After electoral debacle, international conference on Marxism in WB

At a time when the CPI (M)'s popularity is at its lowest in West Bengal and the Marxism as an ideology no longer attracts the young minds in the university campus, the Left ideologues perhaps felt the urgent need to revisit Marxist theories to revitalize their thinking. Thus an international conference has been arranged to discuss and re-examine the Marxist theories to understand on Sunday's economic and philosophical issues.

The three day (22-24 March) international conference on the theme of 'Marxism: Marx and Beyond' is being organized as a joint initiative by Centre for Marxian studies, Jadvapur University and Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. The conference has attracted people like noted economist thinker Samir Amin, economist Alan Freeman and John Peter Neelsen, and historian Irfan Habib, economist Prabhat Patnaik and Amiya Bagchi, political scientist Partha Chatterjee and many others.

 

Though the orthodox Marxists are heavily represented in the conference, it also accommodated people like Ashok Mitra, Nirmalangshu Mukherjee, Ratan Khasnabis, Sumanta Banerjee and some others who are openly critical of the orthodox stance of the CPI (M), though not from the same theoretical position.

On the inaugural session the tone was set by Prof. Nirmalangshu Mukherjee of Delhi University, who forcibly argued in his paper "Beyond Armed struggle" that in Indian context where we have a strong parliamentary democracy "the diversity and the heterogeneity of the Indian people and the widespread struggle for democracy that has emerged from the post-colonial base has already gone beyond some of the classic tenets of strict Marxism."

While downright rejecting the Maoists' armed struggle ("Maoist actions are so wrong as to border on criminality."), he reminds that the idea of seizure of state power through armed struggle is one of the basic tenets of Marxian theory and Maoists are a logical product of that. At the same time his indirect reference to left parties like CPI (M) who have been maintaining a dualist position as to both parliamentary path and the path of armed struggle evoked strong reaction from person none other than Irfan Habib who got involved in heated argument with the speaker.

Bijoy Mukherjee, Professor of Philosophy of Visva Bharati, who was among the audiences, later commented that "since the Marxists have lost power in the state, they have become a bit tolerant to other views. This would not have been possible in earlier days."

Indeed, in the changed scenario topics like 'The subject as a philosophical problem in the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci and Nikolai Bukharin' (Sobhanlal Datta Gupta), 'Marxism and the Question of Consciousness in the light of Gramsci's description of intellectuals' (Malini Bhattacharya), Human capacities and alienation: Reflections on Rabindranath Tagore's and Marx's visions for a better society' (Himani Banerjee) did get importance in the conference.