28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
state power, and "philistine" professors, publicists and politicians belonging to this class strut about in illusory grandeur. Ordinarily, such antics are quite funny—though piteous—but, when society has temporarily been stunned into stupor by the crisis of non-growth, this shadow play becomes dangerous because it provides the real ruling class or classes the plebeian social base to perpetuate the existing regime for a little more time. To .put it bluntly, it leads to fascism at the worst and confusion at the best.
In India today, in keeping with their historical role, representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie are making ludicrous and pathetic attempts to sow confusion about the real character of state power. Were it not for the fact that they are doing so in a period when the forces of change, for reasons not to be discussed here, have been thrown on the defensive, these attempts would have merely provided a comic interlude in our already farcical political goings-on. However, these attempts, coming as they do now, may prove to be rather dangerous and therefore merit serious notice.
It is difficult to keep track of the numbers and kinds of petty-bourgeois 'intellectuals5 indulging in this game. For our purposes here we shall take two representative examples: a professor, K N Raj2 and a politician, Mohit Sen8. In passing, we shall also examine the thesis of a publicist, Hamza Alavi4 whose stand though slightly different from that of the other two, is just as likely to cause confusion.
Profile of Intermediate Regime
It is a well-known fact that commemoration addresses are seldom heard. 'However, to pass off a book review as one such address is nevertheless quite a sleight-of-hand performed on an unsuspecting audience. In the case of the Kale Memorial Lecture at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona, the legerdemain becomes rather apparent because not only did K N Raj pass off an appreciative review of Michael Kalecki's paper on "Intermediate Regimes^5 as the address, but without ever actually saying it in so many words, he led the audience to come to the conclusion that he adopts Kalecki's categorization of regimes in countries such as India as being 'intermediate' and proceeded to discuss the feasibility of such regimes in the politico-economic sphere of their activities.
Without going into the merits of the method of presentation, a few serious questions emerging from this exercise must be examined:
1 What are 'intermediate regimes' ?
2 Can or do they function in countries like India?
3 What has led Raj to resurrect at this particular juncture the concept advanced nearly ten years ago by Kalecki in an obviously journalistic attempt at political theorization?
According to the Kalecki-Raj categorization, intermediate regimes' are governments in which the lower middle class and the rich peasantry can be identified as performing the role of the ruling class.