The Left’s electoral debacle in Kerala, where it won just 35 Assembly seats, its worst tally since 2001, has sparked considerable debate. But this decline is not confined to Kerala; similar patterns were evident earlier: in West Bengal in 2011 and in Tripura in 2018. My suggestions for the revival of the Indian Left proceed along two lines: first, a reaffirmation of its revolutionary political commitment in the face of defeat; second, a new theoretical framework.
Politics is never just about facts. Every way of seeing the world comes with ethics built into it. They tell us what we ought to do. This makes every goal a moral question. For the Left, maintaining fidelity to its foundational principles is indispensable for sustaining and keeping alive its political hope. Marxism used to be the Left’s horizon. It had set the party’s theory. But for decades, it has not been a living practice. It has just been a doctrine.
The old promise that socialism is already growing inside today’s struggles and will naturally win out in that struggle no longer holds up. We must recall that history is not empty, linear, and homogeneous time, as many assume. Rather, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin contends, the revolutionary moment emerges when time is “blasted out of the continuum” and charged with the actuality of the present.
Consequently, history does not advance towards socialism by necessity; without the recognition and seizure of such revolutionary moments, history is reduced to a dead archive rather than a living political charge. The principal complacency of the official Left in India has been its failure to recognise fascism as an immediate threat, premised on the deterministic assumption that “progress” itself automatically prevents the emergence of fascism. The Left’s recent acknowledgment of neo-fascism as a concrete danger, therefore, represents a necessary, although belated, political reorientation.
The Left must recover a philosophy of “now-time”. History is not a flat line of automatic progress. It is made up of urgent moments that can be interrupted and changed. That calls for reading history “against the grain”. Political parties should highlight ruptures, not smooth them over for the sake of continuity. The Indian Left should refuse the comfort of inevitability. It cannot side with the winners’ version of history. It must see fascism as an immediate danger to be confronted, not as a problem that progress will solve over time. If the Left reclaims revolutionary “now-time”, even the dead will stay safe from the enemy.
As Benjamin reminds us, the past holds a latent charge. The Left’s job is to awaken it, not just archive it. When the Left does this, it will stop ceding the past to fascists. Fascists will no longer be able to twist Mahatma Gandhi or B.R. Ambedkar to serve their goals because the Left will have made that history live and will have made it fight in the present.
Second, the Left should break out of time as set by elections. That is a trap. Revolutionary politics cannot wait for the next cycle. It must mean mass mobilisation in the present, or it will lose its meaning. The Left should reject social-democratic history that treats progress as one long victory parade. That story only celebrates whoever won the latest election. Instead, the Left must write history from the side of the oppressed and uphold their rights. This also means moving beyond a vulgar Marxism that only tracks technology and misses social regression.
The Left’s political hope must come from concrete action to redress historical injustices. It cannot rely on the idea that winning elections alone will guarantee progress automatically. During the Kerala election, slogans such as “LDF varum, ellam shariyakum [the LDF will come, everything will be all right]” and “Ippozhum koode undu [still with you]” curdled into empty rhetoric. For voters, these slogans no longer mean anything. Real action keeps the Left honest and intellectually sharp. It means telling history from the side of the oppressed. It means recognising fascism as a danger that must be confronted in the present, not afterwards.
Constituting a collective political subject
Growing up in Kerala in the 1970s and 1980s, I saw strong Left movements through my childhood. That made me believe a better world was on its way and that the Left’s struggle signalled history moving forward. I also saw how Left movements devoted themselves to the oppressed and took sides against all oppressors in struggles on behalf of equality and freedom, and against systems of caste, class, and religious discrimination. The Left can regain its voice by reaffirming the principles it once stood for, instead of chasing electoral wins by echoing the same reactionary forces it once fought. The Left’s path forward is, thus, simple.
The Left used to provide a powerful political vision of genuine constitutional morality, which recognises each person as a human being and collectivities as equally human. Following from this, the Left should be a vehicle to unify all progressive forces that are part of the very structure of existence. Through this shift, the system can capture a non-class elemental bond involving all people of the same world view, an original relationship that existed before the vote, without which the vote would be impossible. This sense of fraternity is actualised at great moments of political solidarity; it should be the route for ethics and Leftism. My suggestions for the Left to have true social ends go along the idea of rediscovering this guiding principle for the Left today.
Neither an isolated unit nor an aggregation of separate units is sufficient to disrupt the existing social formation. What is required is the constitution of a collective political subject: a “body of the people” engaged in unified struggle and progressive movements. The historical models for such mass articulation are there in Gandhi’s mass movement and in Leon Trotsky’s conception of revolutionary agency. Without these, the Left is divested of its progressive character.
Yet, paradoxically, people on the Left continue to vote for Left formations despite having forfeited political hope. In the past, voting for the Left was considered a revolutionary act; now it is considered standard republican behaviour. There is a party that calls itself left wing, and people vote for it in the same sense that they would for any political party.
If the Left, specifically in Kerala, has lost its old appeal, one reason is that it tried to win by advancing “soft” majoritarianism while sidelining and antagonising religious minorities. Rather than actively countering communal bigotry and Islamophobia, some Left leaders exacerbated it. The party’s engagement with caste was defined not by a quest for justice but by social engineering for electoral gains. The Left must, instead, reinvent itself as a collective of the marginalised where the marginalised and oppressed have a shared consciousness.
The Left today is also divided, with different groups that do not share the same purpose or way of working. In the past, the Left was more a movement than an institutionalised party apparatus or machine. Its leaders were not bosses; they were comrades who stepped up when there was a moment and then stepped back. They exercised a provisional leadership of comradeship, not hierarchy.
What held the Left together was a set of basic overarching political and human principles. People believed in those principles, and they shaped what they thought and did. If we really want to bring the Left back to life, we must spell out those principles and then interrogate what they historically were and determine what they ought to be.
Kumari Sunitha V. heads the Department of Philosophy, Madras Christian College, Chennai.
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