Ajit Roy too raises somewhat similar objections and questions more or less the same formulations though from a different and largely Trotskyite position[1]. Roy feels that Mao’s original contributions are yet to be reconciled with the fundamentals of Marxism. Roy is even opposed to treating Leninism as a sub-system of Marxism, a practice he says was sanctified by Stalin for the factional reason of scoring against Trotsky. His basic objection against Mao Zedong thought, it would seem, is that he considers it a theory of peasant (petty bourgeois) revolution devoid of any live leadership and intervention of the working class. He therefore questions not only our adherence to Mao Zedong thought, but every formulation which he feels overstates the role of the peasantry at the cost of the working class.
For instance, he finds it contradictory that we at once define our party as the political party of the Indian proletariat fighting for realising its supreme class mission and yet it is said to comprise the advanced detachments of the people (of course, unlike the CPI(M), we use the word people as excluding the enemy classes) and serve as the core of leadership of the people of all nationalities in India in their struggle against feudal remnants, big capital and imperialism. The party of the proletariat can of course lead the people, but the advanced detachment of the people cannot necessarily lead the working class in realising its supreme class mission, argues Roy. Ideologically speaking, every Communist Party should be a single-class party and we too admit no ideology other than that of the proletariat. As the Communist Manifesto rightly puts it, only the proletariat is a really revolutionary class and all other classes play a revolutionary role only in certain specific conditions and to the extent they adopt a proletarian class viewpoint. But proletarian ideology is not the name given to subaltern or working class consciousness in its natural state, it is an ideology which has evolved through a critical assimilation and crystallisation of proletarian activism and hence the adoption of proletarian viewpoint and leadership is a process of struggle, even for members of the working class themselves. We therefore prefer to make a distinction between the ideological character and social composition of a Communist Party.
Roy also questions the formulation in our Party Programme which lays down that “the main force of the democratic revolution led by the working class is the peasantry. He feels that this formulation reduces the role of the working class to one of passivity and all talks of working class leadership become an empty phrase. As far as we are concerned we are very particular about the question of working class leadership over the revolution and while the Communist Party definitely remains the chief instrument through which the working class exercises its class leadership, our programme lays a lot of emphasis on enhancing the direct class role, initiative and leadership in various streams of democratic and anti-imperialist movement. If Roy’s basic reservation is regarding the people-class-party relation as understood and practised by the CPSU and East European Communist Parties in the later years or nearer home by the CPI(M), then we too share some of these reservations and we always lay special emphasis on unleashing and recognising the broader and direct class initiative of the working class. But this problem does not have anything to do with whether the working class is considered the main force or not.
The Trotskyites’ basic difficulty with the peasantry arises from their inability to appreciate the agrarian-democratic context of our revolution. In fact, they are also unable to appreciate the largely Asiatic setting of the Russian revolution. Lenin, on the other hand, repeatedly emphasised the backward Asiatic features of Russia and its dissimilarities with advanced Europe. Roy is unable to understand how the contradiction between feudal remnants and the broad Indian masses could be the principal contradiction. This is because he treats such remnants only in the continental European sense in which Marx generally discussed this question. In Capital (Vol. I), Marx has the following observation to make about mid-.19th Century Germany which Roy also quotes in his review:
“We, like, all the rest of continental Europe, suffer, not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronism. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead” (emphasis added). Compare this with the following passage from Lenin: “It is stated quite clearly … that there exists in our country a host of remnants of the serf-owning system, and that these remnants “barbarize” the process of development. But once we consider the process of the development of capitalism, the basic process in Russia’s social and economic evolution, we must begin precisely by describing this process, as well as its contradictions and consequences. Only in this way can we give graphic expression to our thought that the process of the development of capitalism, the ousting of small scale production, the concentration of property etc., is proceeding and will continue, despite all the remnants of the serf-owning system, and through all these remnants.”[2]
Clearly, Lenin here speaks about remnants not as dead and passive survivals but as live and active features of the present. Such remnants are not curious anachronisms which only resist and retard capitalist development or just lie away in some obscure corner beside the high road of capitalism but they have a good deal of resilience and are capable of drawing fresh sustenance from within capitalism. If this was true of Russia then, it is no less true for India today.
At the same time, Lenin was categorical in his assertion that “In its programme the party of the Russian proletariat should formulate in the utmost unambiguous manner its arraignment of Russian capitalism, the declaration of war on Russia capitalism. This is all the more necessary inasmuch as the Russian programme cannot be identical in this respect with the European programmes : the latter speak of capitalism and of bourgeois society without indicating that these concepts are equally applicable to Austria, Germany, and so on, because that goes without saying. In relation to Russia, this cannot be taken for granted.”
In other words, the remnants are so powerful that they tend to cloud the very fact that Russia is developing on capitalist lines and that is why Russian communists have to separately declare war on capitalism. Just as in the agrarian context, Lenin had identified the anti-feudal peasant movement as the touchstone of the bourgeois revolution as a whole, while treating the “free development of the class struggle in the countryside” as the “fundamental and focal point in the theory of revolutionary Marxism”, here too he emphasises the arraignment of capitalism while “making a final attempt to help the peasantry sweep away all these remnants at a single decisive blow — “final because developing Russian capitalism is itself spontaneously making for the very same goal, but making for it along its own peculiar road of violence and oppression, ruin and starvation”.
It is this indictment or arraignment of capitalism, declaration of war against capitalism’s “peculiar road of violence and oppression, ruin and starvation” which established proletarian leadership over Russian democratic revolution and distinguished it from the general rung of anti-feudal bourgeois revolutions. This clarity and sharpness has certainly been lacking in the programmes and analyses of Indian communists where democratic revolution has long been understood in primarily anti-imperialist and then anti-feudal terms. Hut while the democratic revolution remains bourgeois in the essential economic content or in its objective historical limits the fact remains that a victorious democratic revolution can only be accomplished in confrontation with the bourgeoisie, overthrowing the big bourgeoisie from slate-power. Moreover to the extent capitalism is developing unabated despite and through all the feudal remnants, socialist elements or aspects of our democratic revolution cannot but grow proportionately. This is why we say there can be no Chinese wall between democratic and socialist revolutions in today’s world and under proletarian leadership the former has to grow uninterrupted into the latter. For large sections of Indian communist the fact of capitalism has always been a matter of shocking discovery and disbelief and that is perhaps why they fell such easy victims to the thesis of non-capitalist path.
The Trotskyites have always maintained a pronounced anti-capitalist thrust, but their failure to appreciate the predominantly agrarian context of our revolution renders them an ineffective current. The proletariat alone is the really revolutionary class and the fundamental split in all modern societies is definitely between the bourgeois and proletarian camps, but despite the Communist Manifesto having pointed it out some 100 years ago, every subsequent revolution has had to identify its own principal contradiction, every phase of international communist movement has had to grapple with specific revolutionary challenges and Lenin was very clear in his last writing that the centre of world revolution has decidedly shifted to the East.
Roy himself quotes from Lenin’s State and Revolution where Lenin exclaims, “this idea of a people’s revolution seems strange coming from Marx, so that the Russian Plekhanovites and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve who wish to be regarded as Marxists, might possibly declare such an expression to be a ‘slip of the pen’ on Marx’s part. They have reduced Marxism to such a state of wretchedly liberal distortion that nothing exists for them beyond the anti-thesis between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution, even the anti-thesis they interpret in an utterly lifeless way.” This clearly means that the proletariat has to establish and exercise its leadership in diverse contexts of people’s revolution. And such revolutions will break out against the most acute antagonisms, against the biggest reservoirs of backwardness and reaction, and delink or liberate the weakest links in the imperialist chain.
Roy accuses us of making a very serious underestimation of the revolutionary development within the working class of the metropolitan countries and second, a gross over-estimation of the striking power of Third World anti-imperialism. He will locate the principal global contradiction in the antagonism between world imperialism and the international working class. Interestingly enough, the working class movement in the West does not suffer from any such revolutionary delusion of grandeur, for its own growth and sustenance it continues to draw inspiration form the Third World revolutionary movements. The working class in the West knows it from its own experience that if the TNCs and imperialist finance capital are not resisted in the Third World, it is very difficult for the former to wrest any significant gains even in its economic struggle.
Notes :
- 1. Maoist Baggage, Economic and Political Weekly, October 30,1993.
- 2. Notes ou Hekhauov’s Sccoud Draft Programme, LCW, Vol. 6,
pp 35-55.
