When Michael Borodin baptized Roy into Marxism in 1919, Roy came from Indian nationalism to the new faith with the zeal commonly found amongst fresh converts. ‘Marxism is a wonderful philosophy, is it not?’ he exclaimed to a fellow comrade in 1923. ‘It has made of history such an exact science. Roy’s first major work, India in Transition (1922), attempted to apply this ‘exact science’ in orthodox Marxist fashion to an analysis of British imperialism and Indian nationalism. For Roy, it was evident that ‘It is only the philosophy of Historic Materialism and the programme of Marxism, Socialism, that can show the way out’. When an Indian comrade expressed mild qualms over ‘Bolshevism’, Roy snapped back, ‘Let me be brutally frank and tell you openly that the salvation of India lies through Bolshevism.’ Nowhere in Roy’s early Marxist polemics does one find a hint of his later heresies.
The Communist doctrines which he eventually repudiates are here vigorously employed in his analysis of Indian politics. In a tract of 1926, for example, Roy applies the Marxist theories of class struggle, dialectical materialism, economic determinism, and the proletarian revolution to establish the inevitability of a Communist conquest of India. The need of the masses is for revolutionary leadership and ‘The Communist Party of India is called upon by history to play this role’. This theoretical orthodoxy was matched in practice by a position of high status in the Communist International (Comintern), where Roy attained the height of his influence in 1926. Whether his subsequent decline and expulsion from the Comintern are attributed to Roy’s own tactical blunders or Stalin’s need for a scapegoat, it was certainly not as a result of any theoretical departure from Marxism. At least until 1931 when he entered his ‘quiet country-town jail’ in Cawnpore, Roy remained an orthodox Marxist….
The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of Communism (1931) // The Paradox of the Lie (1939)
After the truth-shower 