We are extremely delighted to present the first issue of ‘The Anvil’. Any scientific project starts with the identification of the problem and statement of the purpose. We, too, shall start with the problématique of ‘The Anvil’. The complex of problems that constitutes the rationale of this endeavor is primarily a ‘dual crisis’ that we are witnessing especially since the late-1990s, though their roots lie somewhere in the decades of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
We would not be at the risk of premature generalization in contending that the history of the contemporary world starts with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of namesake Socialism with the disintegration of Soviet Union in 1989 and 1990, respectively. The catastrophe of the so-called “really existing socialism” coincided with an unprecedented spurt in the capitalist triumphalism, that in fact, had started in the 1960s itself. However, in the 1960s, this capitalist triumphalism was to be seen in the arena of philosophy and social theory and became the preoccupation of academia of West. With the ascent of Deng Xiao Ping in China and the sproutings of ‘market socialism’, this capitalist triumphalism became even more deafening in the circles of academia. However, with the collapse of sham ‘red flag’ in the Soviet Union in the late-1980s and the consequent disintegration of Soviet Union, this hysteric triumphalism of bourgeoisie gripped the popular public domain and even became the favourite pulp fiction of the eventful decade of 1990s. Francis Fukuyama became the chosen tribune of this neurotic hubris who in his much-celebrated ‘The End of History and The Last Man’ proclaimed the ultimate victory of liberal bourgeois democracy, that is the general political modus-vivendi of capitalism, and the rational-choice making, atomized bourgeois citizen. However, as the capitalist triumphalism approached the end of the century, it was slowly walloped by the depression created by the economic crisis. First, the Asian Tigers proved to be teeth-less and then started a series of economic crises that is popularly known as the crisis of the 2000s. In 2007, this crisis assumed the form of a new ‘Great Depression’ with the outbreak of Subprime Crisis in the US banking system and stock markets and then enveloped the entire world and assumed even newer forms like the Sovereign Debt Crisis of Europe. A number of political economists from the Left, Centre-Left as well as the Centre-Right are now saying that actually the capitalist world never really emerged from the crisis since 1973. Some even claim that 1973 was only the first phenomenal expression and the crisis was already there since the late-1960s. Political economists like Andrew Kliman, Michael J. Roberts, Guglielmo Carchedi have effectively argued that the crisis that we are witnessing since the 1970s is different from the crises that the capitalist world saw in the first half of the Twentieth century. Before the 1970s, the capitalist world economy was characterized by occurrence of crises that were preceded and followed by high growth rates and periods of significant boom. That is not the case with the crisis that has gripped the capitalist economy since the 1970s and has appropriately been termed as ‘the long recession’, ‘terminal crisis of capital’, etc. Some have even attempted, and not without considerable success, to prove that even in the future world capitalist system is highly unlikely to witness any significant boom. Statistically as well as politically, there seems to be no reason to reject this prognosis. Even the bourgeois political economists are gripped with a grim cynicism regarding the prospects of a recovery.
The crisis became increasingly acute since the early-2000s and every speculative bubble of fictitious capital proved to be short-lived and led to even deeper crisis in their turn. Since the late-1990s itself the capitalist triumphalism had begun to die down gradually. By 2007, it would become a folie for saner people to claim that liberal bourgeois democracy is the best system that human civilization can hope for. Even if there was no practicable Utopia in sight for the more cynical people, capitalism and liberal bourgeois democracy certainly was not the final abode for humanity. The simultaneous disillusionment with morbidity of capitalism and the lack of any truly revolutionary vision for the future of humanity has led to ghoulish apocalyptic visions. This is particularly true of the cultural propaganda machine of bourgeoisie. Incapable of advancing any progressive vision for the future, it is peddling the spectacle of apocalypse. Hollywood churned out more movies on some kind of apocalypse, Armageddon and the ultimate end of humanity in the last two decades than any period in the history of Hollywood. For once, Zizek is right that Hollywood trains people to imagine the end of the world, but you are not allowed to visualize the end of capitalism.
The point that we are trying to emphasize here is this: the capitalist system is submerged in the most structural crisis in its history and the bourgeois triumphalism of the 1990s has become a mimesis (of something that does not exist). That is the first one of the dual crisis that we mentioned in the beginning. Logically speaking, instead of chronologically, this crisis is the terminal crisis of capitalism. That obviously does not mean that revolution is round the corner and we are on the verge of a new epoch of new Socialist experiments of the Twenty-first century. It only means that the terminal crisis of capitalist system has created dual potential, just like any crisis. Every crisis always opens up dual possibilities, a progressive one as well as a regressive one. The question whether the progressive potential will be realized or the regressive one is contingent on the presence and relative strengths of the revolutionary/progressive and reactionary/regressive agents. This brings us to issue of the second crisis.
The second crisis pertains to the state of revolutionary communist movement in the world today and especially in the countries that can be termed as the ‘weak links’ of today, or rather, ‘the hot spots turning into flash points’. Irrespective of the fact that capitalist system itself is faced with the terminal crisis that will die with capitalist system itself, the revolutionary Left around the world is falling short of coping up with the challenges of resurrecting the movement in the new historical scenario. These new challenges include the question of understanding the nature of the changes in the modus-operandi of capitalism especially since the 1970s; the question of program of revolution which has become the single-knot of revolutionary communist movement in most of the countries that are going to be in frontlines of New Socialist Revolutions; refuting the ‘semi-feudal semi-colonial orthodoxy’ that has become an anachronistic fetter in the feet of the revolutionary communist movement; coming to terms with the collapse of Socialist experiments of the Twentieth century, that is, to establish a critical relationship with them; the question of fighting off the spectres of different forms of anarcho-syndicalism, non-party revolutionism, workerism (operaismo), autonomism which have come out of their graves and brandishing swords; this tendency along with the rise of myriad shades of post-Marxism are denying any agency to revolutionary change; and last but not the least, it has become really pertinent for the revolutionary communist movement to understand the Fascism of the twenty first century and how the change in the nature of crisis has brought about a change in the nature of Fascism also; it would not be an academic exercise but an essential task of the communist movement in order to devise the correct strategies to fight against Fascism today. We feel that the revolutionary communist movement must meet up these challenges. On the one hand, the prevalent dogmatism in the matters of ideology as well as program has prevented it from rising up to the task and on the other, the ‘mirror image’ of this dogmatism, that is, the axisless “free-thinking” of a number of anarcho-syndicalist groups and New Left groups of India has made the possibility of any corrective incomparably more difficult by presenting extremely ill-read, over-simplistic panacea. These political quacks of the Left are exacting a heavy price by influencing a considerable section of serious radical intelligentsia and also certain segments of the working class movement. These tendencies share their anathema to the revolutionary Bolshevik organizational principles and are constantly peddling out gibberish about a “new kind of party.” Due to these disabling tendencies within the Left movement, the revolutionary Communist movement in India is faced with a serious crisis. As far as we know, in most of the countries all or some of these alien tendencies are present. There is a dire need to fight constantly and perpetually against these tendencies of dogmatism and axisless “free-thinking” in order to resolve the crisis of the communist movement. With one caveat we can move forward in our statement of purpose.
A certain trend of political Nouvea-riche in India and elsewhere is talking about an ideological crisis in Marxism. The crisis of the communist movement that we mentioned above has nothing to do with this alleged crisis in the science of Marxism. These trends argue that the offensive of postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonial theory as well as the neo-Kantian interpretations of Quantum mechanics have created an ideological crisis in Marxism because Stalin and Mao and later other Marxists too did not give any fitting reply to these offensives. First of all, this claim is incorrect. Lenin himself had retaliated the neo-Kantian interpretations of Modern Physics and later materialist physicists like Sakata, Taketani and Yukawa answered the claims of the neo-Kantian school in Quantum mechanics. Secondly, the postmodernist, postcolonial and poststructuralist offensive too has been destroyed by a number of Marxist theoreticians like Aijaz Ahmad, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Perry Anderson and many Marxist-Leninist intellectuals and groups around the world. To talk about a crisis of Marxist ideology created by postmodernist offensive today only shows the sheer ignorance of these political nouveau riche of India, who are incidentally, pathologically anarcho-syndicalist in their political orientation. Moreover, this postmodernist offensive had nothing new in it, except a peculiar blend of Nietzscheian anti-humanism, Spenglerian anathema to any idea of progress, Russian nihilism, neo-Kantianism, morbid versions of anti-humanist existentialism. Marxism had answered all these trends in the late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth century itself and Marxist-Leninists demolished the newly packaged blend of all these moribund ideological productions of late-capitalism in the last quarter of the previous century. Therefore, to talk about an ‘ideological crisis’ in Marxism is only a symbol of ignorance and the cynicism and skepticism prevalent in the Left movement today that has dented the ideological and political confidence of Leftists.
In the 1960s, 1970s and then in the 1990s the ideological offensive against Marxist came from without. The postmodernists either openly claimed about the ultimate victory of capitalism, or argued that the only way to oppose capitalism is reject all notions of the universal, the normativity of capitalism, the homogenization by capital. This logic, howsoever radical ostensibly, actually meant that Power rests on the notions of the Universal and any attempt to oppose Power collectively will only create new structures of Power, because every collective is constituted by the logic of the Universal. As we can see, under the veneer of ‘something more radical than Marxism’, was hidden an attack on the very notion of collectivity, class, party and workers’ state. This offensive was openly against Marxism, against Communism, against the notion of progress and against any progressive Utopia. It reduced all resistance to the body of the subject. All possibilities of any collective action were condemned from the very outset. When this offensive was discredited in the late-1990s and early-2000s, the bourgeois ideology started preparing for a new offensive, but this time, from within.
There emerged a new breed with stupefying internal variety that claimed to be Communists, but new kinds of Communists; the Communists who had moved on! The Communists who had no ‘hang-over’ of that Catastrophe that is known as Soviet Socialism or Chinese Socialism! The Communists who had understood that Marxian Socialism made its contribution to history and now it is a spent force! The Communists who finally had this moment of epiphany which made them comprehend the fact that now the categories of class, party, state have become useless for the emancipatory politics! The Communists who retrieved the true ‘idea of Communism’ which was embedded in the march of humanity since time immemorial! Marx was only a particular phase in the march of this ‘idea’ and now we are past Marx! This new breed of ‘Communists’ has collectively been termed as post-Marxists, though as we pointed out, it has astonishing internal variety from the likes of Laclau, Mouffe to Badiou and from Negri and Hardt to Zizek, etc. We can rather call it a spectrum. These trends try to blend elements of poststructuralism, postmodernism, with Hegelian Idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. The different kinds of blending ultimately leads to similar kinds of ideological gems! All these trends attack the revolutionary core of Marxism: the concept of class, party and state which enable us in the true sense to comprehend power and resistance and also a revolutionary alternative. But all these notions are rejected by post-Marxists. Capital and State is replaced by an impersonal power called ‘the Empire’ and revolutionary class is replaced by a shapeless entity called ‘the Multitude’. The real questions of a revolutionary subversive struggle are circumvented in the most radical rhetoricization. The real object of post-Marxism is the same as that of postmodernism: to attack the revolutionary core of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. When it was no longer possible to do so from a totally and openly regressive, reactionary and confrontational position of postmodernism, bourgeois ideology has left that openly confrontational position to target the most vulnerable section of the potentially radical intelligentsia and revolutionary recruitment centres, which are already gripped by a wave of cynicism and skepticism, but who are also not ready to buy the postmodernist guff anymore and yearn for change, in the garb of ‘the idea of Communism’.
We believe that it is essential and imperative for revolutionary communists to subject these alien trends and tendencies infiltrating the ranks of communist movement to rigorous and unrelenting Marxist-Leninist criticism. The crisis of the communist movement can only be resolved by ideological and political consolidation of the movement on the basis of revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism. The second crisis, that we mentioned and discussed above, that is, the crisis of the communist movement must be resolved in order to enable it to rise to the occasion and make good of the historical opportunity (which presently exists only as a latent potentiality) created by the terminal crisis of capitalism, failing which, we would be condemned to witness long period of reaction, repression, rise of Fascism and other forms of extreme right-wing bourgeois reaction, destruction of the working class movement, predatory imperialist wars, ecological destruction resulting in barbarism. As Rosa Luxemburg had said, we are faced with two alternatives: Socialism or Barbarism. We can see a few glimpses of barbarism in Syria and Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine, Philippines, and in a number of countries in Africa. It would not be an exaggeration to argue that it is a question of existence of humanity now: Socialism or Annihilation. The ‘utter chaos’ created by crisis has created a ‘brilliant situation’ for the revolutionary communist movement. If revolutionary communists are able to respond to the challenges of present times, we can hope that this century will be the century of New Socialist Revolutions and decisive defeat of capitalism.
‘The Anvil’ is a very humble and modest initiative in the direction of responding to the ideological and political challenges of the movement, of problematizing the axiomatic and intuitive notions hindering the path of creative and critical thinking, of posing the right questions and initiating a fruitful debate among revolutionary communists. Even if we succeed in a few of the above-mentioned projects, we would consider ourselves serviceable in fulfilling the Herculean task that faces us at present. We heartily invite criticisms and suggestions so that we can make this effort as effective as possible. We also invite contributions on the problems of revolutionary Marxist theory and the problems of revolutionary communist movement. We would like to conclude with the hope that this endeavor will start a long-term critical political relationship with our readers, radical pro-people intellectuals and political activists.
