Manabendra Nath Roy’s political thought highlighted the humanistic aspects of Marxism. Discuss. (2024, 15 Marks)
Manabendra Nath Roy (M. N. Roy), a Comintern leader of the 1920s, came to believe that orthodox communism had buried the emancipatory core of Karl Marx under determinism and party dogma. His Radical (New) Humanism, codified in the Twenty-two Theses of 1946, began as an attempt to rescue that core, and dissatisfaction with every available creed drove it.
What Roy Kept as Marxism’s Humanist Core
- Materialism as liberation. A world explained without gods or metaphysics is a world human beings can change. Roy kept this, recast as physical realism resting on science.
- The critique of exploitation. He never withdrew the charge against capitalism and empire, and added that a bureaucratic state can extract surplus too.
- Emancipation as the goal. Marx promised a realm of freedom; Roy made freedom the explicit end of politics.
Where He Corrected Marx
- Determinism. If production relations fix consciousness, people become effects and moral choice disappears. Roy held that ideas, once formed, act as causes: the human brain is the decisive productive force, because it produces thought.
- Class. Casting people as class members dissolves the person into a collective. The individual, not the proletariat, is history’s agent.
- Party. Soviet practice had subordinated living persons to a vanguard’s claim to know their interest.
- Neither model. Parliamentary democracy gave citizens a vote but no continuing share in power; communism gave them neither.
The Humanist Reconstruction
Roy rebuilt politics on three supports: freedom, reason and morality.
- Man as measure. Roy revived Protagoras: institutions are judged by what they do to individuals, and a society’s progress by the freedom it secures them.
- Reason as nature. Humans belong to a law-governed nature, and their rationality reflects its order. Secular, scientific thinking should replace dogma and the fear that superstition breeds.
- Ethics from reason. Moral conduct flows from rational self-understanding, not scripture or class.
- Crisis and remedy. Modern civilisation’s crisis was a loss of confidence in human rationality. The cure was a philosophical revolution before any political one.
Humanised or Abandoned?
- Humanising reading. Roy’s stress on the person echoes the young Marx’s concern with alienation, and the Frankfurt School travelled a similar path against economism.
- Abandonment reading. Without historical materialism, class agency and the party, little specifically Marxist survives. What remains resembles Enlightenment liberalism; Soviet-aligned critics dismissed it as revisionism.
- Silences. Roy treated caste as superstition, whereas B. R. Ambedkar analysed it as structure.
The humanist impulse has partly reached Indian Marxism in practice. Kerala’s CPI(M)-led People’s Plan Campaign (1996) devolved 35–40 per cent of development spending to local bodies and made ward-level grama sabhas the forums for setting priorities. It was participatory control of the kind Roy demanded, though still within party politics.
Conclusion
Roy highlighted Marxism’s humanist promise by turning it against Marxist orthodoxy. Placing the individual, not the class, at the centre earned his theory the name New Humanism. It is more accurately a post-Marxist humanism than a revised Marxism.