ABSTRACT
India has been one of the great outposts of parliamentary communism. Since independence, parties of the Marxist Left have been a significant parliamentary force and currently govern three states. Communists claimed to be committed to the transformation of capitalist society and the construction of a social order qualitatively distinct from capitalism. The decline of socialism's claims to superior economic management and the rise of neo-liberalism led many on the Left in the developed world to return to a pre-Marxist critique of capitalist injustice, often intermingled with a post-materialist critique of material affluence. The failure of Marxist governments to catch up and surpass developed capitalism forced governing Marxist parties to alter their political practice. Pragmatic political considerations led the Bolsheviks to support the spontaneous land reform of 1917, but in government Russian Marxists from the 1930s on returned to an emphasis on industrialisation and neglect of peasant interests.
