Why Left has all the Answers but LEFT is not the Answer?

 The world is going through a turmoil that is to a large extent man-made. The pandemic has exposed many wounds of the past which were left unattended but a veil was placed upon them. In 2020, India underwent one of the worst economic slowdowns because of an ill-planned lockdown imposed and the worst was the exit from these lockdown without any clear guidelines. The economy came to a standstill and to hide the inefficiency of the state, communal disharmony was spread. While the entire drama was played out, the wealth of a few increased exponentially. Oxfam came out with a report which says that it will require a decade for the poor to recoup their lost wealth whereas the rich did so in just 9 months. In India too the wealth of Ambani and Adani increased by about 35 per cent whereas about 22 million people lost their jobs (CMIE Data).

Now, what about the solution to this increasing inequality. Abhijeet Banerjee, Amartya Sen, Raghuram Rajan, Kaushik Basu, Jayati Ghosh- some of the most well known Indian economists have advocated the increased role of the state come out of this rigmarole. State spending in the form of investment in infrastructure, welfare programs, direct transfer etc. is seen as a way of improving the demand side crisis in the economy. As this pandemic has given rise to both supply-side and demand-side problem, only fixing the supply side by using monetary policy will not help the economy to recover.

This crisis has reiterated the fact that capitalism has crisis inherent in its system. It creates crises to create islands of paradise in the sea of despair. This is something that Left ideologues have been indicating for a long time. We know for a fact that whenever an economic crisis hits a country, the solution is always sought from the government and not from the private entrepreneurs or messiahs of laissez-faire economy who forbid the state from taking care of the masses. The basic requirements of health, education, housing, power, transportation are expected to be responsibilities of the state and when they become profitable, they are gifted away to private players to build Antila and dictate terms to the state.

Why then the Left which is pro-poor, pro-people not successful at the global level or in the country? Why apart from USSR, China and Cuba, there are no major success stories? Why has lambasting the Left become a fashion statement for people advocating nationalism? Why does Left have all the answers but LEFT is not THE answer? 

The proponents of Left ideology may counter this by saying that capital with its vicious fangs has dug so deep in the society that it does not leave any alternative. It is the capital that manipulates the world order to destabilise the socialist regimes. There is no questioning of this argument but the Left also needs to reassess itself. In India, Tripura, West Bengal and Kerala have been the bastions of the Left for a long time. However, currently, only Kerala has a Left-led government. If all these governments worked for the welfare of the people at large, why were they booted out of power? Since the New Economic Policy got implemented, the labour force has been the most distressed section, especially the semi-skilled and the unskilled and they have always been the supporters of the Left. But of late they too have deserted the party. During the lockdown, there has been large scale labour layoff, pay cuts became common and reverse migration took place and the owners kept piling their profit but none of the Unions or Leader has mustered the confidence of this section. In the past three decades, legislation has changed to protect the rights of the private players, Unions have been disbanded, the aspiration level of the millennial has changed but the Left party has not kept itself abreast of these changes. On the other hand, the Right has fanned the flames of pseudo nationalism and religious one-upmanship to distract the masses from the real issues.

There is still time for the Left and parties with similar ideologies to regroup and re-strategise. The intellectual elitism of the Left has to be done away with. They have to become part of the mainstream, choose young leaders and become part of the education narrative to regain their lost relevance.