Prabhat Patnaik, Marxist economist and former vice-chairman of the Planning Board, has called for ‘’the practise of a de-Stalinised Marxism, if socialism is to be brought back on the agenda.’’
He also revealed that he accepted the post of the vice-chairman of the Planning Board under the last LDF Government at the personal request of V S Achuthanandan and not out of any party mandate. ‘’Most of my friends, including in the party, advised me against it, but I took it up nonetheless, and have never regretted that decision,’’ he said.
In an email sent to the fellow comrades, he said, ‘’Communism in India today is being threatened in two ways, either being hegemonised by bourgeois liberalism, or as falling prey to a feudal Stalinism,’’ without naming CPM. Prabhat said that he would elaborate further about this in his key-note address at the Chintha Ravi memorial seminar to be held in Kozhikode on July 7, the first death anniversary of the filmmaker and writer.
The e-mail was a clarification to K T Rammohan, Associate Professor at School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, who expressed some reservations on having Prabhat Patnaik, who might be ‘identified as an ideologue of the killer party,’ as a speaker at the function.
The e-mail was circulated by Chintha Forum floated by a section of the Left fellow travellers, as requested by Patnaik himself. Chintha Ravi memorial seminar is the first programme hosted by the Forum. ‘’What is common to both hegemony by bourgeois liberalism and feudal Stalinism, is an implicit lack of conviction about socialism, an implicit subscription to the neo-liberal ‘development’ agenda, and an implicit denial of scope for people’s empowerment. Succumbing to either or both these threats would be disastrous and totally against the interests of the people,’’ Patnaik said.
‘’I was looking forward to the Chintha Ravi memorial seminar as an occasion to discuss these issues, and hence, to criticise the feudal-Stalinist trend that one encounters in Kerala, and also elsewhere. I saw the seminar as such an occasion because I knew that it would be attended by intellectuals seriously interested in Marxism,’’ he said.