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Kerala: One of the few places where a communist can still dream
- Ice_cream_suit 5y ago"But in Kerala — far from the high-stakes maneuvers of the Cold War and nearly 2,000 miles from the Indian capital of New Delhi — history has taken the most unexpected of detours. Instead of ossifying into an autocratic force, Kerala’s communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power. Instead of being associated with repression or failure, the party of Marx is widely associated with huge investments in education that have produced a 95 percent literacy rate, the highest in India, and a health-care system where citizens earning only a few dollars a day still qualify for free heart surgery. This modern incarnation of communism also has produced one of the stranger paradoxes of the global economy: millions of healthy, educated workers setting off to the supercharged, capitalist economies of the Persian Gulf dreaming of riches and increasingly finding them."
- mc32 5y agoAlso: >” Unlike communists in China, Latin America or Eastern Europe, party leaders in Kerala never seized factories — the “means of production,” in the words of Marx — or banned private property. Instead, they competed in elections with the center-left Indian National Congress party, winning some years and losing others.” The key thing is they didn’t expropriate private property (seizing the means of production) which is one of the main things communists do. So they are more of a hybrid. They may have communist roots and ideology but it appears they are practical and not dogmatic, and, as attested, they are not afraid of making money and becoming rich.
- tsjq 5y agoThey're communist just on label. For all practical purposes they're just another Indian political party.