'New Socialist Initiative', a political-ideological platform, was launched here to forge a new language for the entire Left at a time when questions are being posed about the relevance of the movement.
The inaugural session of the new platform NSI yesterday saw Left thinkers discussing the way ahead for the Left movement in the country.
"Past revolutions do not teach you much about how to make a revolution against capitalism and against bourgeois democratic regimes, which is precisely on the agenda now," said Ravi Sinha, a Marxist political theorist.
He said for the first time in history, revolutions against capitalism are on agenda in societies with "capitalist systems and bourgeoisie democracies".
Marxist historian Jairas Banaji said the role of the Left is in fact in educating the working population of capitalist processes of labour, in analysing everyday life and not to itself form a vanguard party.
"This party must emerge from within working peoples and the role of the Left is limited to encouraging the emergence of this party," he said, emphasising the need to build strategies for a Left that today confronts a Fascist state.
The thinkers, including Banaji and Subhash Gatade, wanted the Left to cultivate an ability to listen and learn, "an ability few Left parties have any longer".
The refrain at the launch was that revolutionary Left has to prepare for this altogether new condition and forge a suitable strategy and a new language that cannot be built on the model of 20th century socialism.
This was because the past revolutions could "never be repeated or imitated" within the previous era of feudalism and colonialism and they can be even less "in the new times and against a changed enemy".
