44 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
consistent organisation. Secondly, each of the rival forces has used the Muslim League against the other. It should however be noted that the Congress was the initiator of the policy of alliance with caste/communal parties and it has been longer in the alliance than the Communist Party. The bourgeois leaders of the caste/communal groupings are at home with the Congress and hostile to Communists.
In other words, alliances and conflicts with the Muslim League or other caste/cornmunal parties and organisations are part of the struggle between two political forces, which represent the bourgeoisie and the working class respectively. Those who try to argue that involved here is a struggle between "nationalism" and "communalism" and that both Congress and Communist Party are equally responsible for having made compromises with "communalism59 are therefore being blind to the real issue—the political struggle of two classes for hegemony. They cover up the fact that, representing the same classes, the Congress and caste-communal leaders have the same antipathy to the Communists and that they have been longer in alliance among themselves against the Communists than the short term cooperation between some of them and the Communists.
The concrete situation today is that the ruling coalition in Kerala is a collection of parties and groups which are united in the politics of hostility to the parties and forces of the working class and other toilers. Dividing the, people as they do on caste and communal lines, their continuance in the leadership of the state would mean more and more vicious attacks on the working people, more and more strifes and conflicts among the castes and religious communities. Opposed to it is the combination of radical democratic forces who defend the real interests of the wolking people and fight for the unity of all castes and communities. The future of the state depends on the advance of the the latter and the defeat of the former.
1 Quoted in E M S Nomboodiripad, Kerala Society and Politics, An Historial Survey, New Delhi, pp 86-87.
2 Karl Marx, On Colonialism, Moscow.
ERRATA
Professor Krishna Bharadwaj's piece on "The Resurgence of Political Economy", published in the July issue of Social Scientist (No. 134) was originally written for an ICSSR seminar on "Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes", held in New Delhi in January 1984. By an oversight on our part, this fact, which is important for appreciating the particular context in which the paper was written, was not mentioned in our publication of it. We regret the omission.
EDITOR