THE FACT that West Bengal has seen not a single sustained movement of the rural poor over the last two decades despite our best efforts cannot be explained simply by referring to the CPI(M)-LFG’s class collaborationist policies and terror tactics. For these policies to succeed, for the whole social-democratic politics to succeed, a proper material foundation and a suitable .correlation of class forces were needed. And these were available, first, in the development, however lopsided, of productivity and productive forces during the 1980s; and second, in the suitable changes in the production relations which gave rise to new dependencies or symbiotic relations among mutually opposed classes and strata. But today we see agrarian growth tapering off, the elements of conflict inherent in various dependencies and attachments coming to the surface under the impact of the national agrarian crisis now spreading to this state, and new fault lines coming up in the social base on which the present regime survives. Fresh scope is therefore certainly coming our way to end the stalemate. But that demands new initiatives on peasants’ and agrarian workers’ demands, a deeper, more comprehensive study of the agrarian scene and a better systematisation of our rich but scattered ideas on the dynamics of class struggle in a state which saw the extreme revolutionary offensive followed by the extreme counter-revolutionary terror and then fell into a sordid social democratic equilibrium.
