https://theleaflet.in/what-a-genuine-leftist-response-to-the-hindutva-challenge-should-look-like/ A review of 'Nationalist Dangers, Secular Failings: A Compass for an Indian Left’ by Achin Vanaik, Aakar Books (2021) pp. 205
Unlike the chicanery of former United States president, politician and academic Woodrow Wilson and imperialist–liberals of the early twentieth century, Lenin’s vision of revolutionary, anti-colonial nationalism was based on the following premises: the need to distinguish between the interests of oppressed classes and the notion of ‘national interest’; the need to distinguish between oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations; the need for Communist parties to aid revolutionary movements among dependent and ‘underprivileged nations’ such as, for instance, the American blacks and the colonies; the need to subordinate the interest of the proletarian struggle in a country to the interests of the proletarian struggle internationally; the need for the proletarian movement to retain its independent organisation whilst fighting with the bourgeoisie the battle of anti-imperialism; last but not the least, Lenin strongly emphasised and warned about the lurking danger of “big nation chauvinism”.
Vanaik also ruminates on the relevance of capitalism and nationalism today. He argues that the “trans-nationalisation of social relations and the consolidation and juridical sharpening of territorialised sovereignty went together.”
On the question of organisation of the vanguard, which in the Leninist tradition is called ‘democratic centralism’, Vanaik argues that it is not about the vertical centralisation of power. It is, following Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist Ernest Mandel, “a centralisation of experience, centralisation of knowledge and centralisation of conclusions drawn out of actual militancy”. And these are the most crucial elements “to generate the necessary wider consciousness to challenge the most formidable vanguard formation of the bourgeoisie— the bourgeois state.”