What oath do IAS, IPS, IRS officials take when you join the Indian Government?

Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint 

Shekar Gupta in The Print

By the time you are reading this, Aryan Khan would be walking out of jail, if 25 days too late. Everything we know about the case as yet tells us there was nothing to justify his arrest, incarceration and being charged under such a draconian law in any case. His ordeal, however, has given us another ‘star’ of sorts, Sameer Dawood/Dnyandev Wankhede.

What kind of star — good or bad, a wronged hero or a villain who finally got caught out — you can decide. He’s a polarising figure. For some, he’s a reservation fraud who allegedly claimed a place in the quota reserved for Scheduled Castes, hiding the fact that he’s a Muslim. No problem with that, except that caste-based reservation wouldn’t be available to him. For others, he’s a Muslim and a Dalit who’s being victimised by entitled elites only because he dared to go after them.

For some, he’s a bully and probable “blackmailer” who targeted the rich and famous, especially in Bollywood, for fame, and allegedly, ransom. For others, he’s finally the one brave narc who decided to do his job , no matter how powerful his quarry.

We cannot take any side on this, and we aren’t. Because we do not have the facts. Our instinct comes from subjectivity, because that’s how we’d see the facts arrayed before us. We shall get off the kerb on this, and focus on something else. Less tangible, and not polarising. It is called propriety in government service. Especially as applied to the All India and Class I Services.

Let me ask you a trick question. How many IAS officers can you name in the country right now? Not members of your family or pals, but from the headlines, especially the recent ones? Or IPS officers? And finally, that one service we see so little of in our normal lives directly, the Indian Revenue Service, the so-called ‘taxman’ or woman.

So, is there a prominent IRS officer you can name off the bat? I bet it would be Sameer Wankhede. He’s not only the most famous IRS officer in the country today, but in a very long time. It is serendipitous that the two most headlined names from the All India Services at this point, IAS and IPS, have also not necessarily been there for good reasons.

Former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai gave a grovelling apology to Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam for making false allegations over the 2G case, where he conjured up that notional loss figure of Rs 1.76 lakh crore in 2007.

It was an obvious exaggeration. But such was the mood at that point you couldn’t argue with him without risking being labelled ‘pro-corruption’. Now that story has unravelled. As indeed, unfortunately, India’s telecom sector. The same thing happened soon enough with coal.

The IPS now. The same Mumbai which produced Wankhede, the zonal narcotics chief who now, in his own defence, is citing the testimony of the young man he charged with a crime with a possible 10-year sentence (‘see, even Aryan says he’s made no charge of extortion against me’), has also given us a police commissioner who’s absconding. All of Maharashtra Police cannot find one of its most senior officers, and non-bailable warrants are being posted everywhere. 

If IPS, IRS and IAS are the trinity of our vaunted civil services and Param Bir Singh, Sameer Wankhede and Vinod Rai are their representatives in today’s most prominent — and bad — headlines, what does it tell us?

We have chosen that order deliberately. The IPS guy on top because he’s an absconder, ducking multiple criminal charges; the IRS man next because he’s in court seeking protection from arrest and yet to answer a hundred questions on his conduct; and the IAS last, for once, because at least one thing we know about Vinod Rai from reputation and track record is that he is, financially, spotless. Just that it has not achieved the best results for India.

These three stars of today speak poorly for our civil services in their own different ways. It is to fight for these services that lakhs of our brightest young people slog for years at coaching academies, often making their parents sell their land and buffaloes, in that one hope: My kid will crack UPSC. Then, they walk into their respective academies with pride in their hearts, stars in their eyes and mostly — I speak from experience of having spoken at these academies and interacted with young recruits — a great deal of idealism.

No, I am not about to lapse into convenient mass condemnation. Mine has never been the ‘sab chor hain’ view. It is absolutely to the contrary, which I dared to say even during those bizarre Anna Hazare months. The point here is, for every Param Bir Singh, there are thousands of others in his service doing their jobs honestly, sincerely, and at very modest government salaries. As there must be in the IAS or the IRS. It is just that we do not know about them. It is just that people who are becoming famous have done so for all the wrong reasons.

Trick questions again: Name the last six incumbents in the office of the Cabinet Secretary, Director, Intelligence Bureau, and Chairperson of the Central Board of Direct Taxes? If you can name six of each, that is 18 who sat at the apex respectively of these three services, I’d say you are brilliant. But you know the three names in the headlines today, sadly. Or some of you might recall the name of the young IAS officer who was asking his police to ‘smash the farmers’ heads’ in Haryana, or one in Chhattisgarh bashing up a passerby on camera for ‘defying the lockdown’ and other such. Good guys go unnoticed, unsung. Tragic, because they are straight, professional, and play by the book.

Now, what is that book? Bollywood deserves our eternal gratitude because it can always make a telling point for us. People dug out this clip from that otherwise noisy nothing of a movie Tiranga (made in 1993 by Mehul Kumar), where Raj Kumar, in his characteristic, much-mimicked drawl, pulls out two papers from his pocket to confront the corrupt traitor of a police officer. These are for you, he says. One is the order of my release from jail, and the other for your arrest. The clip is being shared with the caption ‘Aryan Khan to Wankhede’.

Go to the movie on YouTube and listen to the context of that clip. What oath do you take when you join this service, don this uniform, he asks, and then reads out the oath every Indian joining all-India services mandatorily takes while joining their service: ‘I do swear/solemnly affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to…the Constitution of India…that I will carry out the duties of my office loyally, honestly and with impartiality’.

We shall leave it to the conscience of these latest ‘superstars’ of the civil services to ask themselves if they’ve been true to this oath. It’s also a question many others in these services need to ask themselves, as they lock up students for sedition and UAPA only because of the cricket team they support, civil, servant, fame, or for sharing the Greta Thunberg toolkit, or trumping up charges against anybody they think the political bosses want ‘fixed.’ In 2021, they aren’t better than the notorious Soviet hatchet man of seven decades ago, Lavrentiy Beria, who offered to arrest somebody Stalin was irritated with. But under which charge, Stalin apparently asked him. You give me the man, Beria said, and I will give you the charge.

Late S.S. Khera was one of those immortal doyens of the old ICS, and so self-effacing that Google also throws up so little on him. He was India’s first Sikh Cabinet Secretary (1962-64), made his fame using tanks to stop the Partition riots in Meerut in 1947, and totally frowned at civil servants seeking fame. One mention in the newspapers, he said, is one black mark. Two, a bad ACR. And a photo should invite the sack. Now we know the times have changed in six decades. But we also see what this madness for fame and stardom has done to some people from great services. Even as most others work sincerely, in relative anonymity.

Ideology and the pandemic

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

THE niece was in school in the US when she saw Nadia Comaneci live on TV in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In India, one could only dream of such pleasures although the kindly radio ensured we wouldn’t miss the cricket action at Old Trafford, Karachi or Kanpur thanks to John Arlott, Omar Qureishi and Bobby Talyarkhan weaving magic with the running commentary.

Coming back to Delhi the following year, the niece was greeted with fanfare reserved for people returning from a pilgrimage. She had seen the wondrous Nadia perform her fabled Perfect 10s on the beam and uneven bars. But, uncle, the schoolgirl moved quickly to alert me to a flaw in my eagerness. “Nadia is a communist.” And so? Didn’t we like the Romanian girl’s captivating smile? “Yes, but, you know, communists are trained how to smile.” Probing her reading list in school in America, out came the resolution to the puzzle. George Orwell’s Animal Farm had taken its toll.

The anti-communist primer had come up also for exams at our school in Lucknow, but somehow for most students it was water off a duck’s back. Indeed, the common man’s grip of political reality has remained at variance with, say, Ayub Khan’s, as the dictator turned his hatred of partisans into a bloody mess, or Nehru, who would abandon his fabled democratic instinct to dismiss the world’s first popularly elected Marxist government in Kerala over a disputed school curriculum.

When the Cold War was over, there was a sense of anticipation that the ‘free world’ would tone down the admixture of cretinism and propaganda, which it spewed for decades to describe a communist’s horns and canines. One thought the shrill imagery would give way to a sensible critique of many things that had gone wrong with communist systems.’

Within no time at all, however, the Cold War-era slogan for free democracies turned into an insidious prescription for ‘free-market democracies’. That should have been figured out as early as 1955 when popularly elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in Iran by an American-British intelligence-led coup over the prime minister’s nationalisation of the oil industry.

One of the triggers for Orwell’s outburst against communism was his disenchantment with Stalin, though the British writer never reneged on his own commitment to socialism, provided it remained democratic. Much of Orwell’s anger deepened with his experience of the Spanish Civil War where he saw partisans turning on each other, aligning against Stalinists or supporting them.

As the world continued to see in the fable of Animal Farm the turning of an egalitarian dream into a nightmare, particularly for those that led the allegorical revolution, not much was said or discussed of Orwell’s ‘Man’ who symbolised the animals’ class enemy. It was Man in the form of the drunken farm owner, one Mr Jones and his perpetually snoring wife, whose untold cruelties set off the upheaval.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing,” the Old Major confided to the secret barn house meeting. The ageing pig was the intellectual fountainhead of the rebellion. “[Man] does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilises it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin.”

Replace Man with Capitalism and it reads like a fine précis of the Communist Manifesto. This critique of capitalism in the very beginning of the book has been lobotomised from popular memory. The Covid-19 pandemic may have pushed it back centre stage again, nudging societies to rephrase their worldview. The millions we saw on the roads in the wake of the badly called lockdown in India were as much victims of a callous state as of a reality in which the rich are the privileged and the poor their grovelling minions.

That equation may have been jolted. The world’s four best friends are definitely in trouble. Benjamin Netanyahu has lost his popularity from 70 per cent approval ratings to around 15. The virus has ensnared Jair Bolsonaro in more ways than one. He has a rebellion brewing. Donald Trump is fighting everything and everyone except the virus. His lack of leadership, when it was most needed to save American lives, looks primed to cost him the election in November. Narendra Modi, according to The New York Times, has used the virus-related lockdown to arrest more critics, indicating he is on the back foot.

The Times mentions the case of Natasha Narwal, a student activist accused of rioting by the New Delhi police. When a judge ruled that she be freed for she was merely exercising her right to protest against a divisive citizenship law, the police slapped fresh charges of murder and terrorism, sending her back to jail.

Vijay Prashad’s Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has been studying the way in which governments in places like Laos, Cuba, Venezuela and Vietnam — and one Indian state, Kerala — have tackled the coronavirus.

Both Laos and Vietnam border China, where the virus was first detected in late December 2019, and both have thriving trade and tourist relations with China. India is separated from China by the high Himalayas, while Brazil and the US have two oceans between themselves and Asia; nonetheless, it is the US, Brazil, and India that have shocking numbers of infections and fatalities. Asks Prashad: “What accounts for the ability of relatively poor countries like Laos and Vietnam to attempt to break the chain of this infection, while richer states — notably the United States of America — have floundered?” Orwell should have been around to figure that out.

The West likes to think that 'civilisation' will defeat Isis, but history suggests otherwise

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Hitler set a bad example. He was evil. His regime was evil. His Reich was destroyed, the Nazis vanquished, the Fuhrer dying by his own hand in the ashes of the European nightmare. Bad guys lose. Good guys win. Morality, human rights, law, democracy – though with the latter, we should perhaps speak carefully – will always prevail over wickedness. That’s what the Second World War taught us.


We have grown up in a Western society that believes in such simple, dodgy, history lessons. The world’s major religions teach us about goodness, humility, family, love, faith. So why should we not – however liberal, agnostic, cynical – cling on to our fundamental belief that violence and torture and cruelty will never outlast the power and courage of the righteous?


Isis is evil. It massacres its opponents, slaughters civilians, beheads the innocent, rapes children and enslaves women. It is “apocalyptic”, according to the Americans, and therefore it is doomed. Better still, Ash Carter – the US Secretary of Defence who accused the Iraqis of running away from Isis – lectured the Iraqi Prime Minister last week. His message – I could hardly believe this naivety – was Hollywood-clear. “Civilisation always wins over barbarism.”

But does it? We only have to go back to the lie about the Second World War in my first sentence. Sure, Hitler lost. But our ally Stalin won. The 1917 Russian Revolution gave rise to one of the Gorgons of our age: Soviet dictatorship, the mass starvation leading the to death of millions, barbarism – on an Ash Carter scale – and evil incarnate ruled in Russia and Eastern Europe for more than 70 years, 40 of them after the Second World War.

The Romans kept “barbarism” at bay for almost a thousand years, but in the end the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths – the Isis of their time – won. Unless you were opposed to Rome, in which case Roman barbarism – crucifixion, slavery, torture, massacre (the whole Isis gamut minus the videotapes) – was victorious for almost a thousand years.

Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, destroyed almost everything between Persia and the Mediterranean. Ghengis Khan, an inevitable actor in this sordid drama, kept going until his death in 1227 – 30 years longer than Isis has so far ruled. His grandson Hulagu was invoked by General Angus Maude when he “liberated” Baghdad in 1917 and brought “civilisation” to Mesopotamia. Ash Carter should read Maude’s proclamation to the people of Baghdad: “Since the days of Hulagu, your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunken in desolation and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage.” Pretty much like Isis, in other words. But, by Maude’s count, this “tyranny” lasted for around 700 years.

Now let’s go forward to the years immediately after we brought “civilisation” – again – to Baghdad, by illegally invading Iraq in 2003. Between daily trips to the city mortuary and visits to tents of mourning, angry families would tell us that the “freedom” we brought had given them anarchy. They hated the dictator Saddam who slaughtered his opponents – and who imposed 24 years of “barbarism” on his people – but at least he gave them security. If you have children, these people would tell us, you want them to come home from school. You do not want them to be murdered. So which do we prefer, they asked us? Freedom or security? Democracy or Saddam?

Fearful of the Shia-dominated Iraqi government, whose militias slaughtered them, and the corrupt Arab dictatorships, who suppressed them, many hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims appear to have found security under Isis. Not the Shias, nor the Christians, nor the Yazidis. There is no “freedom”, as we would call it. But Sunni Iraqi men in Beirut, for example, regularly travel to and from the Isis Syrian capital Raqqa and report that – provided they don’t smoke or drink alcohol, their women are covered, and they do not oppose Isis – they are left alone: to do business, to visit families, to travel in safety. (Much the same applied under the Taliban in Afghanistan.)

ID cards are issued in Isis-land, the river police have newly-painted boats, taxes are raised, and yes, punishment is barbarous. But that does not mean the “Islamic Caliphate” is going to be conquered by “civilisation”.

And how can we believe that it will, when our own public-relations boss raves on about “British values” – and at the same time worships the venal, hypocritical, immensely wealthy and dangerous men who have helped to inspire Isis. I refer, of course, to those Saudis whose crazed Sunni Wahhabist cult has encouraged Isis, whose grotesque puritanism has led them to adopt a head-chopping extremism, which lies at the heart of Isis’s own “barbarism”. Sure, the Saudi state arrests Isis cells. But these same Saudis are now killing thousands of Shia Houthis in Yemen in a bombing campaign supported by our Western nations. And what does David Cameron do when the desiccated old king of this weird state dies? Money talks louder than “civilisation”. So he orders that British flags should be flown at half-mast. Now that’s what I call British values!

Poor old Dave. He loathes Isis but adores one of its elderly “facilitators”. Yet fear not. “Civilisation” may yet win over “barbarism”. My own suspicion is that Ash, Dave and the rest will try to buy up Isis, split them into factions and choose the “moderates” among them. Then we’ll have a new, liberal Isis – people we can do business with, the sort of chaps we can get along with, sins forgotten – and we can then establish relations with them as cosy as those the Americans maintained with Hitler’s murderous rocket scientists after “civilisation” conquered “barbarism” in the Second World War.

So much for “civilisation”.

What the Maoist slavery sect tells us about the far-left

Far-left 'splittist' sects like Comrade Bala's proliferated in the 70s – and a genuine desire for change was corrupted

• 
• • Tariq Ali
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 26 November 2013 21.00 GMT

Journalists outside Peckford Place in Brixton, one of the properties linked to Aravindan and Chanda Balakrishnan, arrested on suspicion of holding three woman captive at addresses in south London. Photograph: Guy Corbishley/ Guy Corbishley/Demotix/Corbis

The recent Monty Python revival has come with a bizarre reminder from south London that once, long ago, there were a few tiny Maoist groups in Britain who used language that could have been cribbed from Life of Brian.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, and his 67-year-old wife, Chanda – arrested last week on suspicion of holding three women as slaves in a flat for 30 years – were leaders of a tiny sect of 25 members known as the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, invisible to the left at large. This sect had split from its father organisation, the Communist party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which itself had less than a hundred followers. The Maoists' antics were rivalled by a number of Trotskyist sects, smaller and larger, whose implosion often involved the mistreatment of women, and the story is by no means over.

The Balakrishnans' Brixton commune, it is now alleged, kept three women as virtual prisoners against their will. But it prospered. Membership declined, but property increased. The Balakrishnans pre-empted China's turn to capitalism – according to some reports they had interests in 13 properties, three more than their total membership at the time.

What was the attraction of Maoism? The figure of Mao and the revolution loomed large, but the outpourings from these groups did not suggest a close reading of On Contradiction or other texts by Mao that might have stimulated the brain cells. Instead they became fantasy outfits, each with its own homegrown Mao playing on the genuine desire for change that dominated the 1967-77 decade.

As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. This was not the case in other parts of Europe. At its peak, German Maoism had more than 10,000 members, and the combined circulation of its press was 100,000. After the great disillusionment – as the Chinese-US alliance of the mid-70s was termed – many of them privatised, and thousands joined the Greens, Jürgen Trittin becoming a staunch pro-Nato member of Gerhard Schröder's cabinet. In France, the Gauche Prolétarienne organised workers in car factories, and set up Libération, its own paper that morphed into a liberal daily. Ex-Maoist intellectuals occupy significant space in French culture, though they are now neocons: Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, Jean-Claude Milner are a few names that come to mind. The leading leftwing philosopher Alain Badiou never hides his Maoist past.

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the 70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture. The daily paper Klassekampen still exists, now as an independent daily with a very fine crop of gifted journalists (mainly women) and a growing circulation. October is a leading fiction publishing house and May was a successful record company. Per Petterson, one of the country's most popular novelists, describes in a recent book how, when Mao died, 100,000 people in a population of five million marched with torches to a surprised Chinese embassy to offer collective condolences. All this is a far cry from the cult sect now being excavated in Brixton.

What always struck me even then as slightly odd was that, regardless of the political complexion of a sect, the behavioural patterns of its leaders were not so different. Even those most critical of Stalinist style and methods tended to reproduce the model of a one-party state within their own ranks, with dissent limited to certain periods and an embryonic bureaucracy in charge of a tiny organisation. It was in western Europe, not under Latin American or Asian military dictatorships, that clandestinity and iron discipline were felt to be necessary.

Young women and men who joined the far-left groups did so for the best of reasons. They wanted to change the world. Many fought against the stifling atmosphere in many groups. Women organised caucuses to monitor male chauvinism inside the groups and challenged patriarchal practices. Pity that not all the lessons were learned. Easy now to forget that many who fought within and led the women's and gay liberation movements – in Europe and elsewhere – had received their political education inside the ranks of the combined far left, warts and all.

I can still recall a South American feminist calmly informing a large gathering of revolutionaries in the 70s that advances were being made against machismo. "Only last year," she declared, "my husband, who is sitting on the platform, locked me in the house on 8 March so I couldn't join the International Women's Day demonstration." The husband hid his face in shame.

Now the 70s really does seem another country. The thunder of money has drowned much that was and is of value. The campaign to demonise trade unions – indeed, any form of non-mainstream political activism or dissent – continues apace, despite the fact that the left has never been weaker. A sign, perhaps, that the votaries of the free market remain fearful of any challenges from below.

To call Labour 'Stalinists' for proposing regulation is beyond absurd

Mark Steel in The Independent

Some people might react to the energy companies raising prices another 8 per cent by saying, “It shouldn’t be allowed.” If you’re one of those people, you should be aware that you’re like Stalin. Because after Ed Miliband’s speech in which he said he would freeze energy prices for a while, he was attacked for being like Stalin by several Conservative politicians and newspapers. So if your neighbour says today, “Ooh those blooming gas people, we shouldn’t let them to put their ruddy prices up again”, tell her, “You murdering bastard. I know your sort, first you starved millions of peasants to death, then you signed a pact with Hitler. Well I’m not afraid to stand up to you, even if you are likely to incarcerate me in a Siberian prison, Mrs Whittaker.”

This is the history that will soon be accepted, that communism collapsed when millions of people demanded that electricity prices were doubled. Heroic citizens stood on the crumbling Berlin Wall and proclaimed, “At last we are free to vote and listen to rock music and charge thousands of pounds for turning the radiators on.”

This is a common response now to any proposal that big business is suspicious of. The suggestion that landowners may be required to use some of their land for housebuilding, to “expand towns such as Stevenage”, was compared by the Institute of Directors to “Joseph Stalin’s notorious seizure of land from prosperous Russians.” For those not familiar with the methods of Stalin, he sent his army to shoot any farmers who didn’t hand over all their land to the state. So if you own a garden in Stevenage you’re in trouble.

Tanks will roll past Luton and on to Welwyn Garden City, rampaging soldiers ignoring the cries of children as they transfer the waste ground behind Stevenage Asda to Hertfordshire County Council, cruelly laughing as they build two-bedroom affordable flats while the people of Bletchley can only wonder if they’ll be next.

Even more worrying, opinion polls show that 75 per cent of people support renationalising the railways, which even Labour aren’t proposing, so three-quarters of the population is WORSE than Stalin. This means that if Stalin was alive in Britain now, his speeches would start, “You lot want too much nationalisation, that’s your trouble.”

So we should write letters to First Great Western Trains such as, “Not only does this country have the most expensive rail network in Europe, but last week my train to Cardiff was delayed by two hours and I had to stand all the way. Congratulations, this proves we’re free. Please please don’t ever give in to those interfering Stalinists who’d take away your right to rob us blind and leave us with deep vein thrombosis.”

Similarly, Scottish Southern Energy’s managing director Will Morris explained his company’s latest 8 per cent price rise by saying, “Our aim is to keep prices low.” But that would clearly be immoral and Stalinist so be thankful he’s prepared to make a stand for freedom and put them up. Along with our payments we should send a tip, and a note saying, “Thank you Mr Morris sir, if I may address you sir, for putting up the prices an’ all, for us simple folk don’t want the burden of what to do wiv spare money and only go and waste it on crack like what happens wiv communism.”

Even when the European Union issued a directive that bankers’ bonuses should be kept to just double their salary, David Cameron went berserk about “interference”. Any attempt to regulate the behaviour of big business in any way is seen as an outrageous intrusion, against the laws of nature and sinful.

The Bible will be rewritten soon, to read that “Jesus took the seven loaves and two fish, and gave them to the starving crowd of thousands who all ate and were satisfied. And the Chief Executive of the Galilee Haddock Corporation did smite Jesus for artificially increasing supply, thereby interfering with the price as determined by the free market. And Jesus learned to refrain from miracles for the Institute of Directors did say they were Stalinist.”

For 30 years the trend has been towards allowing the biggest companies and banks to do whatever they like, even after the system crashed. To be fair this does create a wonderfully free society, as long as you’re on the board of one of those companies or banks. Obviously the section of society that isn’t on the board of a multinational corporation or a bank hasn’t done so well, but there will always be some minority with something to complain about.

After the crash of 1929, Western governments took the view that the banks should be regulated a bit, and these rules remained until they were ripped up in the 1980s. But this time the banks, businesses and individuals that fuelled the crash have carried on exactly as before.

Now Labour has suggested a handful of modifications to this system, and they’re called Stalinists. So we should allow the companies to behave as they like, until sections of the population sit freezing, unable to travel, their 40-year-old sons and daughters huddled with them as Stevenage remains unexpanded, maybe keeping a diary of their existence in the icy conditions that goes, “We’re all very grateful. At least it’s not like it would be under Stalin.”

Is Marxism on the rise again?

Why Marxism is on the rise again

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end

• 
• • Stuart Jeffries
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 July 2012 20.00 BST

A public sector worker striking in east London last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuitable" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion?

Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

 Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going through now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation."

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Marxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but there is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it."

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a young man dream.

What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's analysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're all middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

"It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way."

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people."

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on "the newcommunism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

"The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson. "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by."

That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as Žižek, Badiou, Rancière and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system of exploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism".

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existing' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about."

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."