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A closer look at the student-youth movement in our country during the colonial era reveals that young people got mobilised into struggles, not for the ‘student issues’ or ‘youth issues’ as we understand them today, but primarily inspired by the anti-colonial struggle against imperialism. This reflection into the past is necessary for the revolutionary forces to understand ‘student/youth issues’ in the present conjuncture. However, it is not a matter of simply copy-pasting. Any such effort will have to first recognise the changes that education and employment have undergone, the decisive shift of the balance of forces in favour of capital globally, the ideological hegemony of capitalism-imperialism in post-colonial countries like ours, and many other such changes.
India is no exception to what is happening across the world with the rise of the far-Right, authoritarian, and fascist forces of our times. Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines and, till his recent electoral defeat, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have coupled aggressive nationalist rhetoric with a policy of selling out domestic interests at home. This is to comply with the interest of global imperialist capital—global institutions like the IMF, World Bank, WTO and other geopolitical considerations. Obvious exceptions are the far-Right forces in the USA, consolidated during the presidency of Donald Trump, and a few other powerful countries, where too, their advocacy of ‘domestic interest’ does not have any pro-people content. ‘Domestic interest’, in the present context, needs elaboration before we go further. Particularly in the context of India, where two persons, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, are on the list of the top ten richest people in the world, the ‘domestic interest’ needs serious attention. Not just in India, the Third World bourgeoisie in general, has collaborated with imperialist interests, with their huge dependence on the global imperialist system and institutions in multiple aspects. It has no anti-imperialist role, rather it tries to define the ‘national interest’ in favour of its own and for a ‘greater linkage’ with global capital. The fascists and far-Right today have only exacerbated this relation in favour of the crisis-ridden capitalist class. Minorities are being made an easy scapegoat for peoples’ anger so that a pro-people and welfare agenda can be pushed out from national political debate.
Not just in India, the Third World bourgeoisie in general, has collaborated with imperialist interests, with their huge dependence on the global imperialist system and institutions in multiple aspects.
The world today is ruled by international finance capital and its global institutions, which favour the interests of multinational corporations, and politically led by the US state. This schematized description may be questioned given Russia’s geopolitical influence, the political and economic rise of China and their block. This aspect is often exaggerated, obscuring the disproportionate supremacy of the US and the G-7 nations in the domains of military strength, technology, knowledge production, capital and other aspects. The arrival of an apparent contender to the US-led alignment of world forces has triggered an aggressive, US-led global propaganda machinery against Russia and China. However, the challenge posed by this block has little to do with any anti-imperialist or pro-people agenda, as both the states have exploitative and oppressive policies on domestic and foreign affairs and are integrated into global capitalism.
The apparently ‘multipolar’ geopolitical scenario has very different implications for the Left today from what it was during the twentieth century, when anti-colonialism and socialism were an axis around which different camps were polarised against imperialism.
It follows that the revolutionary Left in today’s world cannot depend either on the domestic bourgeoisie or the ‘anti-US’ camp and will have to strive to define the ‘national interest’ through the political awakening of the toiling people. Today, revolutionaries must take anti-imperialist consciousness to the masses with the confidence that, ultimately, it is they who can define ‘national interest’. Recent experiences everywhere show that, if forming or retaining power in governments comes at the cost of accommodating the neoliberal status quo, then the Left must remain agile and come out of such forced agreements in the interest of furthering the project of social transformation.
The stability of governments cannot come at the cost of sacrificing people’s struggles once in power—the Left must trust that the movements of workers, peasants, and small producers, struggles for economic, political, ecological, and social justice, can become the primary axes for a new, insurgent nationalism.
Only this can redefine the ‘national interest’ outside the boundaries drawn by imperialism today. Such insurgent nationalism, though they bear the symbols and histories of their specific local/national contexts, will be internationalist in content and spirit as the values they strive for are values of equality, freedom, co-operations, justice, and respect for diversity.
Let us return to where we began—‘student issues’ or ‘youth issues’. They tend to remain fixated on the nitty-gritty of dissent emerging from specific issues of education and employment; events of a fee-hike or some authoritarian order violating campus democracy, or employment-related issues of specific sectors of people, or at its most general, demands around some legislation. It is true that with the loss of dreams of structural transformation, political mobilizations have practically been reduced to mobilizations around a partial agenda, issues directly affecting a particular section of the population or organizing solidarity actions. Unity of vision among the student-youth and ‘social’ movements coupling ideological motivation with grassroots demands have receded from the horizon of possibility. With the hegemony of capitalism-imperialism reaching new heights and capitalist propaganda taking the name of ‘just the facts’, ‘common sense’ or ‘human nature’, revolutionary ideas are pushed to the bay. They appear as ‘irrational’ once common sense has been defined in this way. At such times, ideological work among the students and youth has great importance among revolutionary activities. It would be wrong to assume that our generation is not interested in politics, if presented in a relevant manner. Anti-imperialism, respect for cultural diversity, our conviction in the values of equality and freedom and dreams of creating a better future cannot be snatched from revolutions and revolutionaries.
[Originally published in COLLECTIVE Issue 6 (Nov. 2022). Read the full issue here (PDF).]
