66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST emancipatory vision and partisanship in politics—intact, our entire conceptual paraphernalia, our political theory too, undergoes a change, along with the change of philosophical positions. Sure enough this philosophical journey does not leave our political practice untouched. So, for instance, the abandoning of essentialism philosophically, the acknowledgement of the contingent nature of all 'truth', is bound to lead us to more complex ways of understanding the mechanisms of political representation, of why there can be no single party of the working class which has been bestowed with a historical mission according to some grand telos of History. This cannot but lead us to reconsider our attitude to questions of agency, leading to different ways of relating to movements autonomous of the party/parties on the Left, to struggles of sections other than the working class, peasantry etc. The whole idea of socialism then has to be put on a different footing—a different theoretical ground. This being so, I do not find it possible to understand statements like "socialism is not communism" or that, "socialism is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." (p. 79) It is as if it were "all there", immanent in the logic of History and we were merely discussing whether each of us has adequately grasped that logic. If this be the case, it is necessary to ask ourselves what precisely marxism is? Is it the name of that particular politics that remains preserved through these theoretical sojourns? Is it the theory canonized by the Second and the Third Internationals, of the historical inevitability of communism? Is it a set of propositions that need to be defended at all costs, irrespective of what philosophical position we defend it from (Analytical philosophy, Critical theory, post-structuralism etc.)? Is it the belief that the economy is the final arbiter of human affairs? What happens if we take Marx seriously and insist that ideas are historically embedded, and that no theory, including the propositions that we identify marxism with, can have transhistorical validity? Unless we are able to specify these and define what marxism is, we cannot really say, like Aunindyo does, that with my position, I am "committed to a break with marxism". It is a different matter that the possibility does not terrify us any more. One could possibly take a leaf from Marx's book and say that maybe the best way of being loyal to his spirit is to go beyond him as he did not hesitate to go beyond Hegel. I believe that time has come to modestly accept that there need not necessarily be a single marxist position. Precisely for that reason I wish to describe marxism as a politics and as a social imaginary— a tradition in the widest sense of the term. I wish to describe it as a political practice rather than as a set of propositions, a body of theories, a methodology in the strict sense. The politics that I describe as marxism does not begin and end with the text of Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, Gramsci or Mao. It is practised daily in the bastions of