Prabhat Patnaik, a leading Left thinker and vice-chairman of Kerala’s planning board, has come out strongly against the Left-leaning intellectuals who have now turned against the CPM.

In an article titled, ‘The Left and its intellectual detractors’ in the latest issue of People’s Democracy, he writes: “What is striking about the attitude of the intellectuals arrayed against the organised Left at present is their complete withdrawal from the realm of political praxis to a realm of messianic moralism. Such messianic moralism is not just politically counter-productive. The withdrawal from the realm of politics that it signifies, strengthens politically the camp of the ‘enemies of the people’. (In India, for instance, the attack inspired by messianic moralism that has been launched on the organised Left at a time when the latter is in the forefront of an extremely crucial but difficult struggle against the attempt of imperialism to make India its strategic ally, weakens that struggle, and thereby plays into the hands of imperialism). But messianic moralism, quite apart from its palpable political consequences, is smug, self-righteous, self-adulatory, and, above all, empty. An attitude that does not distinguish between types of violence, between the different episodes of violence, that condemns all violence with equal abhorrence, that places on a footing of equality all presumed perpetrators of violence, amounts in fact to a condemnation of nothing. To say that all are equally bad is not even morally meaningful. This messianic moralism, this withdrawal from politics, is based fundamentally on a disdain of politics, of the messy world of politics, which is far from being peopled by angels. It constitutes therefore a mirror image of the very phenomenon that it seeks to resist, namely the ‘cult of development’ spawned by neo-liberalism. Manmohan Singh says: politics is filthy; rise above politics; detach ‘development’ from politics. The anti-Left intellectuals say: politics is filthy; rise above politics; detach the struggle against ‘development’ from politics.”

... contd.