Rabindranāth's encounter with a larger world, beyond his own country, began at a very early age and continued all through his life. Hence the interrelation between his political thought and his view of the world is an exciting but challenging issue, for at least two reasons. First, Tagore was not a political activist, nor did he attach primary importance to politics in his thought. Hence apart from his lectures collected as Nationalism, delivered as the First World War was approaching its end, there is hardly any other text where he reflects exclusively on politics. The importance of this text notwithstanding, it is perhaps time to consider his political standpoint from other angles, by looking at many other sources that are not primarily political. Among these are his essays, mostly in Bengali, and his lectures and addresses delivered abroad in the period between the two World Wars. During this time he travelled extensively to both the East and the West, following the award of the Nobel Prize in 1913 and his desperate search for funds for his dream project of Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan.

Second, there is a methodological dimension to this exercise, which in turn is twofold. At one level, Tagore was a product of Indian and specifically Upanishadic tradition together with Western modernity, a mix that characterized the Tagore family. At another level, he was writing as a colonized subject in British India, experiencing colonial rule at first hand and the responses it evoked at various levels in his own country. He therefore had two rather easy options open before him. The first was to accept British rule in a spirit of servility like any ‘brown sahib’ of his day; the second, to completely reject the West, turning instead to nationalism or uncritical nativism. Tagore took neither of these two paths. His position on colonialism, more specifically on colonial modernity, was mediated through a total worldview evolving since his youth.

Tagore's contemporaries viewed India on an existential level through their lived experience of colonialism, and hence often resorted to nationalism by rejecting the West; but for Tagore the global citizen, the East–West binary was methodologically irrelevant.

The Agenda of Marxism in the New Century

It would not be perhaps an overstatement if it is argued that the arrival of the twenty-first century, historically speaking, has some striking similarities with how the twentieth century began its journey. The same feelings of anger, protest as well as frustration of the working people, demanding organization, articulation and leadership, which marked the arrival of the twentieth century, constitute to a large extent the scenario of the new century too. The battle lines are being drawn, the fault lines of capitalism are more and more visible, the truth about the ugly face of imperialism is now impossible to hide after Iraq; but the big difference is that the real possibility of providing an alternative to world capitalism had actually emerged in the twentieth century after 1917, which ended with the unceremonious collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. With no immediate alternative in sight in the face of the triumphant claims of imperialism resistance and struggle, however, continue unabated, assuming new forms and, at times, taking uncharted paths. As large sections of the struggling people have become frustrated with socialism's failure in the twentieth century to live up to its expectations, there are many who are looking for radical alternatives to Marxism in their search for what they call a more meaningful intellectual arsenal (i.e. postmodernism, Post-Marxism), while there are others who are engaged in critical rethinking concerning the past, present and the future possibilities of Marxism in the light of the new questions that now it has to confront.

It is generally believed that the relations between Soviet Marxism and the Frankfurt School are non-negotiable. The reason is simple. While Soviet Marxism has been considered as an expression of a unilinear view of Marxism, which in the name of science has refused to accommodate the element of subjectivity, the Frankfurt School, deeply anchored in the tradition of German idealism, has focused on consciousness and humanism. This, at least, has been the standardized understanding of the interrelation of Soviet Marxism and the Frankfurt School and one has viewed the other with deep suspicion and animosity.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, as a new atmosphere of free thinking gradually began to clear the mist of dogmatism and regimented thinking, which had dominated the Soviet era for decades, it was now possible to unravel a new dimension underlying this relationship. Following the research findings of a number of Russian and German scholars, after the opening of the Soviet archives, one can now arrive at an altogether different, yet complex, understanding of the relationship between Soviet Marxism and the Frankfurt School whereby one can reach a quite different conclusion. This refers to an untold story that unfolded itself in the 1920s, which is associated with Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute, headed by the internationally acclaimed Marx scholar, David Ryazanov, its first director, who had succeeded in establishing a great relation of cooperation and friendship with the Frankfurt School in Germany.

The current global economic crisis, which originated in the West, has triggered a revival of interest in Marxism on a scale which was quite unthinkable even very recently. At the same time there remains the tremendous intellectual apathy for doctrinaire Marxism, associated normally with the practitioners of the mainstream Left. This prompted me to work on this select volume of 16 essays, written over a period of about three decades. The essays are reflective of different moods, times and situations, as they have witnessed both the closure of an old order in the last century and the birth of the new millennium. Despite thematic diversities, the essays question the ontological claims of the kind of Marxism which has dominated the mindset of the common man for decades, resulting in a complete disillusionment after the fall of the Soviet bloc. In its place, a case is made through the essays for an alternative perspective and an understanding marked by the spirit of pluralism, democracy and humanism. That times have changed and that the new century makes new demands—and that it is imperative to take a stock of the history of Marxism afresh, without being trapped in dogmatism—constitutes the central focus of the essays.

Most of the essays have been published previously. However, some of them are being published here for the first time. In the case of the published essays the year of publication has been mentioned at the end of the article.

With the opening of the Comintern archives in Moscow, it is now an acknowledged fact that the Third International, generally known as the Communist International (Comintern) (1919–43), holds the key to an objective understanding of the history of international communism in the twentieth century. It is also undeniable that it prefigured the destiny of the communist parties in different parts of the world not only in the inter-war period but also in the years to come. As long as the Moscow archives remained closed to the scholars, it was impossible to arrive at a proper, authentic understanding of what actually happened and how things happened in history. This was precipitated by the fact that for all communist parties affiliated to the Comintern, it was simply forbidden to write anything critical about it, as the Comintern, ironically, emerged as a contradictory structure from the very beginning. At one level, theoretically, it proclaimed the principle of equality of all communist parties, while, at another level, conditioned by the given historical situation, it soon established the pre-eminence of the VKP(b), since the Soviet Union became the refuge of all exiled communists, representing the parties affiliated to the Comintern, in the period between the victory of the Russian Revolution and World War II.

It is true that Marxism today is in crisis; but it is not dead or irrelevant, as its opponents try to argue. This crisis is being explained primarily with reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of socialism to outwit capitalism as a world system. The present essay, however, tries to look at this question from a somewhat different angle. It tries to argue that the crisis of Marxism has to be primarily explained as an internal one. The end of the USSR has, of course, added a new dimension to it. To be more exact, the essay seeks to examine how the inner crisis of Marxism has been actually precipitated by the distortions it has suffered in the name of official or authentic interpretation and to explore new clues towards an alternative understanding of Marxism's revolutionary spirit at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is an irony of history that the development of Marxism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it had not yet attained any official status, took place in dark times, in the periods of worst reaction and counterrevolution, while the internal crisis of Marxism, which constituted its own dark hour, was contingent and avoidable and took shape in a period marked by the victory of socialist revolution in Russia.

I have rather deliberately chosen this somewhat unorthodox title, keeping in mind the late P. N. Haksar's abiding interest in socialism, Marxism in particular. He died in 1998 with a feeling of deep anguish, as the world turned virtually upside down after the fall of the Soviet Union. This paper is an attempt to understand what went wrong with socialism in the twentieth century, an age marked by pluralism and increasing diversification of knowledge. The central argument of the paper is that, notwithstanding socialism's compatibility with pluralism in its original vision, socialism failed because of its inability to negotiate the question of pluralism. In a way this is a tribute to the late Haksar too, who himself possessed a creative mind with a pluralist temperament.

The collapse of socialism as a practice in the last decade of the twentieth century has evoked two major yet contradictory explanations. First, socialism failed, because, following the advent of perestroika and glasnost under Gorbachev, it was infected with the virus of pluralism, the beginning of which was made supposedly by Khrushchev in the 20th Congress in 1956. Second, socialism's failure is attributed to the fact that it was not sufficiently pluralist, notwithstanding Gorbachev's efforts to democratize the Soviet system. In fact, in the last days of the Gorbachev era, these two opposite positions were represented by Nina Andreyeva and Boris Yeltsin respectively. While the first position is generally considered Stalinist, the second position is an advocacy for liberalism.

The founding of the Comintern in 1919 was historically destined to be an alternative to the reformism of the Second International. Consequently, the Third International, throughout its life, was confronted with the problem of providing a real Left, Leninist critique of European social democracy, the main exponent of reformism. Ironically, however, it is this very meaning of Leninism which right from the beginning became a kind of thorn in the flesh in the Comintern's life. Sharp disagreements, criticisms and counter criticisms centred around the issue of what would be the correct perspective of the leftism couched in the phraseology of Leninism. The years between 1924 and 1934 witnessed the unfolding of various currents and crosscurrents related to this question and the eventual closure of this issue. The period under consideration is unique in the sense that it signified initially a gradual and then a complete break with the “mass line” and the united front strategy adopted by the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921. In other words, this was the time which witnessed a crystallization of the Comintern's understanding of leftism, climaxed by the advent of the “third period” after the Sixth Congress in 1928.

Historically speaking, the rising curve of leftism in the Comintern during this period ran parallel to the growth of Stalinism in the USSR and the growing dissension within the CPSU(B), spearheaded most forcefully and systematically by Trotsky and subsequently by Bukharin in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

This essay tries to address one central question that Marxism in the twenty-first century is trying to confront. This centres around one possible weakness of Marxist theory, namely, the vision of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Generations of Marxists have been inspired by the success of Marxism as a theory to accomplish a revolution, which incorporates within it a strategy to effect the breakdown of an exploitative system. This involves the Marxist understanding of leadership, organization and mass mobilization, as evident particularly in the victory of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. While Lenin was the architect of this practice of materializing a revolution, the effect of this vision being the formation of the Comintern in 1919, his untimely death in 1924 seriously hindered the working out of the vision of socialism as a way of life, as an alternative to capitalism. What happened thereafter was virtually a transfer of the strategy and outlook of centralization, which is the essential element in the making of a revolution, to the making of socialism itself, leading ultimately to the collapse of the USSR and its East European allies in 1991. Rapidly the impression gained ground that, while Marxism as a strategy of making a revolution has proved correct more than once, its claim to provide a better, that is, a socialist, alternative has proved to be an illusion.

The essays in this volume cover a period of about thirty years, namely, the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the new millennium. Marked by a complex set of events, this has been a period of transition of Marxism from a rather ossified to a more flexible and open understanding. This was a time which witnessed the birth of a new kind of interpretation of socialism generated from within the Soviet bloc, identified with Mikhail Gorbachev's ambitious programme of perestroika and glasnost. Suddenly it appeared that Marxism had entered a new age, coming up with a great promise for the future. This, however, did not happen. By 1991, as the Soviet Union, together with the East European bloc, crumbled, Marxism seemed to have entered a period of unprecedented crisis across the globe. This swing of the pendulum of history put Marxism on trial, raising questions concerning its very existence, relevance and future. The situation became particularly complex when, by the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, it was evident that the rise of postmodernism was a new and powerful challenge to the universalist claims of Marxism. Besides, the crisis of Marxism sparked off new debates relating to Stalinism and its democratic alternative, recognition of the revolutionary-humanist currents in the Marxist tradition, associated with figures like Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg, who have been traditionally considered as representatives of Western Marxism and excluded from the purview of official Marxism.

Rosa Luxemburg has been traditionally considered as a utopian visionary, whose understanding of socialism was guided by a kind of mixture of romanticism, anarchism and idealism. In the mainstream tradition of Marxism, in most of the established communist parties even today she is looked upon with a feeling of deep suspicion at least for three reasons: first, because of the distorted presentation of the Lenin-Rosa Luxemburg debate on the party Luxemburg is considered an opponent of Lenin and an enemy of the very idea of organization; second, with Stalin's coinage of the expression “Luxemburgism” in the 1930s Rosa Luxemburg was linked up with Menshevism and Trotsky and virtually hounded out of the Comintern-controlled international communism; third, her critique of some of the key issues concerning the Russian Revolution, as found in her The Russian Revolution (1918) was considered as a dangerous threat to the established Stalinist model of socialism that had been built up in the Soviet Union.

My submission is that it is precisely in this so-called irrelevant, utopian and “Menshevik/Trotskyist” outlook of Rosa Luxemburg that one can discover the clues to a vision of socialism which inaugurated the heritage of an alternative understanding of Marxism with a revolutionary humanist face, as distinct from liberalism, social democratic revisionism as well as Stalinist authoritarianism. It is through the lens of Rosa Luxemburg that it is possible to understand what went wrong with Soviet socialism and how we can reposition our understanding of socialism in the twenty-first century.

While discussing Rosa Luxemburg's views on socialism and democracy, it has been a standard practice to refer to her political texts, i.e. Social Reform or Revolution, The Mass Strike, The Russian Revolution, the famous pieces which she wrote in Rote Fahne on the eve of the failed German Revolution of 1918, that is, writings specifically political-ideological and programmatic in orientation. In comparison, her letters, the vast range of which is now accessible mainly due to the publication of the Gesammelte Briefe (Collected Letters) in six volumes under the very able editorship of Annelies Laschitza and Guenter Radczun (vols 1 to 5) and Annelies Laschitza (vol. 6) respectively, have commanded little attention. Rosa Luxemburg, however, is not an exception. In the intellectual history of Marxism the emphasis, for obvious reasons, has been traditionally on texts which are explicitly political, the letters occupying a position of secondary importance. Thus, except a few letters like Engels to J. Bloch (21–22 September 1890), Marx to L. Kugelmann (12 April 1871), Engels to H. Starkenburg (25 January 1894), the enormous Marx-Engels correspondence has remained largely unexplored. In the Collected Works of Lenin his correspondence is covered by a large number of volumes but has remained mostly neglected except perhaps such well-known pieces as his “Letters to the Congress” which he dictated in the last days of his life. One possible reason is that letters are largely personal and subjective, in comparison with other writings, specifically meant for serving a distinct political purpose (i.e. Lenin's What is to be Done? or Rosa Luxemburg's Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy).

Year: April 1937

Place: A clinic in Rome

Antonio Gramsci, engaged in writing his Prison Notebooks, awaits death in a hospital, following the terrible years of confinement in Mussolini's prison. Gramsci dies on 27 April 1937, unsung and virtually unnoticed, leaving behind, however, a precious gift for twentieth-century Marxism, namely, his Prison Notebooks. Many years later, this voluminous work finally comes to the knowledge of the outside world and is acclaimed as a fundamental contribution to Marxism's glorious heritage.

Year: February 1937

Place: Moscow's Lubyanka prison

Nikolai Bukharin, once considered the “darling of the Party” by Lenin, a key figure in the Bolshevik revolution and regarded as a leading theoretician, awaits trial. He is accused of having betrayed the revolution, joined the bandwagon of capitalism and counterrevolution and is branded as a “Right deviationist.” He has been arrested following the charges levelled against him at the fateful plenary session of the Central Committee of the CPSU during 27 February–5 March 1937. After one year Bukharin is sentenced to death by the highest authorities of the USSR and he faces the firing squad on 15 March 1938.

These are not new facts. Completely new, however, is the fact—unknown till very recently—that Bukharin during this one year of prison life, like Gramsci, was engaged in writing what has now come to be known as his Prison Manuscripts, comprising several volumes dealing with problems of philosophy, politics and culture, an unfinished autobiographical novel, a book of 187 poems and a short manuscript the contents of which are not yet known.