This is a review of my book, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India

Among the various strands of India’s rich and diverse political thought, socialist and Marxist ideas have found peculiar prominence over the years. Indeed, India is one of the few liberal, capitalist democracies in the world to have semi-autonomous regions governed by political parties with an officially socialist ideology. Because of its historical importance in world politics, socialism does have a coherent set of ideas on world order and how human societies ought to be structured. In line with the dominant political ideologies in India that have a well established international outlook, socialist ideas have generally been categorized as having a singular conception of India’s outward approach. But this notion seems to reduce the intricate conflicts within the various socialist paradigms and ignores ideological nuances which have been historically prevalent across the world. This essay aims to delineate the distinctions within the broader socialist ideologies in India’s international thought by initially analysing conflicting currents in the Indian Leftist movement through a historical survey spanning across the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The major communist parties of India - the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) dominate the Left political establishment in the country. But India has historically seen a variety of socialist ideas gain influence, even though they seem to be non-existent in today’s political landscape. An example of the same is a more libertarian form of socialism as espoused by Indian freedom fighters MPT Acharya and Har Dayal, whose ideas have been unearthed by historians in recent times. The essay attempts to also use the framework laid out by Bajpai (2014) for assessing international outlooks of the two diverging socialist schools by looking at their perceptions on three aspects – the nature of international life, the nature of the adversary, and the role of force. A summary of the analysis will be presented in a brief conclusion.

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” Wilde’s utopia was socialism, a social order that he believed would overcome the misery and exploitation wrought by industrial capitalism. More than a century later, as issues like inequality and climate change swell the ranks of the left in Europe and abroad, one hears renewed calls to set sail for a society that lies beyond the capitalist horizon. One of the most important English-language fora for this resurgent socialism is Jacobin, a print-and-digital magazine founded, edited, and published by Bhaskar Sunkara. Where many other radical publications have languished in relative obscurity with small, hard-bitten, and sectarian readerships, Jacobin has flourished and become a mainstream talkshop for a broad segment of the left. With his new book, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, Sunkara excavates the diverse socialist tradition—of German Marxists, Bolsheviks, Swedish social democrats, and others—to chart a navigable course to a socialist future. His account is fervent, irreverent, and irrepressibly optimistic: whatever the ghost of socialism past, he seems to say, the ghosts of socialism present and future portend a lasting triumph over capitalism. Sunkara and I met in Brooklyn in April 2019 to discuss his new book. What follows is an abridged and edited transcript of our conversation. —Kelly McKowen for EuropeNow

Although it is often said that early postcolonial India was socialist, scholars have tended to take this term for granted. This article investigates how Indians defined socialism in the two decades after independence. It finds that there were six areas of agreement among Indian socialists: the centrality of the individual, the indispensability of work, the continued importance of private property, that the final goal was a more equal – but not flat – society, that this change had to be brought about without violence, and that the final goal of Indian socialism ought to be spiritual fulfilment. Understanding how Indians defined their version of socialism, it is argued, will help scholars re-evaluate the role of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in defining the goals India pursued after independence. It will also re-orient our understanding of the expectations and limitations of the Indian state in this crucial period in Indian history.

How does Marxism matter for ‘India’ and India for Marxism? What changes as a result and what new offerings appear because of this rather unique interaction between Marxism and the Indian situation, condition, subject-position? Keeping this as the backdrop, the book brings to dialogue three angles. First, it focuses on the concept: class. Class as process of surplus labor (expanded in Marx’s book Capital and The Theories of Surplus Value), as distinct from class as power, property and income; it sees class not as a noun or a group of people but as an adjective to a verb i.e. process. Second, it foregrounds the concept of overdetermination. Overdetermination, as against essentialist and determinist causality, in the context of both epistemological and ontological questions. The inter-twining of these two concepts sets off a process of rethinking Marxism. The other objective of this book, the third angle, is ‘India’; i.e., revisit and reconceptualize Indian economy and society from a class-focused perspective, particularly contemporary India, India of the twenty first century. In the process of their uncanny overdetermination, both the understanding of Marxian theory and India also get displaced and transform as a result. We have in the process, engaged with both arenas – i.e., the shifting sand of both Marxism and India. We have always kept India as the backdrop, context and site (while rethinking Marxism) and Marxism as the philosophico-political compass (while discussing Indian economy-society and the question of transition). Marxism and India have been kept alive in their overdetermination and contradiction in our work. While British political economy had served as the archive for the writing of Capital, can India serve as the archive for the re-writing of Capital from the global South?

GRIP ANNUAL LECTURE 2023 200 Years of Socialism: Revisiting the Old Dilemmas Marcel van der Linden reviews strategic dilemmas and choices of socialist and labour movements from the 1820s to the 2020s. ================================= Comments on 200 years of socialism, revisiting the old dilemmas* by John Barzman =============== Marcel van der Linden reviews strategic dilemmas and choices of socialist and labour movements from the 1820s to the 2020s. ================================= Comments on 200 years of socialism, revisiting the old dilemmas* by John Barzman My initial intention was to focus on a few instances in the history of social movements during which activists discussed the broad organizational form that could bring together the « three pillars » of the socialist and labor movement :

This easy to read book explores the fundamental ideas of socialism as a prelude to its critical reappraisal of their implementation in the Soviet revolutionary experiment. The book then turns to the seismic economic changes of the neoliberal era which it claims now preclude both national social democratic and Soviet-style paths to socialism. Rather, it is argued, if socialism is to become a force for change in the 21st century, wholly new economic and environmental considerations compel it to adopt a fresh orientation around current designs of democratic ecosocialism. Yet, the herculean challenges this poses tend not to be fully apprehended even among socialist proponents. Table of Contents: Preface Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. From Socialism as Idea to Twentieth Century Experiment Chapter 3. Socialist Failure and Rethinking Chapter 4. Socialists Confront a Changed World Chapter 5. Ecosocialism and New Democratic Designs Chapter 6. We are All Socialists Now Chapter 7. Conclusion