Amit Basole evaluates Lohia in a ‘time of crisis’ in the Indian left movements:

Along with the question of Eurocentrism, the question of the type of economic development was Lohia’s most fundamental theoretical challenge to Marxism. Marxists have been by and large unwilling to confront the possibility that industrialism and not capitalism may be the primary impediment to achieving the good life everywhere on the planet. Dazzled by the spectacle of modern science and technology and seduced by promises of plenty, Marx and later Marxists gave short shrift to two of their own fundamental insights: that history matters and that technology is both a cause and effect of the social relations of production. Assuming that the evils in industrialism (which have never been particularly hidden in its two centuries of existence) would disappear under socialism amounted to forgetting the peculiar historical conditions under which industrialism took shape in Europe and America and overlooking that fact that modern technology is profoundly shaped by capitalist social relations (early Soviet experiments with Taylorism in an effort to increase productivity are a case in point).

Thinkers in the Lohia tradition have long emphasized that the availability of colonies was crucial to Europe’s industrial development and that the non-availability of such colonies for India means a process of internal colonization in the manner that we have seen ample evidence of since 1947. Thus crucially, history has borne out the Gandhian-Lohiaite position on this issue. Marxists and other modernists still find this difficult to accept wholly since it calls into question the very possibility that industrial capitalism in the European manner could take shape in the colonies. And if it cannot, what prospects then for socialism?

Insightful.