On Understanding the Decline of the Established Indian Left

The inability of the Indian left to construct a project of the transcendence of capitalism (the central thesis of Patnaik) is understood as constituted within a crisis of world Marxism that began with the crystallisation of the Stalinist counter-revolution which paraded state capitalism as authentic socialism. This essay is on reading the misunderstanding of the fundamentals of Marx's scientific discovery by the established left in India, especially on the transient characters of commodity production, value and the state; and that communism transcends commodity production and abolishes the state immediately after the revolution. As the established Indian left took the non-Marxist model of commodity production governed by an alleged "socialist" state, it was destined to be destroyed by the inner contradictions of state capitalism. To project a transcendence of capitalism one needs to project a world that is devoid of commodities, money and the state. It is this task that the left in India in alliance with international communism must concentrate on.