To
begin with, we need to understand that the early history of communism
in India went through a rupture. The Meerut Conspiracy Case dealt the
emerging communist party a sharp blow. By the time the fragmented party had
reassembled, the Communist International had come under the complete grip of
Stalin and Stalinism, and it had baneful effects on the CPI.[2] This did not mean the CPI achieved nothing. But it meant that the
revolutionary-democratic traditions of classical Marxism were distorted in a
number of crucial ways, and that later conflicts within the major currents of
the Indian communists remained locked within Stalinist parameters. In the case
of Bengal/West Bengal, I would argue, an additional component was the influence
of the revolutionary nationalist tradition. The very significant number of
revolutionary nationalists (the “terrorists”) who became converted to communism
in jail accepted certain political ideas (not mere political independence, but
social change through revolution), certain philosophical views (materialism,
atheism), but they brought their own prejudices. Notably, their rejection of Gandhism
had been based on a simple counterposition of violence and non-violence, and
therefore the equation of revolution and violence was sometimes carried over.
Equally important was the top down approach of the revolutionary groups, and
the seamless manner in which this merged with, and provided an indigenous basis
for the acceptance of Stalinist vanguardism, which replaced Lenin’s real
concept of building a class vanguard that would be in constant dialogue with
the mass of workers, by the imagery of transmission belts and commands or
instructions from above being implemented by those lower down.
Classical
Marxism:
There
are many things that one can learn from classical Marxism.[3] For an assessment of any movement claiming to be Marxist, however,
we need to begin by looking at the core political components. Repeatedly, Marx
and Engels argued that “the emancipation of the working classes is a task of the
working classes themselves”. This was the central plank of their politics. In
the rules of the International Working men’s Association written by Marx, he
argued that the goal of workers’ societies was “the protection, the advancement
and complete emancipation of the working classes.”[4] As Marik points out, in the Third Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx
“opposed the idea of educators from outside teaching the masses, pointing out
that any ‘educator’, that is socialist theorist, must oneself learn the meaning
of socialism through revolutionary practice. In other words, socialist theory
as the ideological change in human beings could only be continuously developed
through revolutionary practice which would also change the material
circumstances.”[5]
The
concept of working class self-emancipation meant that the revolution was not
going to be a process where a small number of wise people would dominate the
masses and decide what would be good for them. This was the principal tradition
of the socialist/communist currents of the period, however, and Marx and Engels
stood out by their break with this tradition. This also made inevitable their
next key point. This was the nature and role of the revolutionary party. They
did not mean to ignore the need to build a revolutionary party by hiding behind
the talk of working-class self-emancipation. But they saw the revolutionary
party as comprising the most militant and aware members of the working class.
And while they did not deny the role of elements from other classes, they made
it clear that the communist party could not be made up chiefly of such
elements. Such a generalized picture, of course, does not give us the full
complexity of their views. But they did go on to elaborate their positions by,
on one hand, developing analyses of concrete situations, and on the other hand,
by presenting critiques of other socialisms. Thus, in a number of critiques of
the theorists of conspiracy and insurrection, they showed that conspiracy kept
out the masses of workers, but not the police. And in a telling comment, they
dubbed advocates of such methods the “alchemists of revolution”. For their own
part, they laid stress on two key issues – the creation of independent working
class political action including working class participation in elections, and
the development of socialist theory within independent working class parties.
In an 1850 essay, Marx argued that secret organizations led by professional
conspirators could not draw in the broad masses of the proletariat in their
organizations:
These
conspirators do not confine themselves to the general organization of the
revolutionary proletariat. It is precisely their business to anticipate the
process of revolutionary development, to bring it artificially to crisis point,
to launch a revolution on the spur of the moment . . . they are the alchemists
of the revolution . . . and have the profoundest contempt for the more
theoretical enlightenment of the proletariat about their class interests.[6]
Thus
Marx was explicitly counterposing a scientific theory of a communist party,
capable of explaining theory and organising the proletariat for struggles, to
the pre-scientific (“alchemical”) party which advocated substitutionism and was
contemptuous about developing real class-consciousness.[1]
In
discussing the strategy of revolution for backward countries (of particular
interest for us), Marx and Engels came to argue, by looking at Germany, that
the bourgeoisie was utterly incapable of leading a genuine democratic
revolution. If it triumphed, it would enter into a deal with the landlords and
the semi-absolutist monarchy. So the task was to build a bloc of the working
class, the peasants, and the petty bourgeois democrats, and within that, to
strive to create working class hegemony.[7] This was summed up in the famous Address of the Central Authority
to the Communist League, where they talked about a “revolution in permanence”.
An added point of great significance, very often ignored, is that their
revolutionary strategy involved a struggle for consistent democracy, and that
this meant, not repudiating the gains made by liberal-democracy, but extending
it far beyond anything liberalism could achieve.[8]
Communism
in India and the Maoist Revolutionaries:
If
we look at these founding premises of classical Marxism, communism
in India appears utterly unlike it. A distorted reading of Lenin
resulted in equating Leninist party building with party-led substitutionism.[9] From the late 1920s, the Comintern doctrine of Socialism in One
Country served to turn communist parties into organizations defending Soviet
foreign policy. Moscow dictated flip-flops, like an ultraleft line of
1928-1934, followed by class-collaboration dressed as anti-imperialist unity
(the Dutt-Bradley thesis). And the campaign against “Trotskyism” meant a
general imposition of a two-stage theory of revolution, according to which the
first stage would be carried out in alliance with the progressive bourgeoisie.
Though
the Comintern was disbanded in 1943, Moscow’s control and influence
remained crucial for a long time. Between 1951 and 1964, debates within the
CPI, while couched in theoretical rhetoric about national democratic revolution
versus peoples’ democratic revolution, really involved a search for bourgeois
allies either within the Congress or outside it. The post-1964 evolution of the
CPI(M) confirms this.[10] However, in the early 1960s, many militants assumed that the fact
that CPI(M) leaders upheld Stalin against Khruschev and talked of Peoples’
Democratic Revolution made them revolutionaries. So they sided with CPI(M).
This also meant that radicals tended to see Stalin as a bastion of revolution,
instead of being the leader of a bureaucratic political counter-revolution. The
CPI(M) was thus formed as a party composed of class-collaborationist
Stalinists, along with Maoist radicals also infused with Stalinist ideas. The
left reformism was soon unmasked, between 1966 and 1969. Mass radicalism was
harnessed for electoral gains. In 1967, the CPI(M) proved as willing to join
hands with bourgeois oppositions to form a coalition government in West Bengal
as the CPI. It was at this point that the revolutionaries, or those who wanted
to be revolutionaries, decided to split with the reformists. There were
differences over the pace and tactics (Nagi Reddy versus Charu Mazumdar, for
example). But by the time the CPI(ML) was founded, the principle that had won
was to present two alternatives as the strategic poles in communism. The draft
constitution of the party said: “To overthrow the rule of the above [defined in
the previous paragraph – K.C.] enemies of the people, the CPI(ML) places the
path of armed struggle before the Indian people.”[11]Parliamentary
work was viewed as an entirely strategic option, and rejected en bloc.[12] The strategy of “peoples’ war” was to be based on the path shown
by Lin Piao, that is, relying on the peasantry, building base areas,
consistently developing armed struggle and using the villages to surround the cities
and ultimately capture them. That which, in China, was a compulsion caused
by the defeats suffered in the cities, was turned into a voluntarily accepted
strategy in the Indian case.[13]
We
will return to the fundamental flaw involved here later. But I would like to
begin with a positive note. The party documents, the writings of several
outstanding leaders of this current, or the party papers, like Deshabrati (Bangla), Liberation, all showed a refreshing
return to the concept of class struggle. Ever since the dismissal of the 1957
Kerala government, the underlying content of the inner-party debate in the CPI
was whether the “progressive bourgeoisie” were in the Congress or in the
bourgeois opposition parties, and who should be the allies in the bid to form
governments. This has of course been the recurrent debate in the mainstream
Stalinist left all the way to the present. Prakash Karat’s Third Front was an
attempt to patch together a bloc of regional forces, in opposition to the line
advocated by others, such as Sobhanlal Datta Gupta in Mainstream.[14] Stripping aside the veil of theory and polish, the Maoists of the
1960s revealed that debate for the opportunistic struggle for loaves and fishes
by bureaucratic leaders that it really was. And by raising the slogan, “Never
forget class struggle”, they made class struggle a reality, in a way it had not
been for a considerable period.
In
the same way, it was the Maoist current that made internationalism a real,
revolutionary force. The Chinese Communist Party, when it inspired splits in
many countries, had the aim of building its own support base. But in order to
fight Moscow, it had presented a mixed ideological bag. On one hand, it
appeared as a fervent champion of Stalin.[15] But on the other hand, it also highlighted the class
collaborationist politics pursued under Moscow’s pressure, even though it
(falsely) exonerated Stalin from such practices. The combination of all this
was to promote a more militant form of internationalism than clapping because
the Soviet Union had launched the sputnik before the USA. Recovering the
old traditions of the communists, Charu Mazumdar called for active
internationalism. Similar to Che Guevara’s call to build “two, three,
many Vietnams” was the statement. “Chairman’s China may be
attacked – speed up the Indian revolution”. This was not a call for diplomatic
manoeuvring to help the chosen fatherland. This was, or could be understood as,
proletarian internationalism at its best, and left a lasting imprint. Many
radicals who have moved a long distance from Maoism, have this starting point
for their understanding of proletarian internationalism. The struggle of the
proletariat for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism cannot be secured
within one country. Capitalism itself cannot function in one country but must
spread its tentacles across the world. A higher system than capitalism cannot
be built on a lower economic level. The idea that superior relations of
production can be built on a low level of productivity and maintained there is
an illusion. So even if unintentionally, Maoism brought back the
idea of world revolution and international socialism.
Another
important achievement was to critique the nature of “progress”. This involved
certain major oversimplifications. But a basic discourse shift happened around
this time, because the Maoists asked, in effect, whether it was the task of
communists to be cheerleaders for capitalist development, on the ground that
capitalism was “progressive” compared to feudalism?[2] This once more overturned a growing consensus among the mainstream
Stalinist parties, that if the capitalists were progressive, or if the
capitalist state took a progressive role, then the task of communists was to
simply support it. Of course, few parties wrote texts that expressed
their ideas so crudely. But this was precisely the achievement of the Maoists –
to blast though the verbiage and expose the linear, undialectical concept of
progress and the resulting class-collaborationist political tasks, including
supporting the “progressive” foreign policy of the Indian state.
The
Contradictions of Maoism:
The
key contradiction of Indian Maoism flowed from its inability to break the
shackles of Stalinist substitutionism. Who will play the leading role in the
revolutionary process? Formally, all “Marxists” begin by answering, “the
working class”. But then, for the Social Democracy, the role of the working
class is exhausted by voting for the socialist party periodically. For the
Stalinists, the party represents the working class. The voice of the party is
the voice of the working class for all practical purposes. Whether
“revolutionary” or “reformist”, parties of Stalinist orientation agree that the
party is the conscious section of the class, not because it continuously
replenishes itself by recruiting the best, most militant elements of the
working class and ensures a continuity of proletarian leadership, but because
by self-proclamation and definition, the party is the vanguard of the
class. By accepting the Chinese CP’s leadership, including its
glorification of Stalin, the CPI(ML) was opening itself to the same errors. The
programme of the party said that “the working class can and will exercise its
leadership over the Peoples’ Democratic Revolution though its political party”,
the CPI(ML).[16] This assumed that the working class has only one political
party. Moreover, the working class does not have any other organisational
forum through which it can express its viewpoint. This suspicion hardens, when
we also read that the working class will play its vanguard role by sending its
class conscious vanguard elements to organise and lead the armed struggles of
the peasants.[17]In
other words, the central task of the party was seen as organising an agrarian
armed revolution. In a country with its rich working class history, decades of
patient communist work among the workers, the development of trade unions, this
was an utterly destructive line. About the cities, Charu Mazumdar had only
vague hopes, not a political strategy. The Political-Organisational Report
adopted by the first Congress of the CPI(ML) asserted that through the process
of building the party, the revisionist line had been defeated. One aspect of
this revisionist line was the building of mass movements and mass organisations
for economic demands.[18] In addition, it was claimed that the armed struggle of the
peasants was inspiring the workers and the petit bourgeoisie.[19] In other words, the leading role of the working class was a token
genuflection to the canons of Marxism. Majumdar’s speech on that occasion said
that building the party means the development of armed class struggle.[20] (missing out the “armed” was tantamount to instant degeneration).
About the cities, he just expressed the hope that a revolutionary tide would
come among the workers, not only in Calcutta, but everywhere.[21] How it would come, by withdrawing revolutionary cadres from the
mass movements and organisations, was left totally unexplained. Revolutionaries
who opposed giving up the trade unions had already found themselves being
ignored, then pushed out. Parimal Dasgupta in Bengal, Purnendu Majumdar
in South Bihar (now Jharkhand) had to go their own ways. Further
articles by majumdar showed the real content of his strategy. Thus, the article
‘A Few Words About Guerilla Action’, reveal that ctually it was a petty bourgeois
led peasant action, and had nothing to do with the working class.[22] Another article by Majumdar, ‘To the Working Class’, repudiated
general strikes as ineffective, repudiated economic struggles in the name of
opposing revisionism, and simply exhorted workers to participate in armed
peasant struggles.[23]Indeed,
he argued that it was not possible for workers to defend themselves with trade
unions, so the party should not build or bother about trade unions, but only
build secret party organizations among the workers.[24] Bloodshed and barricade fighting were envisaged, but without
struggles that would really enhance the consciousness of the working class –
unless exhorting them to read Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung and
attacking the revisionists count as real struggles.[25]
Why
did Marx and Engels stress the historic role of the working class and why did
they insist on protracted learning processes through participation in concrete
struggles?[26] Two points are made here. The first is again the basic Marxist
strategy, that the emancipation of the working classes is a task of the working
classes themselves, not handed over to a group of self-proclaimed
revolutionaries even if they drape the Collected Works of Marx and Engels over
their bodies.
But
why the working class? Marx’s reply was that capitalism reproduced itself by
exploiting alienated labour. The historical tendency of the struggles of the
workers goes far beyond the tendency of peasant struggles. The poorest of peasant,
as a peasant, wishes for a little bit of land, a space, however illusory,
within the existing system. The worker realizes that the existing system gives
to workers only wages. The separation of direct producer from the means of
production can only be overcome by the socialization of production, by workers
management of publicly owned property. Secondly, as a class who occupy a
concentrated position in capitalism, workers can stop the economy functioning,
Finally, objectively, as collective producers, the working class has the power
to create an exploitation free society. A rejection of this meant that the
revolutionary aspirations of the large number of cadres who went to the new
party and groups were wasted.
The
Greatest “Socialist” Myth of the Twentieth Century:
The
contradictions of Maoism also meant that the Maoist forces in India,
whether the CPI(ML) or those outside it, had a complicated and mistaken view of
“socialism”. For them, the Soviet Union was “social imperialist”,
while China was “socialist”. Having accepted that despite the little
blemish here and thee, Stalin and the Stalin era had meant the construction of
socialism, they ended up accepting the view that abolition of private ownership
constituted socialism, without any serious discussion on the essential need for
workers’ democracy. On the other hand, since they condemned the Soviet
Union as “social imperialist”, the line of the political party at the helm
was seen as the crucial factor between socialism and capitalism. Finally, an
utterly idealist attitude, following the “Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution”, was taken about the nature of class struggle under socialism.
Rotten apples in the superstructure were supposedly capable of overturning a
basically sound base.
A
correct understanding of the fate of the Russian revolution had been among the
most important issues in deciding a revolutionary line anywhere, throughout
most of the twentieth century. Socialist democracy, the meaning of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism and the
economic issues involved, all have implications for the future of revolutionary
movements elsewhere. Here, the Maoist revolutionaries failed, because they were
unable to question the basic arguments of Stalinism. One party rule remained
unquestioned. Only if the party turned bad, the country changed from socialist
to capitalist. The role of soviets, or analogous forms of institutions was
ignored. Bourgeois democracy was not to be extended by socialism, rather, bourgeois
democracy was to be simply rejected.
This
made the difference between the CPI(ML), or the other Maoist organisations, on
one hand, and the CPI(M) on the other, a difference based on the will of the
cadres, and nothing more. The revolutionary struggle was begun in 1967 (taking
the announcement of “Spring Thunder” as the beginning). Yet the working class
that had grown up already was ignored. The reality of bourgeois democracy
in India was brushed aside. For certain Maoist groups, like the
CPI(Maoist) they continue to be basically irrelevant. As a matter of fact, this
meant a refusal to engage with the objective reality of India, and to
impose an utterly illusory line. Of course, reality proved stronger
than the utopian illusions. The experience of China, or even of Russia, in both
of which countries there was little or no real civil society, and where the
ruling class ruled almost entirely through force, do not provide all the
lessons for revolutionary strategies in countries where there have existed some
form of bourgeois hegemony. At the same time, by removing all
revolutionary cadres from a number of areas, the struggle to establish the
hegemony of the revolutionary forces was given a go by. It was assumed that the
example of rural armed struggle would replace concrete struggles in working
class areas. Moreover, this was based on an extremely deformed
reading of a few passages of What Is To Be Done?, according to which the party
injects class consciousness from outside and the working class by itself can
only develop bourgeois consciousness.
The
assumption that only the most exploited were revolutionary, meant the exclusion
of the organised workers, those having a little better pay or working
conditions. This of course ignored the reality that they had obtained those
slight gains because of militant struggles, not because the ruling class was
buying them up through bribes.
If
ultraleftism of a very old kind was behind these mistakes (after all, Lenin had
criticised exactly these errors – boycotting elections, boycotting unions, and
so on – in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder),
inability to look sufficiently into the shortcomings of Stalinist communism was
at the root of another set of mistakes. Notably, special oppression remained
originally ignored. Even later, it was often not theoretically discussed, so
measures taken were sometimes ad hoc. Gender, caste, indigeneity, were not
taken as important markers. The party programme simply mentioned that the
Peoples’ Democratic State would, inter alia, “abolish the caste system, remove
all social inequalities... and guarantee equality of status to women.”[27] That class unity in reality could not be forged till these
inequalities were addressed in the revolutionary process and within the working
class received no recognition. A big part of the Communist movement, including
its revolutionary wing, was extremely suspicious of feminism, seeing in it a
bourgeois or petit bourgeois current, even though in India, feminism had a
strong socialist component right from the beginning in the early 1970s. Neither
the party, nor its struggles, were often gendered. At the same time, the Maoist
movement did provide an impetus for many young women as well as men.[28] As Kalpana Sen points out, the inspiration provided by the
movement was immense. Till the mid-sixties, in most women’s colleges, there
were no directly elected unions. Girls nominated by the authorities ran the
unions. The militant student-youth movement of the mid to late 1960s changed
that picture. Women also took part in the ideological struggles around the
Naxalbari peasant struggles. They fought in the jails, put up red flag, and
confronted the jailers. Moreover, the path of Naxalbari meant challenging
existing values in a way that the mainstream left had not been doing for a long
time. Among these was a rebellion against domestic discipline and conservatism.
That so many young women came to the new party was because, in Sen’s words,
“the opportunity to breathe in free air”.[29] Failure to identify patriarchy as a distinct enemy to be combated
may have limited the endeavours of these cadres. But the call to immediately
join the revolution was something that enabled them to overcome in practice
many of the constraints of patriarchy. So if the CPI(ML) did not provide all
the solutions, nor did it stand as a force of traditional conservatism.
In
the same way, the formal position of the party talked only about class, in an
abstract way. But the struggle to bring in poor peasants, after the end of the
first phase, meant entering into new terrains. The focus on the landless
peasants led to a recognition of the complex interrelationship between caste
and class in India. However, while the far left (both Maoists and Trotskyists)
were grappling with the complexities of caste-class relations, for the
mainstream Stalinist left caste was simply semi-feudal remnant that would be
overcome with the development of capitalism, till the Mandal Commission Report
implementation forced them into some kind of awareness (even then limited to
electoral purposes).[30]
