Part of a series examining underappreciated Marxists and Leftists. Read the first installment here.
Manabendra Nath Roy was quite the (in)famous communist in his day. He was active in the 3rd International on three continents and was so esteemed by his contemporaries that he was likened to the Indian equivalent of Lenin or even Marx himself. Not that an Indian person needs vindication by being compared to Europeans, but it’s a nice compliment nonetheless. Eventually his differences with the Stalinized Comintern would lead to his drifting away from official communism. Yet he remains an underappreciated embodiment of the fate of the 3rd International, and his speeches and writings deserve a second look.
It is M.N. Roy’s approach to the idea of regression that will be the focus of this essay. But what exactly is meant by ‘regression?’ Simply put, ‘regression’ refers to a recognition that things did not go according to the orthodox Leftist playbook. The Second International (1889-1914) was the height of the Left’s power. Its chief theoreticians all personally knew Marx or Engels, so there was apparent continuity from masters to disciples. There were millions of proletarians organized under the banner of socialism in the most industrially advanced countries in the world. The International gathered representatives of peoples who used to be fierce rivals, demonstrating that socialism might have been capable of overcoming nationalism, xenophobia, and centuries of ethnic conflict and/or colonization. They all rode the wave of an incredible period of historical development over the previous half century that culminated in many significant working-class victories and a cause that practically recruited for itself. The advent of socialism was seen as inevitable to a certain degree, and all that was required of the Leftists was to guide history toward the fulfillment of its trajectory.
But that was all easier said than done. Indeed, at the height of its power, the Second International ended up siding with the various belligerents of World War I and sending its dutiful proletarian siblings off to the trenches. Far from continuing to progress, as they all assumed it was, history now appeared to move backward, to regress, all right before those same Marxists’ eyes. This is not at all what they had expected. A few along the way had tried to point this out or head off the danger. And many since have added their own views into the swirling mess of tendencies, trends, and methods that have come at this question of regression.
There are many different approaches to this very important yet thorny question. Reviewing some of them will help bring Roy’s own into relief. A notable one is the so-called revisionist camp of the 1890s to about 1905, which was centered around a German socialist theorist by the name of Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein noticed that trends in the economy weren’t really moving according to how the old predictions went. For instance, Bernstein noticed that agricultural production wasn’t becoming centralized like industrial production of commodities was. In addition, the middle class didn’t seem to be disappearing into the ranks of the proletariat like Marx and Engels said it would and must. Thus, Bernstein concluded that since the economic conditions that were apparently necessary for Marxian socialism weren’t present or were progressing more slowly than anticipated, therefore Marxian politics must be changed to fit this new reality. This is the origin of the idea of evolutionary socialism, or socialism not by revolution but by gradual change in the existing Bonapartist state apparatus, headed by a strong parliamentary proletarian party. Though Bernstein’s views were ultimately defeated thanks to theoretical rebuttals by Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and others, in practice his party adopted everything he advocated. This is not the place to dive into Bernstein or his legacy, but it is worth pointing out that Bernstein considered himself an orthodox Marxist and was sincerely trying to take account of the fact that something wasn’t quite right with how Marxian politics was unfolding in reality.
Let’s skip ahead some decades and look at a contemporary attempt at regression theorizing. This we may call the intersectionalist approach. There really isn’t one founder or lead here because this isn’t one tendency, but rather more like an amalgam of post-Marxian attempts to take account of Marxism’s failure in the early 20th century. These approaches may be informed variously by folks such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Audre Lorde, and others to come out of the postmodernist and postcolonial frameworks of the 1970s and 1980s. These attempts at regression would all emphasize the social identity makeup of the Second International. Since its leaders were all Europeans (and mostly men), the conclusion is that they fell victim to their internalized Eurocentrism, masculinism, heteronormativity, white supremacy, and other privileges. Those in this vein who would consciously use more Marxist language in their description, such as Gerald Horne, might add that the European Left of the Second International was bought off by imperialism and thus condemned their siblings in the global east and south to the evils of colonization, all because they somehow were too beholden to their ill-gotten privileges in the imperial heartland. Again, this is not the place to go into this milieu, but describing contemporary Leftist theories this way provides some continuity and clarity during the longue durée of regression over the 20th century and beyond.
Moving back in time, we land on the figure of Lukács György, a Hungarian Marxist who lived right through World War I and even took part in the ill-fated Hungarian Socialist Republic. His attempt at answering the question of how everything went so horribly wrong followed the examples set by the protagonists themselves, including Luxemburg and Lenin. He ultimately formulated an account centered on the reification of Marxism. That is, the very bureaucratic success of Marxism in establishing very powerful political parties, many of which had strong presences in various national legislatures, became Marxism’s undoing. That organizational form was previously very useful for disciplining the working class and getting it interested in politics in the first place. That form of organizing the politics of Marxism served its purpose: it created a millions-strong proletarian army across Europe that was ready to violently throw off the yoke of its capitalistic masters. But instead of unleashing that force, the Second International now held it back. The proletariat needed a new, higher form of organization to match its new, higher class consciousness. Lenin alone, and Luxemburg too late, realized this. Lukács merely formulated it into a nice, neat, 400-some-page book. Marxism’s very success became its undoing, but Lukács also hoped that it was not too late to learn from this and reconvene the fight. Unfortunately that is not how things played out.
We could cite others and their accounts of regression, but this is a suitable introduction to contrast MN Roy’s own. Roy took Lenin’s theses on imperialism and ran with them. Lenin understood imperialism to mean his contemporary slice of capitalism, which was characterized by gigantic world monopolies, an effective end to free competition in the marketplace, the highest concentration of industry and socialization of production hitherto known, and an uncontrollable overproduction crisis that spelled the end of capitalism itself. Imperialism, in other words, made socialism both possible and urgently necessary.
What was supposed to happen was that capitalist industry was to flood all markets with too many goods and services, so many that they couldn’t be consumed. Thus, the great advances in the productivity of capital and labor would produce an entropic glut of the market, thereby wasting such productivity, and revolution would be made possible since it would be the only means of restoring order and putting the immense wealth of the industrial age to the benefit of human well-being, not abstracted production in and of itself.
But Roy would make a very important, if unappreciated, observation here. Roy noticed that the large colonial holdings of Great Britain, France, the U.S., and Japan were blunting the impacts of that oft-prophesied general crisis of overproduction. These markets were big enough to absorb all that overproduction that was plaguing the imperial core. As he said to the 3rd International in 1921,
The overproduction that at present characterises Britain’s industrial system cannot be regarded as a ruinous weakness, at least not under present conditions [...] Therefore, I suggest that a clause be added to the theses that refers to the important role that the colonial possessions play in the attempt to stabilise international capitalism. This clause must explain that the task of the International is to make clear on this point that the colonial possessions are resources that can be used by the capitalist system to rebuild its strength.
In other words, imperialism didn’t have to end in socialism. There was a scarier alternative. Imperialism could be the end of capitalism or the basis for it to springboard into renewed life. The only way to avoid this, he would argue, would be to globalize the revolution itself:
If the greatest prophet of human history is not to be proved false—if over-production is to be the grave of capitalist society, then the World Revolution must assume world-wide character.
Amid all the optimism of the Bolshevik Revolution, then, Roy was acutely aware of the danger that the ongoing colonization of the global east and south presented to the nascent socialistic experiments. And without the agentic participation of the rest of the world’s proletariat, he observed, the European revolutions would be doomed. His most forceful and eloquent articulation of this idea is found in his 1921 speech, “Theses on the Eastern Question.” He begins his speech with two observations that, while undoubtedly true, nevertheless flew in the face of the prevailing Marxist orthodoxy of the time:
The fact that, in spite of its general bankruptcy, European capitalism is still holding its own against the increasingly powerful attack of the proletariat in the Western countries proves that capitalism, as a world-domineering factor, has not yet reached such a state of decay that its immediate downfall is inevitable.
And
But the fact is that till today imperial expansion and exploitation do render strength to capitalism to maintain its position in Europe.
His solution was simple: make the revolution more global and complete than this half-assed overproduction crisis has been so far. Envelop the capitalists on all sides and every domino will eventually fall. Whereas Lenin and Trotsky had envisioned their revolution in Russia setting off a wave of revolutions that must culminate in the toppling of the arch-imperialist regime in Great Britain, Roy took the same starting point but went in the totally opposite direction. If India went ‘red,’ then Great Britain would fall as a matter of course. Roy was suspicious of waiting for the British communists to get it right given the British Left’s history of acquiescence to British colonialism. Instead, why not take out the most important economic engine in the whole of the British Empire? Once the periphery has defected, the core will fall:
While undoubtedly it is the proletariat of the industrial countries of Europe and America which stands at the vanguard of the armies of the world revolution, the historical phenomenon should not be overlooked that the toiling masses of the most advanced non-European countries are also destined to play a role in the act of freeing the world from the domination of imperialist capital. This historic role of the masses of the most advanced non-European countries consists of: (1) raising the standard of revolt against foreign imperialism simultaneously with the revolutionary action of the Western proletariat; and (2) fighting the native landowning class and bourgeoisie. Thus attacked from both sides, imperialism will have no possible way out of the vicious circle of its own creation.
Note that this is not a postcolonial argument of the kind we see today. Roy would have been no friend to the Third Worldists of the early neoliberal era. His vision was firmly in lockstep with Marxism. Thus, if we turn to him again in our own time, there is the danger of fetishizing his Indianness or his critiques of the European Marxists into a ‘southern’ (délből) approach when really that was not on his radar in the same way.
Sadly, Roy’s intervention would ultimately be pushed aside. Perhaps, like the best of the Second International-era radicals, his Marxism was a bit too orthodox for the mainstream!
We may wish to argue that his insistence on decolonization was a bit too fetishized. After all, decolonization has taken place but the world is no closer to socialism as a result. It turned out that decolonizing the global east and south was not an automatic precondition for the general emancipation of humanity through socialism. It is still unclear whether the decolonization waves of the 1950s and 1960s were ‘progressive’ in any meaningful sense (can there be progress in the midst of ‘regression?’).
What might MN Roy’s legacy be today? That is certainly too big for this essay to consider. His unique take on regression, though perhaps in danger of being ‘brownwashed’ by contemporary postcolonial sentiments, is still robust enough to merit consideration alongside the others. As a chronicler of the demise of both the Second and Third Internationals, Roy’s life and work register this important turning point in history. If he is forgotten today, then it is certainly at our own peril. But how exactly he comes to bear on our conduct is yet to be determined.