A Comment by Karunakaran

K. Venu, a social thinker and political critic, is a rigorous commentator   of his own understanding on the society we live with a meticulous interest in the development of science and its impacts on social thinking. As a research Student of Zoology who lived in the southern city of Kerala, Thiruvannthapuram, Venu got involved in the happenings of world’s turbulence in the 60’s and later found himself with an ultra-leftist group of Indian Communists, namely Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

He was the founder and editor of a “Maoist” magazine knowingly identifying with  the Naxalite upsurge in India, then. Almost immediately he left his research and took lively role in the party and as a result arrested and jailed for more than four years. Venu, known with his commitment to the political truthfulness and his brilliant analysis of social situations inspired a generation of poets, short story writers and dramatists from  Kerala which brought a new political and  aesthetical dimension  to the modernity the  society then experiencing.

Venu again jailed during the emergency, declared by then the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi,  after his involvement in the various revolutionary upheavals in the state.  During these two periods of his jail life Venu  wrote two books on the Indian situation and the possibility of revolution as well as on ideological issues.   The first one, “The perspective of Indian Revolution’, in fact addressed his comrades in arms but the second one, namely “The Philosophical Problems of Revolution”  was a radiant study of Marxism and its development including Maoism and Cultural Revolution and offered  a classical text to the subject. The book published in both Malayalam and English.

A prolific writer, Venu brought out his widely read first book , “Universe and Man” in his twenties .  The book had its many editions afterward, is  a popular classic in Science literature of Kerala.

Serving two decades of his unbending political and theoretical leadership with the Maoist Party he led, Venu later resigned his party post as its All India Secretary declaring  that a communist party can never be a democratic party and explaining the very   deficiency of the Marxist concept of a society and its   range of forms  of governance. He detailed his findings with his own experience in a book, “ The  Concept of Democracy  by a Communist”. 

Venu argues that  the various practices of Communist idea ended up in a kind of single party dictatorships   denying any room for the functioning of a broader civil society. . He says that this was mainly due to the class-reductionist stand maintained by Marx and his followers that democracy is only a form of class rule thereby covering up the reality that democracy emerged from the very beginning of human society as a social organizational form resolving the basic contradiction between individual and society. He further explains that communist dictatorships were historically retrograde developments when compared with parliamentary democracy despite its historical limitations.    Venu summarized his life experience in politics and social thought in a long conversation with writer, E. Karunakaran.  This also has been compiled in a widely read book, called, “The Human experiences of Democracy” In this  new book he advances the idea that Social Darwinist interpretation of market fundamentalist capitalism is not going to survive in the historical process. The dialectical interaction between individual being and societal being will remain the motive force behind the democratic advancement of human society.

Venu lives in Trissur and regularly writes in periodicals on various subjects related to politics and social thought.  He is also a member of “Fifth Estate” which is in search of ideas for a  democratic just society

His better known books are :
 പ്രപഞ്ചവും മനുഷ്യനും-1970 (Universe and Man)

 വിപ്ലവത്തിന്റെ ദാര്‍ശനിക പ്രശ്നങ്ങള്‍- 1979

  Philosophical Problems of Revolution-(English Edition)1982

  സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യത്തിന്റെ സാത്ഷാല്‍ക്കാരം-1984     

   ( Realisation of Freedom )            

    കേരള പഠനത്തിനൊരു മുഖവുര-1987
(An Introduction to Studies on Kerala)

 ഒരുകമ്മുണിസ്റ്റുകാരന്റെ ജനാധിപത്യ സങ്കല്‍പം -1992( A Democratic Perspective by a Communist)

ഒരു ജനാധിപത്യ വാദിയുടെ വീണ്ടു വിചാരങ്ങള്‍- 2003 ( Rethinking  by A Democrat) 

ഇന്ത്യന്‍ ജനാധിപത്യം പ്രശ്നങ്ങളും സാധ്യതകളും-2010 (Indian Democracy problems and Possibilities)

ജനാധിപത്യത്തിന്റെ മനുഷ്യാനുഭവങ്ങള്‍ -2010 (Human Experiences of Democracy)