In Memory of Gautam Sen

 

Gautam Sen passed away early today (25 May 2021). This is a personal note. I have written one in Bangla earlier, and this is a slightly amplified version of the same. My association with Comrade Sen goes back to 1980, though in the last one decade (2011-2021) we met rather infrequently, and talked little. This was not due to estrangement, but due to different ways of organisational functioning which made us engage less with each other.

Gautam Sen was a student radical at the Durgapur RE College, who went on to join the CPI(ML), and to become a very close associate of Mahadev Mukherjee at that stage. Because of the RE college connection he told me jokingly, ‘I was a year senior to Vinod [Misra] so I want an hour in private with him, to ask certain questions which I will not tell you people'. Subsequently, from the late 1970s, he would move away from a range of CPI(ML) positions—the question of ‘Authority’, new democratic revolution,  and while continuing to accept the capitalist nature of the USSR, he would also ask for a more materialist analysis than the Stalin died, the Khrushchev revisionist clique seized power, and the class nature of the state changed type of silly explanation. The group he led, and another group, which I only knew as the Bimal group, though I am sure it had a more formal name, fused around the same time that I found out the Communist League (Indian Section of the Fourth International) in 1980. We were introduced to each other by someone who I do not recollect now, but who told me that as we were both critical of the Moscow-Beijing types of communism we should find areas of mutual interest. My interest grew further after reading the essay (later turned into a pamphlet) on why the Indian capitalist class cannot be considered comprador, published in the Bangla occasional theoretical journal Oikya O Sangram. Strange to think that one of the initiators turned up as a minster in the TMC government and was an MLA till replaced by Aditi Munshi.

To get back to Gautam Sen though, he was part of a small group who dared to move out of the mainstream, to reject the comfortable zone that accepted a history stretching back to 1920/1925 and to only discover revisionism in Joshi/Namboodiripad/Jyoti Basu or the person of your choice, and to question the received wisdom from the Comintern. The name taken by their organisation was Majdoor Mukti Committee. I do not know, for in all the years I never asked him, whether he had in mind Plekhanov’s group. But certainly he referred to Marx—The emancipation of the working classes is a task of the working classes themselves. He also wrote a pamphlet on that subject.

In the early and mid-1980s, some of the organisations talking about Socialist Revolution in India tried to form a coordination with an aim to unification. This did not lead to the hoped for total unity. But at one stage the MMC, the Communist League, the Bolshevik Leninist Group, and the Sramik Mukti Dal attempted serious unity discussions. The CL and the BLG did unite, to form the Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (Indian Section of the Fourth International). The SMD and the MMC did not, for different reasons. It started becoming evident that strategy, assessment of concrete ground level issues, and not just a debate over SR vs NDR or a common rejection of Stalinism would be enough.

In those days, however, when in Kolkata, being a Trotskyist was being a target for open and behind your back attacks of all sorts, Gautam Sen in particular and MMC comrades of that period generally, treated us differently. After Operation Blue Star, the CL had been instrumental in getting a number of groups to agree to a common programme. But then one group with pretensions to a degree of clout because they could mobilise a reasonably good number of workers, put pressure and we were requested to drop our name from the convenors of the programme, in the interest of holding the programme. MMC was one organisation which strongly opposed this style of functioning.

The principal reason for the differences with Gautamda and MMC were three. First, their closeness to the British SWP meant a rejection of feminism. Cliff’s Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation and some material by others like Lindsey German were used to push forward lines of argument which we strongly contested.

Second, something that in those days appeared extremely important, and which remains important but not to a breaking point, was the debate over the class nature of the Soviet state. Eventually MMC would translate Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia because this was one area where MMC did not really develop any independent argument.

Third, there was the debate over Permanent Revolution. In his pamphlet Biplabr Star Nirdharaner Mandwando O Bharatiya Biplaber Star, Gautamda insisted on a schematic two stage theory. I responded in an appendix to my Leninism and Permanent Revolution.

But it would be later that I would come to feel that none of these were the crucial impediment. That was his position on substitutionism, flowing from which he would insist that there is indeed a continuity between Leninism and Stalinism. He published pamphlets in both Bangla and English on this. He and I debated on the pages  of Yuvakantha, an RSP youth journal. We also debated in public meetings. When in response to his citing Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution I referred to her articles during the German Revolution and her rejection of the National Assembly in favour of the Workers’ Councils, and suggested that this meant she had changed her position on the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, he was very agitated and said in that case he would refer to omit those pages from her writings. But personal relations remained unimpaired. When once he went abroad, there were certain personal issues that needed handling, he could turn without hesitation to Soma and myself.

Gautamda was inspired by anti Nuclear activism from at least the early 80s. for me, apart from the material I was getting from the Fourth International, one source of understanding was Soumen Guha. From the 1980s, Gautam Sen, Manan Ganguly, Pradip Dutta, and some others including myself, were involved in a small organisation, the Anti Nuclear Forum. Gautamda was inspired by the kind of anti-nuclear programmes he had seen in the West, where people would come with their different banners, posters, leaflets, journals. He and I were among the vocal minority who upheld ths position against both he stress over a single common leaflet and the call for bannerlessness, ostensibly to oppose one party hegemony, but in my experience to facilitate behind the scene control and to push petty bourgeois stars. In 1998, after the Pokharan bomb test, Maitree, with leading roles played by Soma Marik (ICS, Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha and Maitree) and Mira Roy (MMC, NNPM and Maitree) was to play an influential role in making all the anti nuclear groups apart from the Left Front to join into one large coalition, the Paramanu Astra Birodhi Prachar Abhiyan, instead of four or more micro coalitions. This resulted in a huge gathering, bigger than anything he far left and its usual allies could put up. And it could rope in people like Professor Sujoy Basu, who had been supportive ever since the Anti Nuclear Forum days. Parenthetically, that was one of the last occasions when my father, Gautam Chattopadhyay, a CPI leader, then 74, would not only lend his name as one of the convenors of the demonstration but would also walk. I also remember Professor Jasodhara Bagchi standing in the Maitree contingent.

In 1998-2004, we were working together in Protibadi Udyog, an attempt at overcoming the division between political groups versus civil society organisations. According to a strange convention here in Kolkata, the two are not supposed to work together. Srijan Sen would insist in 1998 when we were building the demonstration, why am I not coming in the name of a ‘mass organisation’ but using the name of Inquilabi Communist Sangathan. In Pratibadi Udyog we had MMC, ICS, NNPM (with very vocal feminists like Maitreyee Chattopadhyay as leaders, so let none think that the NNPM was anything to do with ICS and MMC) and others. PU would campaign over elections, putting forward a citizens’ charter and saying that candidates needed to answer us instead of coming and making promises. PU also held programmes on various occasions, including over the Tolly Nullah and the Beleghata Canal evictions.

Our anti-nuclear work also led to large programmes. I did not attend all of them. Some of our other comrades did, like Sushovan Dhar who was very much a part of the campaign over Haripur. In 2008, Gautamda and I were both to go to Nagpur for the CNDP conference. Looking at a significant number of Radical Socialist comrades there, he asked us in jest—is this a Central Committee meeting of your organisation that you have called?

In the last one decade we had less contact, mainly because of the divergent style of work. Radical Socialist was trying to be more engaged in mass work, implanting members more in working class struggles, as well as in social movements of all the oppressed. MMC was still focused on propaganda for socialism. So we met less often. But we invited Gautam Sen as a speaker in 2011 when Radical, our paper, organised a meeting in solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution. And he invited Soma to write for Search, as well as to speak in a panel he was organising over the Russian revolution on 25 November 2017. As far as my memory goes, that was the last time we met face to face. I had a Russian Revolution talk elsewhere the same day, and reached when the meeting had started. I was compelled to listen to a radical denunciation of democracy as it only dupes the uneducated masses, so ‘we’ must seize power without caring for any talk of democracy. Neither Gautam Sen nor Soma nor I subscribed to this position, but he was always to ensure that these spaces should be open to various shades of the left. So along with Sourin Bhattacharya, and Soma, there were Prasanta Roy and this speaker.

Gautam Sen was a prolific writer. For a group their size, he, and they, managed to publish a very large number of books, pamphlets, journals. There have already been queries about whether his archives will be put up in the Marxist Internet archive. Since that is entirely volunteer run, I hope comrades of the MMC will think it over seriously.