Published: Liberation, October 1968
Charu Mazumdar
ISOLATION from the broad peasant masses constitutes a most harmful political weakness on the part of the revolutionaries. This danger appears at every stage of the struggle. That is why Chairman Mao, in explaining the tactics of guerrilla warfare, has said : “Divide your forces to arouse the masses, concentrate your forces to deal with the enemy.” This is the first law. This process of arousing the masses is never completed. The second lesson is that guerrilla warfare is, basically, a higher stage of class struggle, and class struggle is the summation of economic and political struggles. The more I am trying to have a clear understanding of the thought of Chairman Mao, the more I am learning ever newer lessons from it. Comrades in every area will have similar experience and only then will our understanding deepen and we shall become better Marxists. However, it cannot be said just now that all of our comrades have understood this correctly. But all the comrades have started thinking along this line. Learning from the masses is a very difficult task. Subjectivism is an offshoot of revisionism. Our struggle against revisionism has only just started. We have still a very long way to go.
While the comrades who are working among the peasants should continue to propagate politics, they should never belittle the necessity of formulating common slogans on economic demands. For, without this, broad sections of the peasantry cannot be drawn into the movement, nor can the backward sections of the peasants be raised to a level where they can grasp our political propaganda, nor can their hatred against their class enemy be sustained. “Seize the coming crops” is a slogan which must be propagated from this moment. Hatred must be roused against the jotedar class as it starves the peasants throughout the year. “Peasants should seize the next harvest” is a slogan which will draw broad sections of the peasants into the fold of the movement, and our conscious political propaganda will change the nature of this peasant movement.
