M.N. Roy’s Critique of Marxism

M.N. Roy is one of the few thinkers who began his political life as a committed Marxist and ended it as one of Marxism’s sharpest critics. Born Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, he travelled across continents, helped found communist parties in Mexico and India, and worked closely with the Communist International before breaking away entirely. His critique of Marxism was not the work of an outsider looking in. It came from someone who had lived inside the movement, tested its promises against reality, and concluded that the theory had failed both philosophically and practically. Out of this disillusionment, Roy developed an alternative philosophy he called Radical Humanism, placing individual freedom and moral values at the centre of political life. This post examines what Roy found wrong with Marxism and the vision he offered in its place.

From committed Marxist to disillusioned critic 🔗

To understand Roy’s critique, it helps to know where he started. He was a dedicated revolutionary who took Marxism seriously enough to build organisations around it. He helped establish the Communist Party of India in 1925 through the Tashkent group and was an active member of the Comintern. His relationship with the international communist movement, however, soured over ideological differences, and he was expelled in 1929. This expulsion marked the beginning of his shift away from orthodox Marxism.

The deeper turning point came during his years in prison after returning to India in 1930. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Roy’s real philosophical quest began during these prison years. When he emerged, he was no longer the orthodox communist he had once been. He had begun building a philosophy rooted in reason, ethics, and freedom rather than dogma.

What the Soviet Union revealed 🔗

A major source of Roy’s disillusionment was what he observed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He had initially supported the Bolshevik Revolution with genuine hope. Over time, he came to believe that communism in the Soviet Union had degenerated into something it was never meant to be. The revolutionary energy that was supposed to unite workers across national borders was instead redirected toward narrow Soviet national interests. This troubled Roy deeply, because Marxism had always emphasised the unity of the working class across boundaries.

Roy was equally critical of the authoritarian character of the regime. He saw centralised control and the suppression of dissent as a betrayal of the very ideals of freedom that the revolution claimed to serve. Instead of empowering the proletariat, power became concentrated in the hands of a small elite. What Marx had called the dictatorship of the proletariat had, in practice, become the dictatorship of the party.

The philosophical flaws Roy identified 🔗

Roy’s critique went well beyond what he saw in the Soviet Union. He challenged the theoretical foundations of Marxism itself, targeting several of its core concepts. The research literature records that he was critical of the Marxian concepts of economic determinism, dictatorship of the proletariat, dialectical materialism, and surplus value. Each of these objections is worth unpacking.

The problem with economic determinism 🔗

One of Roy’s most fundamental objections was to Marxism’s economic interpretation of history. Marxism holds that economic factors are the primary drivers of historical change, with class struggle being the engine of social transformation. Roy found this view too narrow and too rigid. He argued that it ignored the powerful role that ideas play in shaping history. For Roy, the intelligence of human beings and their cumulative actions were themselves significant social forces, not mere by-products of economic conditions.

He pushed this argument further by questioning the assumption that man was first and foremost an economic being. Roy suggested that before becoming an economic actor, the human being was driven by biological needs. He pointed to anthropological evidence that early human struggles revolved around finding the means of subsistence, and that these were driven by biological urges rather than purely economic motives. The implication was clear: a philosophy of history that reduces everything to the forces of production and ignores moral and intellectual factors cannot be a reliable guide for social action.

Dialectical materialism: materialist in name only 🔗

Roy’s training as a thinker made him uncomfortable with the internal logic of dialectical materialism. He argued that it was not truly materialist at all but was essentially idealist in nature, since the dialectic itself was borrowed from Hegel’s idealist philosophy. The UGC NET study material observes that Roy detected contradictions in combining subjective dialectics with scientific materialism. In his view, this combination produced an unstable and unscientific foundation.

Roy did not abandon materialism entirely. Instead, he believed materialism could stand on its own without the dialectical apparatus attached to it. His real concern was that classical materialism had no room for ethics. As scholarly accounts of his thought explain, Roy held that the greatest defect of classical materialism was that its cosmology seemed to have no connection with ethics. He insisted that unless materialism could accommodate moral values, the human spirit, which thirsts for freedom, would ultimately reject it.

The surplus value debate 🔗

Roy also questioned the Marxist treatment of surplus value. For Marx, surplus value, the value produced by workers beyond their wages and appropriated by capitalists, was a sign of exploitation to be abolished. Roy took a more practical view. He argued that surplus is necessary in any productive system and that social progress itself depends on the generation of surplus. In his assessment, abolishing surplus value entirely would be impractical and even self-defeating, because no society can advance without it. His objection was not that surplus existed, but that it was distributed unfairly. The problem, in other words, was inequitable distribution rather than the surplus itself.

The rejection of individual autonomy 🔗

Underlying all these specific objections was a single, deeper concern: Marxism’s treatment of the individual. Roy believed that Marxism subordinated individual freedom to the collective goals of the proletariat, and that this suppressed individual potential and creativity. For a thinker who placed the human being at the centre of his entire philosophy, this was the most serious failing of all.

Roy argued that man is essentially a freedom-loving being who has always struggled to protect his liberty. In his reading, people form societies and states only in the hope that their freedom will be safeguarded, and they rebel when that freedom is threatened. By neglecting individual freedom, Roy felt that Marx had turned his back on the humanism of earlier philosophers. This conviction shaped Roy’s most important claim: that freedom, not socialism or communism, should be the ultimate goal of a civilised society.

Revolution by consent, not by insurrection 🔗

Roy’s critique extended to the Marxist method of achieving change. Marxism had traditionally relied on the idea of violent revolution to overthrow the existing order. Having witnessed where this led in the Soviet Union, Roy grew sceptical. He argued that revolutions achieved through violence tend to produce authoritarian regimes, because those who seize power by force are reluctant to give it up.

He proposed an alternative he called revolution by consent. This approach relied on peaceful, democratic means to bring about social change, ensuring that the new order was built on freedom and justice rather than coercion. Roy believed that a genuine revolution had to begin in the minds of people. As his admirers summarised his position, real revolution for Roy was ideological, a change in the mind of the people that should happen first. This is why he placed enormous importance on education. He held that one cannot be a revolutionary without scientific knowledge, making education the essence and condition of meaningful change.

A philosophy of universal appeal 🔗

Roy also believed that a successful revolution must be guided by a philosophy with universal appeal. Marxism, with its focus on class struggle and economic determinism, divided people into hostile camps and failed to speak to diverse populations. He found this especially limiting in colonial and agrarian societies. The account of his book Reason, Romanticism and Revolution describes how Roy rejected both the centralism and the deterministic economic basis of Marxism in favour of a more universal humanist vision. A revolution rooted in shared values of freedom and human dignity, he argued, would be more inclusive and more durable than one built on class antagonism.

Radical Humanism: the alternative Roy offered 🔗

Roy did not stop at criticism. His objections led him to construct a positive philosophy that he called Radical Humanism, or New Humanism. He described it as new because it was humanism enriched and reinforced by scientific knowledge and the social experience gained over centuries of modern civilisation. The philosophy synthesised human dignity, individual freedom, rationalism, and social justice into a single framework.

At the heart of Radical Humanism stood the sovereign individual. Roy held that the individual is the ultimate unit of society and that all institutions must exist to enhance personal liberty rather than to subordinate it. He linked morality to rationality, arguing that human beings are moral precisely because they are rational. In his ethics, freedom is the highest value and the search for truth is a corollary of the quest for freedom. This was a direct response to what he saw as Marxism’s neglect of both ethics and individual autonomy.

Organised democracy and the state 🔗

Roy translated these ideas into a concrete political vision. He grew convinced that party politics was incompatible with genuine democracy, because parties concentrate power and reduce ordinary citizens to passive voters. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy records that Roy concluded party politics was inconsistent with his ideal of organised democracy, leading to the dissolution of the Radical Democratic Party in December 1948 and the launch of the Radical Humanist Movement.

In place of the party-dominated state, Roy envisioned a highly decentralised democracy built on a network of people’s committees through which citizens could exercise continuous control over the state. He wanted to reshape the state on principles of pluralism, decentralisation, and democracy, reducing it to an advisory and administrative body working alongside free and voluntary associations of enlightened people. He paired this with a cooperative economy in which planning began at the grassroots level, because he believed the economic liberation of the masses was a necessary condition for their advance toward freedom.

Why Roy’s critique still matters 🔗

Roy’s critique of Marxism is significant because it came from genuine conviction tested by experience. He refused to defend a theory simply because he had once believed in it. His insistence that freedom must be the ultimate goal, that ethics cannot be separated from politics, and that change must come through consent rather than coercion, anticipated many concerns that remain central today. His emphasis on individual freedom and moral politics aligns closely with modern debates on human rights, while his ideas on decentralised, partyless governance continue to inform discussions on participatory democracy. Roy’s legacy is that of a thinker who refused to be confined by any single ideology and who placed the human being, free and rational, at the centre of political life.

What do you think? Is Roy right that freedom, rather than equality or socialism, should be the ultimate goal of a civilised society? And in an age of large, powerful states, is his idea of a revolution by consent a realistic path to change or an idealistic hope?

References

1. https://testbook.com/ugc-net-political-science/mn-roy-political-thought
2. https://iep.utm.edu/roy_mn/
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262095821_RADICAL_HUMANISM_OF_M_N_ROY
4. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/psp07/chapter/m-n-roy-and-radical-humanism/
5. https://sreenivasaraos.com/category/m-n-roy/
6. https://politicsforindia.com/mn-roy-political-thoughts-psir/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason,_Romanticism_and_Revolution