Derrida, Foucault and the rise of Trinamool Congress

Communism, as a concept, is enticing, just like the fictional story of Robin Hood.

A person representing the yeoman class robs the aristocrat and distributes the wealth among the poor and the needy. He is hailed as a messiah by the oppressed class. The storyline is a continuation of the Biblical version of victory of good over evil, the plot being shifted form the realm of imagination to mortal societal structures.

In the 19^th century, even till the end, when majority of the people were leaving in abject penury, scrapping to make two dollars (in currency terms) a day, theory proposed by Marx & Engels was the right fit. Introduction of highfalutin terminologies like “bourgeois” and “proletariat” to redefine the good & evil and a mix of economic theory led to the beginning of modern-day Robin Hood principle. 

At the time the theory was propounded, it was justified and rightly it gained traction, both among the masses, who formed the oppressed class and the intellectual among the elites, who were the oppressor.

To cut the long story short, class struggle began and after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, uprising in China against the feudal warlords and at end of the world war two Communist regimes were set up with Russia and China, albeit different philosophy of the same ideology, as regimes writing vision statement for other subsidiaries.

The wall came crashing with news of atrocities, killings and death in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Russia disintegrated and so did the Eastern Bloc, China adopted cautious capitalism to stay afloat. By the seventies, Communism as proposed by Marx, was in tatters.

In spite of strict restriction on flow of information, three volumes of Solzhenitsyn’s ”Gulag Archipelago” among others, news of death of sixty million in China served as the last nail in the coffin of Classical Communism .

The Communists in the academics or the so-called intellectuals needed a new theory to continue the momentum. To their rescue came the new age French philosophers, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard et all. They declared that the Western Society which was based on “phallogocentrism” needs to be deconstructed. They rejected the entire “Structure” of the western society. As per them the western society was predicated on patriarchal hegemony and rejected the idea of supremacy of the individual. They viewed the entire society as a struggle between groups – the oppressor and the oppressed, race, gender, nationality, ethnicity and endless.

The idea of Post-Modernism was born.

While the Left in India stuck to their roots of classical Marxism, Trinamool Congress adopted the ideas of Post-Modernism, with or without tacit knowledge and tweaking it to the present societal structure in West Bengal. 

Minorities were empowered as a group; youths, without a job, was pampered through monthly donations to local clubs; the womanhood were given out doles in form of various subsidies and handouts. The common enemy was an invisible threat from a communal, nationalistic, overpowering, phallocentric, decadent political party that rules in the center. They were threat to all groups, albeit, for different reasons.

Minorities will lose their privilege, they will be treated as second class citizen, maybe imprisoned. The youth will lose their revenue and livelihood as their nefarious activities in supply of materials to the building segment, with tacit support of the government, will be curtailed. The women will lose their empowerment to a regime which is inadvertently patriarchal.

To instill fear among the demography serves as the best source of success among political parties.

The Bhartiya Janata Party failed to install fear among the Hindus, that they would lose their right to religion with the present government, mostly because the Hindu society is too fragmented to form a cohesive group. Besides that, BJP has no other forms of allurement for the masses in Bengal which lead to their dismal performance.

Development is not an attribute that a group bother.