Fascism, Democracy and the Long Oppositional Struggle: Part-2

(Translated into English from Original Bengali Text)

Part 1 elaborated on the meaning of the Bengal election, fascism as a larger social system, the role of digital and rentier capital, the RSS’s work as a ‘social organisation’, and the difference between street mobilisation and organising. The second part advances the question: How to build a durable, democratic social force against fascism?

Democracy is not a once-every-five-years affair.

In our country, democracy is often equated with elections. If there is an election, there is democracy. If we win, the people are with us. If we lose, they are not. It is an extraordinary argument. People in a village may have no right to decide what happens to their water, forest, land, school or health centre; but once every five years they may enter a polling booth and press a button. Does that make them sovereign citizens? In an urban neighbourhood, bureaucrats, developers and councillors decide where a park will be, where a high-rise will be built, who will be evicted, where municipal money will be spent. Local people hear about it later. Yet in the run-up to an election, they are declared owners of democracy.

Ownership is not a bad thing, except that ownership is on a five-year lease. If anti-fascist politics is to be genuinely long-term, its first task is to free democracy from the cage of the vote. Democracy has to become a habit.

Gram sabhas in villages. Neighbourhood assemblies in cities. Workers’ committees in factories. Joint meetings of teachers, students and parents in schools. Independent student bodies in colleges and universities. Local organisations of gig workers. Anti-eviction committees in bustees and colonies. Associations of small traders in markets. Wherever people live, there must be spaces where they can decide for themselves the matters that concern them. Some will say: that is civil society, NGOs, and neighbourhood club activity. Where is revolution in the true sense of the term? It may well be here.

If a person spends an entire life taking orders from above — at home, in school, at work, in the party, the union, the panchayat and the state — by what magic will that person become democratic on election day? Democracy has to be learned, like singing, farming, organising. One has to speak and listen; lose an argument; remain a majority while respecting a minority; take responsibility and give it up. Fascism teaches the opposite. The leader knows. The state knows. The nation knows. The army knows. Father knows. Teacher knows. Godman or godwoman knows. Do not ask questions.

So the democratic work of organising an anti-fascist movement cannot mean holding two meetings a year on constitutional values. It means creating spaces in everyday life where people learn to decide for themselves rather than obey. That is how a base is built; that is where organising begins. The question is not how many members have been enrolled. It is about how much social power has been generated.

Democracy has to be learned — and learned through mistakes.

There is an uncomfortable side to this argument. A decision does not become good simply because local people made it. A gram sabha can make mistakes; a neighbourhood assembly can bully those in the minority; a workers’ committee can ignore women or Dalits. Caste, patriarchy, religious prejudice and the power of money exist within local society too. Decentralisation should not be romanticised. But if this becomes the argument for returning every decision to bureaucrats, courts, party leaders or experts, the possibility of learning democracy disappears. We need safeguards: appeal against unjust decisions, minority rights, public accounts, rotation of leadership, autonomous organisations of women. Democracy is not a perfect system. It is the social capacity to discover and correct its own mistakes.

Our political culture has very little space for this. A meeting means one person speaks and everyone else listens. A committee means a few people know and dictate and the rest obey. The same habits survive within movements. If, while fighting fascism, we dislike questions within our own organisations, regard leaders as infallible and call disagreement betrayal, we reproduce a miniature version of our enemy’s political culture. The politics of opposition must not merely say different things. It must learn to live differently.

Not one centre, but many

The question of decentralisation follows inevitably. Decentralisation does not mean a ministry in Delhi sending some money to a panchayat. It means moving power down — and ‘down’ does not mean merely into the hands of the panchayat pradhan. It means moving power into society. What kind of school does an area need? Does it need a healthcare centre? What will land be used for? How will a forest be managed? Where will the local budget be spent? As far as possible, local people should decide. Gram sabhas, neighbourhood assemblies, and workers’ assemblies decide; higher-level bodies coordinate when and where necessary, rather than command.

In India this is not sheer fantasy. Adivasi regions retain social memories of self-government; laws such as the Forest Rights Act and Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (or PESA) offer some legal recognition of gram sabha authority. Many movements have tried to turn that legal space into real social power, with uneven success. The law itself is not the main point. The practice is people discussing their resources among themselves, making decisions, and bargaining with the government.

The Zapatistas in Mexico have been doing this for decades. Their autonomous social order did not fall from the sky. It was not a matter of people emerging from the forest with guns in 1994 and introducing ‘horizontal’ democracy the next morning. Behind it lay years of clandestine political work, indigenous forms of organisation, argument, mistakes, learning, and the dismantling of an older vanguardist idea of politics to create new relationships. The older revolutionary organisation eventually subordinated itself to local indigenous leadership. Their famous formulation is worth remembering: command by obeying. Leadership not by issuing orders, but by listening.

Rojava offers a related lesson. Local communes and councils, autonomous women’s institutions, successive levels of confederation: it would be foolish to claim that a stateless society has been achieved there, but there is a real experiment in building social power without making the state the centre of everything. These examples are not templates for copying. Chiapas cannot be transplanted into a North Bengal village; Rojava will not appear in a ward of Kolkata. History is not a photocopying machine. The lesson lies elsewhere.

Horizontality does not mean the absence of organisation. The absence of a supreme leader does not mean the absence of political labour. Spontaneity does not mean creating a Facebook event tonight and witnessing revolutionary change tomorrow morning. Quite the opposite. Decentralised democracy is far harder to run than a system in which instructions come from the centre. It requires more work, more social relationships, more political education.

Many centres mean responsibility spread wide.

The phrase ‘many centres’ can sound like ‘centrelessness’, as if everyone simply does whatever they please. The opposite is true. When there is one powerful centre, most people carry very little responsibility: an order is issued and followed. Many centres distribute the burden of decision-making. A local committee must account for what it does, answer for its mistakes, coordinate with neighbouring areas, send delegates to discuss bigger questions — and know how to recall those delegates. This is not chaos. It is a more demanding form of organised democracy. Sending instructions from above is easy. Sustaining discussions across a hundred places, managing disagreements and still reaching a collective decision is difficult. That difficulty is political education.

Anti-fascists in earlier times understood one thing.

Under historical fascism, communists, socialists, anarchists, liberals and democrats fought in different ways in different countries. They disagreed fiercely, distrusted one another and made grave mistakes. But large sections of the democratic and Left forces understood one thing: anti-fascism is not an election campaign. If fascists organised in a neighbourhood, one needed an organisation there too. In factories, unions. Among students, student organisations. In culture, songs, theatre, magazines. In case the state blocked news, clandestine channels of communication. If people were attacked, shelter, food and medical help. In some places, armed resistance; elsewhere, popular fronts; quiet organisational work.

The struggle, in other words, was social. Elections can be part of it. Who would make the absurd claim that people should not have voted Hitler out had it been possible to oust him through the ballot? Nor am I saying there is no need to defeat the ruling BJP electorally today. There is. Where possible, opposition candidates have to be helped to win; electoral manipulation has to be resisted; the right to vote has to be defended. But if that becomes everything in politics, five years from now we will be back where we began.

Even if fascists lose an election, the society that produced them remains. The WhatsApp groups remain, the shakhas remain, temple-centred organisation remains, hatred of Muslims remains, caste remains, misogyny remains, the fury of jobless youths remains, corporate media remains, platform capital remains. Another government sits atop that society. Five years later, it’s the same? The cycle has to be broken from below.

What disappears from our memory

The history of earlier anti-fascist struggles tends to preserve the dramatic images: guns, barricades, underground parties, electoral alliances. Less often remembered is the infrastructure of everyday survival — workers’ clubs, libraries, solidarity funds, neighbourhood newspapers, theatre groups, women’s organisations, kitchens for the unemployed, food for families during a strike. These were forms of political resistance, too. People cannot continue their struggle inspired by ideology alone; they need social support. The same is true now. If the state files cases, people need lawyers. If a worker loses a job, there must be support. If hatred is propagated through the media, there must be a means of producing and circulating factual news. If someone is attacked, there must be a safe place to go. If we dismiss these factors as ‘social work’ and separate them from politics, fascism benefits. It enters precisely such gaps, offering service, identity, security and a sense of community.

So what is to be done?

This is usually where revolutionary writing runs into trouble. The analysis is over — now what? A 10-point programme? Let’s not do that. If people in a neighbourhood do not know what they need to do in their area, why should a writer sitting in Kolkata know? There cannot be a single answer to what kind of organisation is needed in a factory or a tea garden, what questions can bring people together in a particular bustee, or how a university’s students might connect with temporary teachers and workers.

Perhaps it’s important to discuss a few general things here. First, we have to return to society. There is no substitute for this. We have to speak to the person who voted for the winning party. If the first thing we do is call him a fascist, the conversation is over before it begins. Why did he vote in the way he did? A job? Anger at a local boss of the previous ruling party? Hatred for Muslims? Love for PM? Security? Infiltration? A feeling of being threatened as a Hindu? We have to listen. Listening is not agreeing. But we cannot change what people think without first knowing what they think.

Second, the politics of demands has to connect with the politics of power. It is not enough to tell the government: "Give us a school." Local people must have a say in how that school is run. Not only jobs, but workers’ power to decide a workplace issue. Not only forest rights, but the right to decide what happens to the forest. Not only panchayat elections, but also functioning gram sabhas. Not just municipalities, but neighbourhood assemblies as well. Every demand, in other words, must also become a demand for democracy.

From demands to the power to decide

A politics of demands is necessary, but if every demand ends at the door of a benevolent state, people remain recipients. We need a school — yes. But parents, teachers and students must also have the power to ask whether teachers are present, where the budget went, whether children will be taught in the local language. We need forest rights too. But the gram sabha must decide what happens on the land, who may take what from the forest, whether an outside company could enter a particular forest. We need a healthcare centre — but local people should be able to monitor whether medicines are available and doctors turn up. Welfare has to be connected with self-government. We must simultaneously learn to take resources from the state and refuse to treat the state as the owner of every decision.

Third, we need organisers. Desperately. Not the all-knowing party cadre. They need not be professional revolutionaries. We need people who can speak but listen even better; who can settle quarrels, call meetings, maintain accounts, introduce two isolated people to one another, and step back when a new leadership emerges. None of this is glamorous. It does not make a good live video. One may remain unknown even after 10 years. In a long struggle against fascism, this boring work may be the most necessary.

Fourth, we need new independent social spaces — never completely outside the state, perhaps, and never completely outside the market, but as far as possible beyond their control. Study circles, unions, community kitchens, cooperatives, legal-aid groups, local news networks, health initiatives, women’s organisations, environmental committees: begin where the need is. They cannot remain separate ‘projects’; they have to connect. In Zapatista language, a world in which many worlds fit. In ours, many oppositional spaces.

Oppositional spaces: not outside the state, but not subordinate to it

Some call this interstitial politics, some ‘prefigurative’ politics, others politics of the commons. The label matters less than the practice: creating spaces in society in which different social relationships can be rehearsed. A cooperative may organise to earn profit differently; in a community kitchen food becomes something shared rather than a commodity; in local media, news does not descend from above but is written based on people’s experience; in a women’s collective, ‘private’ violence inside the family becomes a social question; in a forest committee, decisions made are not only about timber prices but also water, food, grazing and future generations. These small spaces will not make the state disappear tomorrow. They will, however, offer people the experience of relating to one another differently. Revolution ceases to be a remote future and becomes a series of political practices in the present.

In the end

Fascism loves a strong state. It loves a strong leader. It loves the idea of one country, one language, one religion, one history, one truth. Capital too loves concentration: large markets, large corporations, large databases, monopoly ownership. Against that, democracy cannot be left imprisoned in the pages of a constitution. Its place is in people’s lives: many opinions, many centres, many associations, many spaces of self-government. Social power not with state power, but against it.

This cannot be done in a day. It cannot be completed before the next election, perhaps not in our lifetime. The RSS can work for a hundred years. There’s no reason to be impatient in five years? The Cockroaches have shown one road today. Someone else will show another tomorrow. The streets have to be filled; protest is necessary; elections have to be fought. But the work that begins after the streets empty out may be even more important to complete.

We have to return to the neighbourhood. Return to the village. Return to factories, colleges, bustees, forests, tea gardens, markets. We have to help people connect and learn to decide for ourselves our own lives. Against the ruler’s knowledge and the ruler’s truth, we have to make opposition knowledge. It’s essential to build while breaking. Not waiting for some distant Great Revolution, nor for the auspicious day when the state will finally be captured.

Because in the end, the strongest barricade against fascism is not another strong state; it is a strong, oppositional society.

Photo: Kushal Kar