades rather than entrenched oppressors.
More government-sponsored welfare for the poor? Why do you need the communists for that? Everybody else is doing it too.
Championing secularism against BJP’s majoritarian politics? A large part of BJP’s support base in West Bengal comprises former Left voters. The attrition happened because the BJP was a more effective force in challenging a blatantly undemocratic and oppressive TMC political apparatus. Politically incorrect as it sounds, the majority has more pressing concerns than the state of minorities in India.
To say all this is not to be sarcastic towards the communists in West Bengal or the country at large. It is to underline a genuine cul-de-sac facing the Left in a country like India. What should it do to resurrect its radical politics? There are no easy answers here. The evolution of global and Indian capitalism, the Indian state and India’s larger political economy have made reinventing radical Left politics far more difficult today. So, to come back to Lenin, what is to be done? Four things can be listed to provoke a discussion.
Democracy will work better than centralism in rebuilding organisation
Just one example should suffice. If there is one (former) communist leader from West Bengal after Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya who would have maximum recall value among common people in India, it is Ritabrata Banerjee. Banerjee defected from the CPI(M) to the TMC in relative obscurity, but his coup d’état against the TMC leadership, seemingly in cahoots with the BJP has made him a big newsmaker following the West Bengal results. How did such elements rise within the ranks of the CPI(M) when it had power? The buck stops with the top leadership rather than the rank and file. Communist parties continue to remain wedded to organisational principles of more than a century ago which leave little agency against decisions of the top leadership.
Elite leaders, poor voters’ model will not work for the communists any longer
Jyoti Basu’s brush with communism happened in the 1930s in Britain while he was studying law there. But he came back to Bengal and became part of a genuine, mass-based radical Left politics. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was more into poetry and culture than realpolitik. He inherited and destroyed the communist structure that the likes of Jyoti Basu and Promod Das Gupta built. The national decline of the CPI(M) happened under the watch of two consecutive general secretaries who began as student leaders in Jawaharlal Nehru University, an elite educational institution by all standards. Neither of them ever contested a real election outside of student unions. Even in the recent past, the communists who have gathered the most TRP have been student leaders.
Has it helped their overall political fortunes? Not really. With class fronts such as among peasants and trade unions weakened in terms of building struggles which are pregnant with long-term political possibilities, mass fronts are of little use. One could even say that the wokeness from the non-class fronts is possibly putting off for the working class and definitely sidetracking its more pressing concerns.
Workers have everything to lose except their chains
Unlike Marx’s famous proclamation in the Communist Manifesto, this is the hard reality facing the working class in India and those who want to organise it. It desperately wants to become a part of the formal sector workforce instead of being in agriculture or informal sector workforce. This is not to say that working conditions are not harsh in the formal sector – plight of gig workers or those in Noida factories whose protests caught everybody off guard should disabuse us of any such notion – but it is still better than not being a part of formal sector workforce.
A lot of these workers might vote in Bihar or West Bengal but they work in Noida or Karnataka. Large number of deletions in big migrant receiving constituencies under the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise is a testimony to this. The way to politically mobilise these workers is to make a footloose party organisation which can develop an organic link with what is now truly a footloose working class in India. While a lot has been written about the difficulties of mobilising workers in old-style factory settings, not enough attention has been paid to the political potential of organising migrant workers. By embedding themselves in networks like these, political parties can grasp the daily struggles of the working classes and gain their trust when building solidarity.
Radical politics must think longer-term than the immediate election and news cycle
West Bengal is the best example. Had the CPI(M) leadership not been obsessed with executing its so-called tactical masterstrokes, such as whether or not to ally with the Congress to defeat the TMC and focused on course correcting from mistakes which led to its loss of power and politics itself, it would perhaps have stayed relevant to prevent to BJP’s rise in the state. The problem is not limited to delusions about electoral tactics alone. An even bigger problem for the Left today seems to be what can be described as putting the ideological posturing cart before the political traction horse which can drag it forward. Every time the BJP lobs a right-wing agenda bomb towards the opposition, there is a strong urge among so-called secular parties and their fellow travelers to join issues in polemics. Such issue-based camaraderie is often found lacking when addressing more substantive issues around class and communist morality in the political discourse. The culture of tactical silence around such issues has permeated even within the ranks of the Left parties. The biggest indictment on this front ought to be reserved for the comrades in Kerala rather than West Bengal, where the entire rank and file had been reduced to a bunch of cheerleaders around Pinarayi Vijayan who continues to the leader of Opposition even at the age of 81. It is telling that such decisions are being taken without any debate inside communist party structures.
In lieu of a conclusion
Critiques will argue that this column is flagging the lack of political morality and theory at time when the ruling party is putting under squeeze even the minimum space for democratic competition and secular fabric of the country. It is useful to end with what Lenin would have said against such an attitude.
“A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another—all this is common knowledge. However, a theoretical or abstract recognition of these truths does not at all rid revolutionary parties of old errors, which always crop up at unexpected occasions, in somewhat new forms, in hitherto unfamiliar garb or surroundings, in an unusual—a more or less unusual—situation.”, he writes in Left Wing Communist, An Infantile Disorder.
Meltdown over the existing political situation is often an alibi for not doing the hard work of rejuvenating progressive politics at the grass-roots and maintaining the integrity and ideological clarity required to do so. Anybody who wants to rebuild the Left in this country should first accept this fact.
German communist Eugen Levine described communists as ‘dead men on leave’. While not all communists, including Lenin himself, agreed with such a take on necessarily tying communists with imminent martyrdom and renunciation, the principle could definitely be applied to bourgeois democracy. In India and abroad, it has pivoted toward the right not because the right has weakened institutional guardrails and sharpened social fault lines. That came later. It is a result of a collective failure to reimagine and reinvent progressive politics, which created the void the right has occupied. Doing so will require not just resistance but also a larger theory of Indian political economy.
