Download PDFSaturday 31st January, 2026, Flic en Flac. 6.00 p.m.
A blue sky speckled with clusters of silvery clouds floating high above the ‘debarkader’ where Ram used to moor his pirogue for decades before it eventually disappeared without any explanation. The case of the vanished vessel is one of the very few mysteries that happened to Ram. Perhaps the only one. His life was open.
No split between the private person and the public citizen. No secrets. No hidden agenda. He was what you saw. You could know him. You felt he was interested in you, in your family, in your work, in your life. And you were right. He always was. Attentive. He listened. Then he would suggest several questions that could be asked. His questions often would help you to find the answers and or more likely, new questions. Ram was no preacher who fabricated pseudo-truths for others. No ready-made solutions. He studied and explored. He analysed and proposed. He sought your understanding. Conversing with him is a dialectical dialogue.
Lindsey is present. So are his sisters, his brother, his nieces, his comrades and his friends. His ashes, collected in an earth-coloured urn, are scattered to the sea and thrown towards the sky. The sun is shining, its slanted rays darting the shimmering but silent waves. It is a beautiful afternoon. Ram is welcomed back to that part of nature known as Nowhere. Exactly where he was before he was born.
Yet, he remains part of our shared history. The same ancient history of planet Earth he cared so much for just as he cared for its inhabitants. He strove to understand the world where humans live and die, where they love and hate, where they laugh and weep. Where they create and destroy. Where they protect and save. Where they massacre. Where so many keep struggling for a better life.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. “Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Ram’s worldview was grounded in Marxist philosophy and its consequential revolutionary politics. The development or underdevelopment of human societies throughout history is driven first and foremost by material conditions, by the dynamics of economic and political structures and not by the will and whims of extra-terrestrial divinities that allegedly determine the destiny of mankind.
He did not believe in pre-ordained fate. How resources are organised, how wealth is produced and distributed are key factors that explain how classes in society develop. The minority class that controls surplus production maintain a dominant position at the expense the large majority that produces the wealth. Labour is exploited to produce capitalist profit. The system is shielded by laws, by military force, by police repression, by legal frameworks and by judicial institutions that always fail to deliver social and political justice.
He understood the system. Its unstable contradictions and injustices. Its lies and its propaganda. Its ideology that feasts on greed and power. Its cynical legalisation of the exploitation and oppression of the many by the few. The system justifies itself with seemingly grand principles and ideas. Private property is presented as sacred whilst conveniently forgetting the obvious truth that it is illogical and unjust for a few to appropriate privately what is socially produced. Ram agreed with Marx that such a system should be abolished. Political action was necessary to resist exploitation and political oppression and bring about radical changes in the interest of all mankind.
In the mid-seventies, Ram joined the Bambous cell of the MMM. He had no illusion about its petty-bourgeois leadership. He understood the MMM to have two dimensions. First, as a radical anti-capitalist movement with a strong trade union component, the General Workers Federation. Secondly, the MMM was a political party that, in its initial program, denounced capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. However, in its practice, its leadership veered to reformist politics and, sooner than later, could hardly be distinguished from the Labour Party till it finally ended up at some point in the same bed or sofa with the PMSD. The party that had once exhorted workers to wage the class struggle for socialism now champions ‘national unity”. Its leaders became “proud patriots” and declared their commitment to “law and order”. The capitalist class was relieved. The MMM is no longer a political threat.
By late 1976 Ram, with other comrades, created a left-wing tendency within the MMM known as “Lalit de Klas” that published a monthly review in Kreol. It was not only an intellectual enterprise. Above all, it organised militants and trade unionists for practical action on several fronts of the class struggle. Its members played a key role in August 1979 General Strike, one of the most heroic struggles of the working class in Mauritian history. It challenged acutely the legitimacy of the capitalist order and its political institutions. An agreement ending the strike was reached , but its terms were not respected by government.
One year later in September 1980, Ram campaigned intensely fo the implementation of the agreement. Mass popular mobilisations forced government to do so. The Labour government was discredited. Its unholy alliance with the sugar barons and the whole capitalist class exposed. These mobilisations contributed significantly to the 60 – 0 electoral victory of the MMM/PSM alliance in 1982.
Long before the 1982 elections the MMM leadership had treacherously negotiated a deal with the capitalist class that was later formalised publicly as the Nuvo Konsansis Sosyal. The betrayal was complete. The members of Lalit de Klas left the MMM and created the Lalit Party.
For some fifty years Ram has been at the forefront of countless struggles. His commitment to build a party based on a program that meets the interests of the working-class and of society in general was total and tireless. Yet, he found time to plant, to fish, to read and write. Art and literature. Football and films. All human endeavours interested him.
And he cooked. A lot. His hospitality was simple and generous. His company was soothing. Most precious of all, was his intellectual honesty and his deep yet unassuming intelligence. His irony was calm but amusing. No bitterness and no contempt towards his opponents even though he did at times pity their contemptible opportunism and their apparent respectability so often polluted with corruption. Most of the time he would prefer to laugh.
Recently, we met for one of our periodic dinners. We surveyed the alarming international political situation. The decay of western capitalism is stinking to high heaven. The horrors of war, genocide, poverty and increasing inequalities are visible to all. Ram has since long known that the stakes for mankind are high and historical. He did not lament. His lucidity did not flinch. There is no other choice than to denounce and oppose the ambient social barbarism.
Ram is gone. He left on a beautiful afternoon.
His party Lalit, remains. His struggle for socialism goes on here and elsewhere
I suppose that there is some comfort in remembering gratefully that we have been comrades for some fifty years, or as Lindsey put it: “ti to frer sa, li finn mor gramatin”.
Salaam, Ram.
Jean Claude aka Lolo Bibi
Porlwi 2 fevrye 2026
This article was syndicated from Workers World.org (https://www.workers.org/) and was originally published on 31 January 2026. You may republish this article, so long as you credit the author, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article (https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/3726/kamarad-ram-his-commitment-to-revolutionary-socialism-by-jean-claude-bibi/).’
