PRAGOTI

pragoti is doing a very good job. it does not need to justify its content to individual readers. it is sharp, very balanced and informative. its readership has grown over time considerably, which is now substantially more than any other leftwing sites based in India (i.e. . compared with sanhati, kafila, leftvoice etc.). this only shows that its political positions are more attractive than anything else being offered from within the indian left. it needs to improve a lot no doubt. but not by abandoning its politics.

as far as this article is concerned, it has been re-posted in various websites,
like in here http://www.communist-party.org.uk/ and also http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1759/1/
so readers have already voted. of course those who did not like it have a right to criticise. but if they agree with the politics of the article but don't like its form/presentation etc, why don't they write something themselves...why place unnecessary burdens of their own expectations on the author of this particular article.

 Some clarifications are due - 

• Pragoti is not an official CPI(M) forum. It is a left democratic forum as is explained in its editorial policy document. 
• There have been many articles that have taken critical positions on the left front governments - some editorial members have blogged on why the Maoists' banning is a detrimental move, there have been critical articles such as those by Ashok Mitra, and so on. There has also been very distinct positions on foreign policy, nuclear policy, environmental issues etc, not congruent with official CPI(M) or left parties' positions. 

In essence, your allegation that there is a total conformity between Pragoti and the CPI(M) in particular is not true. 

As regards Prasenjit Bose's article, I see no "apology" (whichever way you use the word). The article is a political indictment of a) the supporters of the Maoists and b) the political opposition in West Bengal which is bent upon the physical annihilation of ruling party supporters/ sympathisers in many areas. It is evident that you fail to see this in your reading of the article. You might find the argument about the Trinamul-Maoist acting in tandem repetitive; but that does not hide away the truth there is to the same. Reiterating it is necessary because the very form of democracy in West Bengal is at stake. How can a government perform its regular activities in areas where the opposition is bent upon physical annihilation through a proxy? It is necessary to keep persisting with a political argument against this form of anarchism. There have been other critiques of the Maoists in other places and sites; but they are silent on the role the political opposition in West Bengal has played in this regard. It is necessary for a left democratic forum like Pragoti to point to this..and relentlessly. 

The car factory issue etc are extraneous to the article. Dredging this up is not supportive of your original claim on the article or on the site. 

Dear Com. Nandan,

I am extremely thankful for your comments on my piece. Your comments are very helpful in revising my piece to publish in a journal with wide international circulation so that on the part of the Left, we can debate with Prof. Sen. In fact, I would suggest that you should also write a piece on the problems of Sen’s approach, particularly your Hegelian analysis of Sen, which seems most promising. You have rightly pointed out that Sen’s ‘range of philosophical and ethical material is decidedly inadequate’. In my revised version of the piece, which I am going to send to a widely circulated journal of international repute, I have pointed out more of Sen’s ‘parochial disengagement’. In fact, I have also referred to Alasdair MacIntyre’s A Short History of Ethics in the modified version.

Well, Sen, who is a liberal but, carries the burden of ‘leftwing past’ in his student days would hardly discuss, committed left intellectuals like Žižek and Badiou, and I would also add Laclau to this list. Neither he would be interested in Heidegger’s What is a Thing?, a fundamental text about ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’ questioning of ‘the thing’ and the notions of ‘subjective’ versus ‘objective’ analysis of ‘truth’ nor Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Although Žižek rates Heidegger, Deleuze, Badiou as great thinkers of 20th century, we know that Hegel, Marx and Lacan are his ultimate Gurus. Lacan said that in Deleuze, he got a good student but ‘schizophrenia’ does not exist rather ‘paranoia’ would be the right term to explain the phenomena of what psychologists like Eugen Bleuler coined it to describe a long-term mental disorder whose symptoms include inappropriate actions and feelings and withdrawal from reality into fantasy. Lacan goes with Emil Kraepelin’s definition of ‘paranoia’—a mental condition in which one mistakenly believes that one is being persecuted, or that one is very important, a kind of self-obsession mixed up with unjustified suspicion and mistrust of others. Today, we see this ‘mistrust of the other’ in capitalism and imperialist set-up and also the symptom of ‘self-obsession’, which Freud already diagnostically termed as ‘megalomania’ and ‘narcissism’.

The liberals like Sen are generally averse to discuss inter-disciplinary studies of philosophy, political theory, economics and psychoanalysis. This aversion can be partly explained in the structures of our capitalist division of labour itself. Thus, it is not surprising that despite the post-behaviouralist trend in American social sciences with inter-disciplinary studies right from 1970s, we still notice a significant amount of ‘disciplinary provincialism’ and our university discourses and courses are structured around those lines of segregation of disciplines rather than a dialogue between disciplines. It also resists seeing the epistemological system as a cosmic whole, or what Marx called as ‘totality’. In other words, the dominant mainstream academic discourse will not tolerate indiscipline in disciplines as it is meant to discipline the disciple/pupil. Even if we talk about interdisciplinary subjects like ‘political philosophy’, ‘political economy’, ‘political sociology’ or in sciences, ‘mathematical biology’, ‘physical chemistry’, ‘biophysics’ etc. unfortunately, the university discourses are still run by certain Wittgensteinian ‘rules of the game’, which in a way are also linked with the concept of ‘hegemony’ and ‘authority’. That is to say, who decides the ‘rules and regulations’, as discussed in my article.

Regarding Habermas, Sen in fact engages with him selectively, as he did the same with Marx in his book. As you must be knowing that Sen in his book, tries to problematize between ‘normative approach’ of Rawls and ‘procedural approach’ of Habermas on the question of ‘identification of reasonable persons’ (p. 42-45, p. 134) and then withdraw himself to the ‘issues of differentiation…since they are not central to the approach of [t]his book’ (p. 196). Then he problematically argued that although Rawls and Habermas have positively contributed to the theory of democracy (p. 324), yet both ends up with a vision of ‘perfectly just society’, which Sen differs by suggesting that even if Rawls and Habermas are different in approaches, they come to the common conclusions (pp. 324-326).

As you know that the ‘indivisible remainder’ in my text is taken from Žižek, which he borrowed from Lacan particularly from the concept of surplus ‘jouissance’, which Lacan again elaborated from Marx’s ‘surplus value’. You are very correct in saying ‘Sen’s appropriation of Puntam’s fatally flawed dissociation of ethics from ontology.’ But this disjuncture of ethics from ontology and a similar disjointment between ‘normative ideal’ and ‘pragmatic real’ in Sen, which he could not however overcome is connected with the (neo)liberal politics that Sen seems to be now subscribing. A person cannot be associated with Left, even if he assesses himself or claims to be one unless proved by his theoretical arguments, ideological articulations and political praxis; since self-assessment like any other assessment can also become wrong! In Sen, we find a contradiction of his dominant (neo)liberal ‘self’ and much marginalized leftwing ‘self’. But if one analyses Sen’s intellectual trajectory right from his PhD thesis book Choice of Techniques, then it is amply clear that he has increasingly shifted towards the ‘right reactionary camp’. My article was only a modest attempt to expose those hypocrisies in Sen by provoking him that in an imperialist world (dis)order, one has to take a clear position with no ambivalence or ambiguity. As you are a voracious reader of Lenin, and indeed as I enjoyed your pamphlet Contours of Leninism, we can say by reminding Lenin that today, either one has to chose between a bourgeois or socialist ideology, for there is no middle course, for mankind has not created an ideology beyond class lines.

Comradely yours,
Moid

1. I concur that the range of philosophical and ethical material that Sen engages with is decidedly inadequate. It is not only Thomism in its original form, but also the pertinent modern manifestation of this tradition in left-oriented Christians such as Alasdair Macintyre (especially his work on the ethical centrality of character) and Herbert McCabe that is left unconsidered. But the greatest lacuna lies in Professor Sen's total lack of engagement [minus crossovers like Habermas] with the continental mainstream of substantive philosophy. It is deeply unsettling that we have from someone of Sen's stature and cosmopolitanism a systematic examination of ethics without so much as an engagement with the thought of Levinas. The Professor also goes on to totally skip the work of Heidegger, Deleuze and Badiou - the triumvirate that Zizek rightly terms the greatest of the 20th century's philosophers.

2. I am tempted to interpret the epistemological short-circuit in Sen's logic - what Com. Maidul Islam calls the indivisible remainder - as a simulacrum of the his problematic metaphysics. As Marxists, of course, the natural response here is to attack Sen's appropriation of Puntam's fatally flawed dissociation of ethics from ontology. The Professor's stoutly refuses to recognise Capital as a spectral Real that hegemonically [and tyrannically] determines the human condition within modernity. Instead, his central conception 'redressable injustice' is that which exists exclusively in the form of the discrete mutable crises and the overwhelming emphasis he places their resolution over and above the human condition as such is a sterling example what Zizek terms "ideology at its purest". In rejecting the hegemonic and non-contingent otherness of Capitalism, Sen's conception of justice, along with mainstream theories of ethics , serves to constitute the disjunctive synthesis that ideologically underpins western capitalism. There is little wonder here that every stripe of right-liberal, from David Cameron to David Miliband, wants to jump onto the Professor's boat. One fears that Sen (thus far a man of the left by his own assessment) seems to be quite a distance down the Habermasian highway of state philosophy, capitalist theodicy and the ideology of 'think but obey'.

Then again, irrespective of political partisanship, the deeper philosophical-ontological crisis of this book persists. Sen's ultimately emotivist conception of the ethical Subject is abstract in the precise Hegelian sense of the word. The old Master, in a brilliant passage in Paragraph 18 of the Preface to the "Phenomenology", explores the relationship between Substance and subject . He not only rejects the narratives centred around some purely speculative Substance but also comes down against the sort of casuistry Sen espouses in equal measure. The point of departure lies in the negation of the abstract, whether it is the "immediate simplicity" in the former notion or the "indifferent diversity" patently on display with Sen. The truly dialectical alternative is one that stands in opposition to sameness in abstraction of both these pseudo-ontologies. This third radical category of substance-as-subject postulated by Hegel (and subsequently subjected to a riveting exegesis) is the crucial ontological category completely disregards by Professor Sen at the cost of the fundamental efficacy of his whole theory of justice.

apology - "in a literary sense, a formal statement of justification or defense speech"
apology - "a poor example; "it was an apology for a meal"; "a poor excuse for an automobile"

I personally think the rest of the comment was elaborate enough

apology for what? "The only thing that this miserable series of apologies dished with nauseating regularity..."; "not such apologies article after article": how does kanika find this to be apologetic? please elaborate further.

You are correct in identifying the area to be stressed. I have also tried to stress that area by giving an alternative of cooperative publishing efforts, may be I should be more concrete in the matter.

I was trying to say about Open Source Publishing, not Open Access Publishing. That I have made clear in one paragraph also (open source misunderstood). For LaTeX applications, the tex file is needed to be distributed for the source, and I have mentioned LaTeX and Scribus because they are FOSS. Open Source Publishing needs extensive use of FOSS, and the development of FOSS in this area also need to be standardized for a coherent development of the matter. Take the example of Unicode font in Indian languages, which is still not standardized, and creating hindrance to publish a huge amount of digitized material in open domain.  

I think the author meant 'Open access publishing' by 'open source publishing'. The latter term is not appropriate. The source of documents is 'open' for a few proprietary formats too, while latex documents will not be 'open' without the tex source files.

in my opinion as classes still exist in the socialist system one cannot wish away the space for their political expression; nevertheless, as the defeated classes will try to take advantage of that freedom , genuine and open in a socialist democracy, the communist party has to be doubly careful not to allow the reactionary forces, in alliance with their foreign masters, to make use of it to reestablish their despotic rule , for which it has to be in constant touch with the masses to educate and empower them so that they are not only numerically superior but also ideologically united in its practical sense.

Of interest -- You can see a clip of Toussaint's last moments in prison from the new short film "The Last Days of Toussaint L'Ouverture" at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2468184/ This short film is the basis for a new feature (not with Danny Glover) that is in development.

Sorry Enlightened Mind, I am still confused. A confused mind is always a problem to a communist party married to Stalinist and Maoist prescriptions. Just one question when Karat is talking about multi-party in socialism does he mean multi party in people's democratic state or in a socialist state ? I am not clear on this. This is because I think it is oxymoron to say that there can be a socialist state under people's democratic dictatorship ( as in China now). In class terms there can`t be a socialist state under people`s democratic dictatorship. This is just ABC of Marxism. This is used to camouflage the issue who rules the state - in this case it is the communist party who only rules, others suck their thumbs or languish in labour camps. Secondly long before 2000 CPM updated party programme, the Chinese party during the new democratic revolution stage after the revolution said that it is a multi-party state. There is nothing unique in this. Even today the NPC is a multi party assembly where essentially only communist party rules. In fact seeing how the people dislodged the single party authoritarian regimes in the Eastern Europe, the realistic leadership of CPM thought it is better to say that we are for a multi party state during the stage of the people's democratic revolution.
In Mao's theory of new democratic revolution under the communist party leadership, the state will have multi party system. Then when China became a socialist state after the transition period [ The period of officially designated "transition to socialism" corresponded to China's First Five-Year Plan (1953-57), The period was characterized by efforts to achieve industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and political centralization] it remained a multi party state as other smaller parties can participate in the election like ( technical experts from other smaller parties) in National Peoples Congress, but in reality they have no power in NPC. More than 70% of NPC members are the communist party members (there are many detailed study on this) . In essence National Peoples Congress is a Communist Party controlled parliament.
To make things clear is Prakash Karat saying that under socialist state ruled by people's democratic dictatorship, there would be multi party system or is he saying that in socialism there would be a multi party system. Two are entirely different. I hope your enlightened mind would recognise this. Today if a BBC reporter asks Wen Xiabao that what is China`s political landscape in terms of pluralism. He would say that China has a multi party political system citing NPC and it is not a one party system. He is 100 % right. So when Karat is saying that under socialism there will be multi party system he is also correct because he wants Indian parliament to take the form of NPC where Communist party will rule and others will be there as showcase item. Nothing more, nothing less. He is certainly not talking about a socialist society where there will be multi-party system with the flowering of democratic values, not formal democracy of capitalism. It is the real democracy of the workers where workers rule through soviets, trade unions and communes, where workers are free to form their own party if they feel that the communist party is not their party and where in a communist party there is a right to form a faction (a right communists in Bolshevik party enjoyed in the early years of revolution, if I am not mistaken till 1921).
Lastly, why the Enlightened Mind used the quote of Baburam Bhattarai. He should have quoted Madhav Nepal. Since Nepal`s party is a fraternal organisation of CPI(M). Is the Enlightened Mind little ashamed that this party has become a stooge of Nepali Congress and the ruling class.

Is there a difference between people's democratic state and a socialist state ? If yes what is that difference ? When the Eastern European states completed its democratic revolution and became socialist states. These are not resolved questions especially to a confused people like me. Perhaps we are not imbibed with the right communist culture and consciousness. Will there be muliti party democracy in a socialist state which according to Lenin is not a state but a dying state. China finished its new democratic revolution long back and declared itself a socialist state. And it is a one party state with glorious records of democracy like the previous one party ruled Eastern European states. To quote Karat, "Our party has the maximum experience amongst communist parties of working in a democratic set up. We believe that even in socialism there should be a multi-party system." Is he talking about people's democratic state or a socialist state. He is clearly saying under socialism there should be a multi-party system. Does Karat mean people's democratic state as socialist state ?

Will the enlightened mind let us know whether in a socialist half state there will be multi party democracy or a one party communist rule ?

Lastly I know Li Peng has retired long back and was the premier between 1987-1998. The name was mentioned along with Wen Jiabao as examples to include all past and present Chinese leaders. I am also aware that some names we should not include like Zhao Ziyang who was the premier between 1980-1987. He was removed and was under house arrest for the rest of his life because he was against the Tiananmen square massacre. The enlightened mind can read his secret journal "Prisoner of the State" published in 2009 after he died, to understand the nature of Chinese politics and democracy.