PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The Central Committee of CPI(ML) convened a Party School at the central level on 22-24 June, 1994 in New Delhi. Altogether 112 comrades from all the sectors of our Party work, among whom 12 were women, participated as students. Apart from this, four comrades of Lal Nishan Party (Leninist) also attended the school as fraternal participants. Under the principalship of
Comrade Vinod Mishra, General Secretary of the Party, who also delivered the inaugural address,
Comrades Arindam Sen, CC Member and Editor of Party’s Bengali Central Organ Deshabrati,
Comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya, Polit Bureau Member and General Secretary of AICCTU and
Comrade B. Sivaraman, Polit Bureau Member, presented their papers.
In the light of the discussion at the Central School the authors revised their papers. Here we bring you the revised version of the papers in slightly abridged form.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The Central Committee of CPI(ML) convened a Party School at the central level on 22-24 June, 1994 in New Delhi. Altogether 112 comrades from all the sectors of our Party work, among whom 12 were women, participated as students. Apart from this, four comrades of Lal Nishan Party (Leninist) also attended the school as fraternal participants. Under the principalship of
Comrade Vinod Mishra, General Secretary of the Party, who also delivered the inaugural address,
Comrades Arindam Sen, CC Member and Editor of Party’s Bengali Central Organ Deshabrati,
Comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya, Polit Bureau Member and General Secretary of AICCTU and
Comrade B. Sivaraman, Polit Bureau Member, presented their papers.
In the light of the discussion at the Central School the authors revised their papers. Here we bring you the revised version of the papers in slightly abridged form.
Inaugural Address by Comrade Vinod Mishra
Dear comrades,
I welcome you all in the Central Party School. As you are aware our party, over the years, has cultivated the habit of a comprehensive and creative study of Marxism-Leninism and all throughout 1980s, although working in underground conditions, we organised party schools from central down to the grassroots levels. In these schools both the study of Marxist classics and the socio-economic conditions of India were undertaken. This has been an important weapon in the hands of the party to integrate the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete conditions of India and thus enrich the party line and unite the whole party around it. This aspect of vigorous ideological-theoretical work undertaken by our party is little known outside and that is why outside observers are often baffled by the smooth transition our party has made from one stage to another. Many people don’t know that while conducting political activities through IFF, the party structure was kept intact from top to bottom, not simply as a scheme of work division but more importantly as the ideological-theoretical guide to the whole course of the movement. Those who maintained that the party has been sacrificed at the altar of IFF are at a loss to explain the present situation when party has taken over the entire political command without a hitch.
A month or so back, I met a comrade from an M-L faction. He had a lot of criticism against our party but he praised us for what he called the expertise in party building. Actually it is neither a quest ion of organisational skill nor of charisma of individual leaders but taking the ideological-theoretical work as the key link of party building that has enabled us to advance the cause of party building amidst the all-round political confusion and organisational chaos in the M-L movement. This is something unique to our party, a fine tradition which we must cherish and preserve. As you know, the study of Marxism has long been abandoned in CPI. Soviet propaganda material was the only literature in currency there and after Soviet collapse the whole propaganda network of CPI has simply collapsed. In CPI(M), it had always been a regimented study with heavy doses of metaphysics. There is just no scope for any independent and creative study of Marxism or for any ideological-theoretical debates within the party. Ultra-left groups have nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism. As regards their adherence to Mao’s thought, they first detach it from its Marxist-Leninist roots and then pick up certain quotations of Mao in isolation from the whole body of Mao's thought and interpret them conveniently to suit their own idealist-anarchist thinking.
In contrast, our track record is far better but I don’t think all is well in our party too. Particularly, in the last year or two there has been a certain decline on ideological plane and the theoretical level of the party has generally gone down. I think if a survey is made here of comrades present in this school in all likelihood it will reveal that a good majority of comrades have hardly touched the classics in recent times and perhaps majority among them will blame the pressure of day-to-day work for this predicament.
If I correctly remember, one of our major aims while opening up the party had been to take on the renewed bourgeois challenge to Marxism. We shall perhaps all agree that whatever has been done in this regard is precious little compared to the challenge ahead. Now when party is poised for a rapid expansion and we have called upon all communists to join CPI(M-L), the ideological-theoretical consolidation of the party has assumed a new urgency. Moreover, in an environment where the different branches of party practice are assuming more and more independent status with their increasing volume of work and full-fledged separate structures, any neglect of ideological-theoretical work is bound to give rise to one-sided and metaphysical way of thinking. Ideological-theoretical work is like the life-blood of the party without which party shall be reduced to a lifeless body. It is like the engine of the party ship without which party ship will aimlessly float in the vast ocean without ever expecting to reach the shore. This Central School is expected to make a fresh beginning in this regard, and in the coming months, the school system must be expanded to the grassroots.
Our party has completed 25 years of its life. Since 1993, when it started functioning openly, party’s influence has spread far and wide and by all accounts we have entered a new phase; rather a decisive phase of party’s advance. I say a decisive phase because precisely at this moment both the right-opportunist tactics epitomised by the CPI(M)-led Left Front government and the left-opportunist tactics of immediate seizure of power practised by People's War group have been caught in a blind alley and are showing definite signs of decay and degeneration.
The LF government experiment in West Bengal, even after 17 years of its existence at a stretch, has not only failed in generating any impact on worker-peasant masses of the country, it has also failed to achieve its other declared objective of effecting a restructuring of Centre-State relations. It has failed in providing any alternative economic policies and, despite tall claims of left and democratic or secular alternative, has failed in arresting the consolidation of Congress(I) rule at the centre. On the negative side, the Left Front rule has virtually turned into a mechanism to consolidate the rule of Indian ruling classes in West Bengal and opened the floodgates of party’s all sorts of opportunistic socio-political alliances at the national level. CPI(M)’s obsession with power in West Bengal has led it recently to vociferously champion the Poll Reforms Bill in league with Congress(I). On behalf of the revolutionary left camp, it is only our party which has evolved a comprehensive critique of the theory and practice of the Left Front government. While we criticise and oppose its anti-people and anti-democratic acts on all fronts, we lay particular emphasis on effecting a split in its rural social base on distinctly class lines. Karanda confirms that its Achilles’ heel lies there. Moreover, in a dialectical negation of the social-democratic practice of government formation we have raised the question of a left government as the genuine instrument of class struggle. It must be understood that like all the lines of demarcation in nature and society the one between Marxist and revisionist tactics too keeps on shifting and they are determined by concrete conditions. In concrete conditions of today, upgrading our tactics on government formation is the best way to deal a severe blow to social-democrats and win over their mass base and rank and file. The rest is all phrasemongering which won’t touch even the fringes of social-democratic influence. It's not a mere coincidence that despite its limited strength in West Bengal, it is only our party among all other M-L groups that has carved a niche for itself in the mainstream politics of West Bengal. Defying all pressures we have consistently upheld our principled position of left opposition to the government in West Bengal and opposed CPI(M)’s opportunist theoretical and political positions on almost all fronts.
Within the left movement in India we are regarded as the other pole in contrast to CPI(M). We have earned this distinction without for a moment sacrificing the cause of the left unity. Our tactic vis-a-vis CPI(M) represents the continuation of historic struggle against social democracy, albeit on a higher plane. With each passing day more and more revolutionary communists are able to grasp them as the only viable, effective and broad-based challenge to social democratic experiment which has reached a dead end while our party is in a position to take new and bold initiatives. This is one aspect I have in mind when I say that our party has reached a new phase, a decisive phase of its advance.
Since our unity efforts in general and with the Andhra group led by Sitaramayya in particular failed in early ’80s, party re-organisation proceeded along two different lines. Andhra group which was highly critical of Charu Mazumdar and the annihilation line put emphasis on legal and mass activities. In collaboration with certain factions operating in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra it went on to organise a central body of federal nature which popularly came to be known as the CPI(M-L) People’s War Group. It did make a promising start by developing powerful mass organisations of rural poor and of students but it soon relapsed into full-fledged dalam activities. Its theoretical-political positions were never very clear and were popularly perceived as armed militant actions for redressal of grievances of particularly tribal people. But at political-tactical plane they can only be comprehended as attempts to set up base areas of red political power. We need not repeat here the whole story of its metamorphosis into an anarchist group. Suffice it to say that this group at present is suffering from serious ideological dissensions and organisational splits and reports suggest that the leadership is contemplating major tactical changes to wriggle itself out of the impasse.
By late ’70s however, our party, on the other hand, had realised that the first phase of direct revolutionary onslaught is over and any immediate call for building red army and base areas by raising armed struggle to new heights will be nothing but left adventurism. While continuing to put primary emphasis on developing mass peasant movement including armed resistance wherever necessary, we decided to make full use of legal and even parliamentary opportunities to expand our influence among broad masses, to take up united front activities to seek new allies from various strata of Indian people as well as to utilise the contradiction within the enemy camp.
While developing the whole range of tactics suited to the concrete Indian conditions as well as to the specific stage of the revolutionary movement we had to struggle against liquidationist tendencies within our party which advocated the renunciation of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the communist party in favour of a vaguely defined left ideology and a left formation which opposed basic class approach in peasant movement and which favoured turning our party into an appendage of Left Front or Janata Dal variety of government. Party had also to consistently struggle against all manifestations of parliamentary cretinism. Our policies were vehemently opposed by the whole crowd of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries who accused us of betraying the cause of revolution, and sometimes branded us as the agent of Deng Xiaobing and at other times as official naxalites. Our party firmly and unitedly rebuffed this ultra-left onslaught and exposed the real worth of left opportunists who subsequently degenerated into full-blown anarchists, practised the worst kind of political opportunism and some even indulged in brutal killings of common people and communist cadres.
To recall the historical experience let me quote Engels from the preface to The Class Struggle In France : “(after the defeat of 1849) vulgar democracy expected a renewed outbreak any day. We declared as early as autumn 1950 that at least the first chapter of the revolutionary period was closed and that there is nothing like crisis. For which reason we were excommunicated, as traitors to the revolution, by the very people who later almost without exception, made their peace with Bismarck – so far as Bismarck found them worth the trouble”.
Writing on the new form of struggle in the new phase Engels said, “And if universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly established, unexpectedly rapid rise in the number of our votes it increased in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of their opponents and so became our best means of propaganda; that it accurately informed us concerning our own strength and that of all hostile parties, and thereby provided us with a measure of proportion for our actions second to none, safeguarding from untimely timidity as much as from untimely foolhardiness - if this had been the only advantage we gained from the suffrage it would still have been much more than enough. But it did more than this by far. In election it provided us with a means, second to none, of getting in touch with mass of the people where they still stand aloof from us; of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions against our attacks before all the people; and further it provided our representatives in Reichstag with a platform from which they could speak to their opponents in parliament and to the masses without, with quite other authority and freedom than in the press or at meetings ....
“With this successful utilisation of universal suffrage, however, an entirely new method of proletarian struggle came into operation, and this method quickly developed further. It was found that the state institutions in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organised, offer the working class still further opportunities to fight these very state institutions.”
It happened in Russia too where after the failure of 1905 revolution Lenin reorganised the party for legal and open activities and for participation in the Duma. In Russian party too left opportunist trends emerged at this juncture which accused Lenin of betrayal and equated Bolshevism with boycottism. Lenin firmly repudiated these trends, branding them as infantile disorder and stressed the need for cautious adjustment with state institutions.
Left adventurist mistakes in China led to loss of almost all the base areas and a considerable section of Red Army and forced the CPC to undertake the Long March. Left opportunists blamed Mao for betrayal when he developed the line of united front with Chiang Kai-shek against Japanese imperialism.
I refer to all these historical instances only to reiterate the fact that the revolutionary struggles in every country pass through different phases of advance and retreat, and therefore, the policies and tactics of the parties should be readjusted accordingly. This is the whole essence of Marxist thinking on tactics as well as the art of leadership. Dogmatically following the tactics suited to a different condition and calling for direct struggle even when the situation demands reorganisation of the party and of accumulating strength means walking straight into the enemy trap.
It was quite right for us to start with the Chinese model because that was the only available blueprint for revolutions in semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries. But in the course of our own experiences of last 25 years and also with the better understanding of specific aspects of Indian society it is only natural to make necessary adjustments and modifications in the Chinese model to evolve in course of time the Indian path of Indian revolution. Dogmatic adherence to Chinese path negated the very essence of Mao’s thought. Mao had to carry on a firm struggle against Chinese dogmatists who despite severe losses were bent upon blindly copying the Russian model in Chinese conditions. The famous formulation of Mao on the integration of the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete conditions of China arose only in the course of this struggle.
Many people are unaware that our party line has grown in course of serious struggles against these left opportunist trends and while their activities have increasingly reduced to squad activities we have increasingly expanded the scope and sweep of mass revolutionary movement of peasantry and activities of our armed resistance groups have become an integral part of the same. Now with the anarchist course followed by the PWG running out of steam our party stands on a firm ground to unite revolutionary communist forces around the correct line. This is the other aspect of what I refer to as a decisive phase of party advance.
As I see it, social democracy represented by CPI(M) remains our chief ideological adversary within the left movement in general and anarchism represented by PWG our chief ideological adversary within the M-L or naxalite movement in particular. A proper combination of ideological-political struggles against both these trends is imperative for building a revolutionary communist party in India.
Here I must say a few words about our tactics in parliamentary struggles. There is no denying the fact that this has brought in our own organisation serious unhealthy bourgeois tendencies. It was shocking to find people squabbling for tickets, entering into all sorts of opportunist alliances to manipulate victory, and then many of the elected representatives clamouring for money, fame and bourgeois privileges and eventually several of them betraying the party to Join ruling parties to serve their personal ends. Communist conduct, party principles and party discipline were all thrown to the winds in a most shameless manner and all this brought a lot of disgrace to the party. This shows that the significance of the party’s election tactics has not gone deep into the body of the party organisation and, moreover, the party organisation has proved quite weak in enforcing party discipline over the parliamentary group. Party has to go much farther in utilising elections and parliamentary institutions in concrete Indian conditions but if the present situation continues any further experimentation is fraught with dire consequences. I have already quoted Engels on utilisation of election platform and here I refer to Marx’s address-to the CC of the Communist League:
“ ... That everywhere workers’ candidates are put up alongside of the bourgeois-democratic candidates, that they should consist as far as possible of members of the League, and that their election is promoted by all means. Even where there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence to count their forces and to bring before the public the revolutionary attitude and party’s standpoint. In this connection, they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by doing so they are splitting the democratic party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is infinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.” Comrade Lenin too has repeatedly stressed this communist tactics vis-a-vis bourgeois-democratic parties in election and defined the role of communists as that of revolutionary opposition in the parliamentary arena. This must undoubtedly be our starting point.
The question of seat adjustments or electoral alliances and even participation in governments at state level shall all come up while pursuing parliamentary struggles in our conditions. Such and other questions must always be decided on the basis of upholding the party’s absolute independence and broadening the scope and sweep of revolutionary mass movement. Although India too is semi-feudal and semi-colonial like pre-revolutionary China, the power structure of the Indian ruling classes is vastly different from that of China and this very difference is reflected through the Indian parliamentary system. The growing phenomenon of caste, religious and regional mobilisation and the growing diversity of political forces sharing the power at different levels point more and more to the representative nature of the parliamentary institutions in the sense of power-sharing arrangements among diverse sections and strata of the ruling classes as well as the growing strains within the system itself. The situation also provides scope for revolutionary democratic forces to effect a breach within the system to this or that extent and this opportunity must be fully utilised to bring about a mass upsurge for revolutionary democracy. There is simply no alternative to this tactics in the present phase of our movement.
It must be understood that party’s election tactics is part and parcel of its overall tactics of developing revolutionary mass movements and is no way a means for career building of individuals. Hence party can and must rely on tested comrades in pursuing this tactics to a successful end.
Building a broadest possible democratic front is a strategic task before our party. Our relations with sections of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats have developed in recent times. This is perhaps the era of synthesis! We are trying to develop a theoretical framework of unity between revolutionary communist and radical socialist forces, drawing from the past history of cooperation during freedom struggle and emphasising the new round of cooperation after Soviet collapse and consequently the renewed offensive of imperialism. Ironically, our call for a left confederation has turned into a struggle against CPI(M)’s hegemony over the left movement. CPI(M)’s premise of united activities with us as formulated in their congress documents was essentially based on our ‘rectification of mistakes’; in other words, our moving closer to CPI(M)’s positions and hegemonic fold. As subsequent developments belied their expectations they went back to their old line of trying to isolate us by all possible means. I think it is always better if people shed their illusions and encounter the realities as it is. We need not worry much about CPI(M)’s vehement opposition to us. This too has its positive contribution to our growth. CPI(M)’s earlier attempts to dismiss and isolate us have come to nought and the fresh attempts are also doomed to fail. And in future, with the turn of events, our relations will be resumed on the basis of equality and recognition of differences. Only that will be a healthy and principled unity. We must have to patiently work for bringing about such a change.
A few words about the international communist movement. The collapse of Soviet bloc and the far-reaching changes in China have drastically changed the scenario of the international communist movement. The old division between pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese parties, a legacy of the Great Debate of the '60s, has become irrelevant. The Soviet collapse, however, has brought about a reorganisation of communist parties and communist platforms in Russia as well as in several East European countries. These parties are reassessing their past, particularly the harmful effects of revisionism. On the other hand, several M-L parties the world over which emerged during the stormy days of 1968-70 and sustained themselves have also been analysing the ultra-left deviations they had suffered from. This has created a favourable situation for the parties belonging to both the streams coming closer. This typical phenomenon was reflected in the recent international seminar held under the auspicies of the Workers’ Party of Belgium where more than 50 parties and groups belonging to both the erstwhile streams as well as ‘independent’ streams participated. Our party too was represented there and extended Its cooperation to such coming together.
We think that reducing the concept of the unity of the international communist movement to simply the unity of M-L parties who uphold Mao’s thought, and that too a particular interpretation of it, is too sectarian an approach and unsuited to the present conditions.
I think it is necessary to reiterate our attitude to China as it remains a great source of confusion and polemics. In our opinion, building of socialism should not be viewed in abstraction devoid of concrete conditions of the country concerned and the concrete times. Building socialism in a backward country like China and in conditions when leaving apart a few small socialist countries nowhere else socialism exists and there are no prospects for any proletarian revolution to come for a fairly long time in any advanced capitalist country, is a specific problem. So it is not the question of building socialism in general that ought to be discussed rather building socialism in China in the present-day conditions that must be the point of departure for any meaningful discussion. These considerations only lead us to appreciate the general orientation of Chinese reforms. There is no question of supporting each and every measure of CPC and Chinese government. The support to the general orientation at the same time implies our serious concerns over the risks involved and, of course, criticisms of the policies which we consider harmful to the general interests of socialism and the international communist movement.
We are neither in favour of a China or CPC-centered international communist bloc nor are we eager to join any international formation that makes condemnation of China its central concern. This I think sums up our attitude to China as well as to the international communist movement.
We are living in times when almost nil the basic tenets of Marxism are being challenged and declaration is made of the end of history. This reminds me of Marx who in his Poverty of Philosophy wrote some 150 years back, “When they say that the present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production—are natural, the economists imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity .with the laws of nature. Thus these relations are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.”
So bourgeois philosophers and economists had declared the end of history much earlier. But still history progressed and Marxism played the guiding role in its advance. Marx had challenged the eternity of bourgeois relations of production and through a rare scientific insight shown that these relations too, like earlier relations, are but transitory in nature. Eternity of change lies at the core of Marxist philosophy and all future attempts to change the world shall only draw sustenance from Marxism. Marx in his grand treatise Das Capital had exposed the exploitative basis of bourgeois relations of production. He wrote in his Wage Labour and Capital, “Even the most favourable situation for the working class, the most rapid possible growth of capital, however much it may improve the material existence of the worker, does not remove the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the bourgeoisie, the interests of the capitalists. Profits and wages remain as before in inverse proportion.
“If capital is growing rapidly wages may rise, the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened.”
Despite all the changes in the structure and organisation of production, the exploitative basis of the bourgeois relations of production, the extraction of surplus value remains in tact and if anything the social gulf between imperialism and dependent countries on the international scale and between the proletariat and bourgeoisie within the developed capitalist world has only widened. And hence the antagonism, the motive force that continues to propel history forward.
And yet the proletarian struggle has suffered setbacks, socialism built over a large part of the globe has suffered reversal. Hence mere reiteration of faith in Marxism, in the victory of proletariat is not enough. Marxism can be defended only through its enrichment.
By the time Marx’s study of British capitalism, the most ideally developed country of capitalism, the base material for his Das Capital was complete, free competition had started giving way to the monopolies. The stage of finance capital, of monopoly capitalism replaced competition within the country by competition among capitalist countries for the world market. And thus arose the phenomena of world wars and of proletarian revolution breaking the imperialist chain where it is weakest. And then again the rise of a single economic, military and political bloc of imperialism led by USA and the defeat and subsequent collapse of socialism in the prolonged cold war.
This interrelation in the background of structural changes in capitalist production owing to scientific and technological revolution and virtual stagnation in the socialist economy opens up new fields of study and investigation for Marxist theoreticians the world over. Communists have before them over seventy five years of experience of building socialism. One learns only through one’s mistakes and hence the study I mentioned about shall essentially be study in the political economy of socialism comparable only to the dimensions of Das Capital.
CHALLENGES to Marxism today — the subject can be approached at various levels. For one, we might choose to concentrate on the post-Soviet theoretical assaults. But already we have had some encounters with these in seminars, in Liberation articles and in Fifth Congress documents. Moreover, the two core ideas in these attacks, namely, that democracy has triumphed and that the communists are finished for good, have been proved false in Russia itself. This has compelled the cheer-leaders of capitalism to bite dust and admit that things are not that simple.
Then there are challenges thrown up not by some theorists or ideologues, but by life itself. In the advanced capitalist countries there has been a marked decline in the relative importance of manufacturing industry and in the percentage of industrial workers; in developed as well as backward countries various non-class identities and conflicts such as those based on caste, religious/ethnic community etc. seem to dominate the scene; in a word, a lot has changed (in social structures and superstructures) since the times of Marx and even of Lenin. Thirdly, and in part as a reflection of the above changes, there is a plethora of “alternative” theories — old, new and renewed ones — which claim to dislodge mainstream Marxism from its pride of place. Here we shall be concerned with this third category of challenges. And that too, we shall have to be selective in dealing with the alternative theoretical trends or conceptual frameworks. For the present paper, we shall take up only the Trotskyite and Gramscian frameworks for a primary discussion while taking a quick look at the proponents of the so-called post-Marxist school.
Perhaps we owe you an explanation regarding this selection. The Soviet collapse is widely seen as a collapse of the Stalinist monolith. It has therefore accorded a new respectability to those of Stalin's contemporaries who put forward alternative visions within a broadly Marxist framework. This is particularly true for Leon Trotsky, by far the greatest intellectual and political stalwart after Lenin and Stalin. As for Antonio Gramsci, he was not an anti-Stalinist as such. But his political positions often differed from those of Stalin and Comintern, particularly around the time of the Sixth Congress (1928). More importantly, he has left behind a very distinctive analytical framework which has been espoused by a good many non-party leftist intellectuals all over the world. In our country, after Marx, Lenin and Mao, Gramsci is perhaps the greatest influence in leftist intellectual circles and has been the basic Inspiration behind subaltern historiography. It is precisely with his most zealous followers in mind that we include Gramsci in our discussion, although Gramsci himself never formed a theoretical trend or political school opposed to Marxism-Leninism.
FOR our present purposes, two questions — or rather two sides of the same question — are highly relevant. These are : the Stalin-Trotsky debate on “socialism in one country” and the Trotskyite theory of world revolution. It will be convenient to take up these questions one by one.
After the death of Lenin, the most fundamental debate that cropped up in the CPSU(B) was: is it possible to build socialism in one country? Among the seven-member Polit Bureau, leaders like Stalin and Bukharin asserted that it is. And those like Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev opined that it was possible, and after the Russian revolution necessary, to start building socialism in a single country, but not possible to achieve full socialism at a national level. In those days, more than a theoretical question it was one of life and death for the young Soviet Republic, and naturally it generated a lot of heat and passion on both sides.
Trotsky built his case on the Marxist-Leninist dictum that “the complete victory of the socialist revolution in one country alone is inconceivable and demands the most active cooperation of at least several advanced countries, which do not include Russia”.
His insistence was that, while doing everything possible to build socialism in the USSR, the Soviet party and the Comintern should give up the pessimistic assessment (as he read it) of the prospect of the European revolution and adopt a more active or leftist policy to promote the same. In this context he, like Zinoviev and Kamenev, attacked the then recent shift in the Comintern policy in favour of united front with social democratic parties and with trade unions led by them.
Joining issue with Trotsky, Stalin “divided the question into two.” In the first place, he treated the “complete victory of socialism” as a “full guarantee against the restoration of the old order”, which is possible only through “the joint efforts of the proletarians of several countries”. Secondly, he proclaimed that the USSR had “all that is necessary for building a complete socialist society.”
In support of his position, Stalin quoted Lenin: “Infinitely hackneyed is the argument that they learned by rote during the development of West European Social Democracy, namely, that we are not yet ripe for socialism, that, as certain ‘learned’ gentlemen among them express it, the objective economic prerequisites for socialism do not exist in our country (Notes on Sukhanov)”.
Trotsky was not convinced, however. Drawing upon the Communist Manifesto he argued that historically society tended towards integration on an ever-larger scale. In the transition from the feudal to bourgeois order Europe had overcome its medieval particularism. The bourgeoisie had created the national market; and on its basis the modern nation-state had taken shape. But the productive forces and economic energies of the advanced nations could not settle within national boundaries; they had outgrown these even under capitalism with its international division of labour. As the next higher phase of societal development, socialism must carry the international division of labour still further; it could not step back and stand on a national ground, in seclusion and self-sufficiency. The high level of technology, efficiency, and abundance which socialism presupposed, a level superior to that achieved by capitalism, could be attained only with what Marx and Engels had called "the many-sided intercourse of nations", and the most advanced nations at that.
Thus continued the debate, the full details of which we cannot reproduce here. Nor are we going to dwell upon the polemics on overall policy of the Communist International (CI). On the particular question of socialism in one country we must say that in terms of Marxist orthodoxy, Trotsky’s position was unassailable. But, as a thorough doctrinaire, he was never good at bringing theory into correspondence with the real march of events, with the changing course of life. During his last two-three years, Lenin had sensed the decline in the prospects of the spark of the Russian revolution starting a prairie fire, and had adjusted his international and national policies accordingly, the NEP being a case in point. And soon after his death, certain developments like the abortive German revolution and Canton uprising made it even clearer that for a considerable length of time the Soviet proletariat would probably have to build socialism alone and unaided. In view of this, Stalin led the majority in the party leadership in hammering out a theory of socialism in one country. Of course, it was going too far to attribute this new theory to Lenin, which Stalin did presumably to invoke the authority of the deceased leader in the face of Trotsky’s powerful onslaught. But Stalin’s theory met the political needs of the time and aroused the party ranks and the people in embarking upon a heroic course of socialist construction. In that particular juncture, Trotsky’s insistence on the impossibility of socialism in one country was not only theoretically stale but politically harmful.
Trotsky based his arguments on an overly optimistic assessment of the prospects of the world revolution. History badly belied his hopes. And led by Stalin the people of USSR created history in building socialism in the face of heaviest odds.
And yet, questions remain, or freshly crop up. Was there no truth in Trotsky’s allegation that the Stalinist leadership of the USSR and the CI often subordinated the interests of revolutionary struggle in other countries to those of the one country where socialism was being built? If so, did that not hurt the cause of the world revolution and thereby Soviet Union’s real, long-term interests which lay in overcoming isolation?
These are historical questions we can take up not today, but after the school. However, there is at least one thing which relates to the present and demands a brief discussion.
According to Trotsky, one important reason why socialism was impossible in one country was that imperialist powers would unite to sabotage and crush it. Stalin opined that inter-imperialist contradictions wouldn't allow that to happen. In the event, Stalin was proved correct, at least during his life-time which included the second world war. But today we have a different situation. There is only one superpower; the element of interdependence and mutual assistance among imperialist powers has greatly increased thanks to transnational corporations, the new-look GATT and the forthcoming WTO etc.; and trade wars therefore seem unlikely to lead to military hostilities. With the decline of the nonaligned movement and various Third World organisations, the US domination over world affairs and over the UN now goes almost unchallenged, as demonstrated by a series of events starting from the US invasion of Iraq. In such a situation, and in view of the advancing waves of STR (scientific and technological revolution) in capitalist countries, is it now possible to build socialism in a single country?
Today, for all practical purposes, that single country is China. Because North Korea and Cuba, for all their inspiring endeavours, are but small islands in the vast ocean of world economy and polity. When we see this China reintroducing a market-economy and indigenous and foreign capital (with all its harmful socio-cultural corollaries) on a vast scale and pressing for closer integration with the world capitalist economy through membership of GATT, we understand that the old question has to be rethought in a new way. But China is doing all this and emerging as a great economic and political power — with socialist planning, domination of stale ownership of means of production and leadership of the communist party; so there is no question of giving up the socialist orientation and going back to capitalism. This is how history has reformulated the question for us, and we must study it afresh in the light of new experience.
It was not only through the polemics with Stalin that the Trotskyite theory of world revolution took shape. It found its practical embodiment in the Fourth International. Let us, then, have a look at the ideology and experience of the FI, which can be discussed in four stages.
After five years of preparation, the Fl was founded at a conference with 21 delegates claiming to represent 11 countries, held secretly in a village near Paris in September 1938. Proclaiming the rise of the FI on the debris of the Third, Trotsky launched an attack on those of his followers who had scuttled such a move in 1936 and who still considered the venture premature: “The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events: the greatest defeat of the proletariat in history. The cause for these defeats is to be found in the degeneration and the perfidy of the old leadership. The class struggle does not tolerate an interruption. The Third International, following the Second, is dead for purposes of revolution. Long Live the Fourth International!
“But has the time yet arrived to proclaim its creation? ... the sceptics are not quietened down. The Fourth International, we answer, has no need of being 'proclaimed'. It exists and it fights. Is it weak? Yes, its ranks are not numerous because it is still young. They are as yet chiefly cadres. But these cadres are pledges for the future. Outside of these cadres there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name”.
This he said in the last section of the basic document of the founding congress: “Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International”, better known as Transitional Programme. The immediate political perspective was thus seen in “the greatest defeats of the proletariat”, i.e., the victory of Stalinism. Magnifying this stress point still further, Trotsky went on to observe: “The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership. The advanced workers, united in the Fourth International, show their class the way out of the crisis”.
And, despite the acknowledged numerical weakness the basic programme ended with (he rousing call: “Workers — men and women — of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!”
Well, there was nothing wrong with this revolutionary optimism. But what actually happened to this ‘approaching victory’ under the banner of FI?
“Trotsky's prediction that the Second World War would end in a revolutionary upsurge even greater than the one after the First World War, and that it would generally escape from the control of the traditional organizations (especially the Stalinist parties), turned out to be inaccurate”.
This is Ernest Mandel, veteran leader of the FI, writing on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
The anti-Stalinist logic takes us to a ridiculous position: the ‘revolutions’ in Grenada and Nicaragua are more authentically socialist than the Chinese! Comrades, you can guess what sort of political consolidation could result from this quality of theoretical analysis. No wonder, therefore, that during and after the second world war a series of splits took place in the FI sections in the USA, France, Germany etc., culminating in division at the top in 1953-54. In the words of Pierre Frank, another veteran leader, “the other splits proved, by their nature and in actual fact, to be rather splits away from the Trotskyite movement. On the other hand, this split was primarily a division of the movement itself into two parts, one continuing the International and the other organised in a committee that acted as a faction... Actually, it had the effect... of injecting into the International, into, the part continuing the International and the other, both a disequilibrium and a reinforcement of the centrifugal forces ... ”
This did not mean, of course, an end to the history of splits, confusion and degeneration of certain sections (e.g., the comparatively powerful Ceylonese section). But I will not go into details on this. Let us rather listen to what the Trotskyites themselves have to say on the causes of these confusions and splits.
Pierre Frank in his authentic history of the FI upto 1978 gives out basically two sets of objective and subjective reasons. First, “totally unexpected developments” in the post-war world which bewildered the movement: “a capitalism deprived of its colonies yet flourishing more than ever, with a working class shorn of political aspirations and most exclusively preoccupied with its standard of living; in the workers’ states an extension of the new relations of production, with bureaucratic domination maintained and without any workers’ mobilisations; in the colonial countries a revolutionary upsurge, based essentially on the peasantry ...”
The second important factor, according to Frank, was that “the organisation was numerically weak, with very weak roots among the masses... Subjectively, the situation was aggravated in numerous cases by the fact that since the organisation was tiny, it was viewed by some as a secondary factor, to which too much importance should not be attached. Cutting it in half did not seem to matter much, numerically speaking, especially for those who believed that they had found the orientation which would lead to rapid growth ... Such feelings are the exact opposite of those that prevail in mass organisations, where the members, responsible to large masses and aware of the role of the organisation perse, are loath to initiate splits — even when serious differences arise within these organisations.” Isn’t this a splendid analysis? Certainly it is. The basic political and organisational factors are spelt out clearly and honestly. Only one thing is missing. And that is an answer to the question: why did the only correct and revolutionary centre of world proletariat fail to provide adequate explanations for the new developments and to strike roots in the mass upsurges in different parts of the world? Has this not something to do with the basic tenets of Trotskyite theory? We shall come back to this towards the end of this paper.
Everything has its opposite. If confusions and splits have been the dominant feature of the history of FI, it also had at least two brief periods of growth. The first one came in 1948 when, in the words of Pierre Frank, “the first crisis of Stalinism erupted in the shape of the Soviet-Yugoslav split.” The FI immediately sprang into action to utilise this fine opportunity : “The Trotskyist organisations very quickly mobilised to help the Yugoslav revolution answer the torrent of slander emanating from Moscow and Communist parties. Campaigns were launched in numerous countries. Leaflets, pamphlets, meetings were used in the fight against Stalinism. In several countries it was the Fourth International's organisations that initiated the youth brigades that went to Yugoslavia — brigades of inquiry, support and work in the service of the Yugoslav revolution”.
Unfortunately, the euphoria was short-lived: “For a short period, the sections of the Fourth International, profiting from the Yugoslav crisis, became stronger. But this process was interrupted during 1950 when, at the beginning of the Korean war, the Yugoslav leadership... took a disgraceful position on the international scene. In the United Nations General Assembly, Yugoslavia voted for UN military intervention against North Korea. This position succeeded in alienating many of Yugoslavia’s defenders. The hopes of recruiting a larger revolutionary vanguard because of the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute were thus destroyed, until such a time the crisis of Stalinism would erupt elsewhere”.
The FI thus lay in wait for the next crisis of ‘Stalinism’, which apparently came in the 1960s in the shape of the Moscow-Peking break. The FI was happy to note that this break “shook the Kremlin’s authority in the communist world to a tremendous extent” but at the same time it was disappointed to find that the CPC actually upheld Stalin. They could not therefore profit from this break and decided that it did not contribute to “any decisive advance for revolutionary Marxism”.
We shall have occasion to come back to this point later; for now let us have a look at the second period of growth. This opportunity came in 1968, the year of a revolutionary student revolt and workers’ uprising in France, the start of the popular Tet offensive in Vietnam, the ‘Prague Spring’, and a hightide in revolutionary struggles coupled with acute crises of the ruling cliques in many parts of the world. The revolutionary upturn was almost global, and this rendered the logic of the International more plausible than ever before. The Trotskyites in many countries made a good bargain out of this situation, most notably in France. To be sure, they were not alone in this. Other radical streams including the revolutionary Marxists-Leninists or followers of Mao made rapid progress in different parts of the world. But whereas the latter struck deep roots in at least some Third World countries and continued to grow despite occasional setbacks the Trotskyite boom did not last longer than six or seven years.
We cannot discuss here all the major propositions of the 12th (1985) and 13th (1986) world congresses of the FI. But we must refer to its positions on at least three questions which are more pertinent to our present discussion.
For Trotsky, the objective basis of the FI lay in the globalised economy — “the international division of labour and the world market” and the fact that “the productive forces of capitalist society have long outgrown the national boundaries”.
This disappearance of inter-imperialist contradiction — which Lenin regarded as one of the basic features of our epoch and which led him to comment that ‘imperialism is war’ — has far-reaching strategic implications. Above all, it puts a premium on “class struggle on a world scale” — a notion which finds place in umpteen times in the 12th and the 13th congress documents and which makes an international directing centre all the more necessary. The independent roles of national-level revolutionary parties are not denied, but the ‘objective’ trend of the time is shown to be in the direction of more Internationalisation. The hint is clear: whosoever claims to be a Marxist, must observe this objective law of history and join the International!
For a true disciple of Lenin and Trotsky, the internationalist approach must permeate everything. The 12th Congress Report assert s: “The dynamics of the present world situation is above all one of the interaction between the crisis of the international capitalist system, the crisis of the system of rule established in the bureaucratised workers states and the crisis of the organised mass movement. The last-named crisis is also described as “the crisis of proletarian leadership on a world scale”. From this again, follows the same task:
“Building a genuine world revolutionary organisation remains a priority task which corresponds to the growing internationalisation of class struggles which is the outgrowth of the growing internationalisation of productive forces, and to the crisis of revolutionary leadership on a world scale.” (From “Report to the 12th World Congress”, published in India by A R Desai, p 76, emphasis in the original)
So the great task today, as it was 60 years ago, is to “build” (mark this word in the official document quoted above, and the emphasis on the word “remains”) International. But does not one exist already? Yes, it does, but it has neither a regularly functioning headquarters at the top, nor any mass following below. The present international is actually nothing more than “a first step towards the goal of building an international with member organisations that are revolutionary parties with a real mass implantation. We know that we are not that organisation. Our sections are too weak to claim that. But we hope that ... we will be able to play an active role in preparing for this future International.”
This, of course, is the most difficult task. And yet, the vanguards must be vanguards. The great struggle initiated by Trotsky must go on. But now with the collapse of Stalin’s party and the Stalinist regimes, the old credo of anti-Stalinism — though it remains and will remain valid — is not enough to sustain any such effort. So a broader approach is necessary, and the 13th Congress valiantly proposes one:
“We have no reason to slay on the sidelines and cultivate the identity of a sect. On the contrary, we propose bringing revolutionaries together in the same democratic organisation, ... to turn together towards left reformist or populist currents and propose unity in action at all levels against imperialism, the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy.”
Well and good, but what about the real prospects? On this, the less said the better. The same document from which we have just quoted has to declare that “unfortunately there is no significant current outside the Fourth International that puts the construction of a revolutionary International immediately on the agenda.”
The very first thing that strikes one in the history of FI is Trotsky’s and his successors’ paranoid hatred against Stalin and Stalinism. Stalin also had developed similar feelings towards Trotsky, but there was a crucial difference. Neither Stalin personally nor the CI as an institution ever decided political tasks and priorities on this basis. By contrast, the Trotskyite International
(i) arose “out of ... the greatest defeats of the proletariat” caused by “the degeneration and perfidy of the old leadership”, i.e., it arose as a reaction against Stalinism;
(ii) made pro- or anti-Stalinism the touchstone for deciding whether something is genuine or not, e.g., viewing the revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua as more “authentic” than the Chinese one simply because the parties which led them were not Stalinist in origin;
(iii) found in anti-Stalinism the principal vehicle for augmenting its own forces (e.g., after the Soviet-Yugoslav break);
(iv) look the assessment of Stalinism and the USSK as the principal point of debates and splits (e.g.,. the official document “The Rise and Decline of Stalinism” prepared just after the third world congress (1951) which, in the words of Pierre Frank, “sparked the powder keg” leading to widespread confusions and splits, and which was completed, after 6 years of debate, in the fifth world congress (1957); and
(v) finds itself, after the demise of Stalin's party and the Stalinist regimes practically irrelevant and groping for a thorough political-organisational overhauling.
Such a narrow political vision beneath the rhetoric of broad “internationalism” has, always and everywhere, determined the sectarianism Trotskyites are notorious for. Essentially an anti-Stalinist sect, their rise, decay and death is nothing more than a changing penumbra of Stalinism.
But we cannot slop here, we must go deeper into the basic ideological flaw of Trotskyism on the question of world revolution.
This basic flaw, I think, is that Trotsky for all his erudition never grasped the real dynamics of world revolution in our epoch. This is manifested in his totally erroneous positions on two closely related questions : (a) the relative roles of capitalistically developed (or ‘proletarian’) and underdeveloped (or ‘peasant’) countries in world revolution; and (b) the relative roles of workers and peasants in the revolutions of backward countries.
As far back as in 1853 Marx wrote that “the next uprising of people of Europe ... may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire (the Taiping Rebellion in China — AS) than on any other cause that exists ... ”. With great revolutionary optimism he added: “as the greater part of the regular commercial circle has already been run through by British trade, it may safely be argued that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions in the Continent ... ”
Marx wrote these lines in his article “Revolution in China and in Europe”, published in the New York Dully Tribune. Similar views were expressed also by Engels in his article “Persia and China”. But it was only in Lenin’s time that a distinct shift of the revolutionary storm-centre from the West to the East gradually took shape. Lenin was quick to capture this shift in a series of articles starting with “Inflammable Material in World Politics” (1908) through “Democracy and Populism in China” (1912) and culminating in the celebrated “Backward Europe and Advanced. Asia”(1913). The idea of revolutions in backward countries as locomotives of world revolution in the epoch of imperialism was confirmed by the experience of the Russian revolution and it was further developed in the first few congresses of the CI.
Trotsky never grasped all this. He wrote a lot on, and attached much importance to, the revolutionary ferment in Asian and Latin American countries, particularly in China. But he did this from a thoroughly Eurocentric perspective. To substantiate this point, we will seek the help of one-time active Trotskyite and the most authentic (and sympathetic) biographer of Leon Trotsky. Describing Trotsky’s thought process and the basis of his optimism at the time of founding of the FI, Issac Deuetscher writes : “His expectations were based on the twin premise that the coming world war would be followed by a revolutionary aftermath similar to that which had followed the first world war, but larger in scope and force; and that the Stalinist parties, like the Social-Democratic ones would use all their strength to stem the tide of revolution. More than ever he saw the advanced industrial countries of the West as the main battlefield of socialism; from their working class was to come the salutary revolutionary initiative that alone could break the vicious circle — socialism in a single country and bureaucratic absolutism — in which the Russian revolution was imprisoned ... In his introduction to Living Thoughts of Karl Marx, written in 1939, he refuted the Rooseveltian New Deal and all attempts to rejuvenate and reform capitalism as ‘reactionary and helpless quackery’; he pointed out how relevant Das Kapital was to the problems of the American economy; and he greeted the dawn of a new epoch of Marxism in the United States. In Marxism too ‘America will in a few jumps catch up with Europe and outdistance it. Progressive technology and a progressive social structure will pave their own way in the sphere of doctrine. The best theoreticians of Marxism will appear on American soil. Marx will become the mentor of the advanced American worker.”
Trotsky always visualised the revolutionary prospects in backward countries, continues Deuetscher, “as subordinate to the prospect of revolution in the West; ‘once it begins, the socialist revolution will spread from country to country with immeasurably greater force than fascism is spreading now. By the example and with the aid of advanced nations, the backward nations will also be brought into the mainstream of socialism’. By carrying to an extreme the logic of classical Marxism, which had postulated progressive technology and a progressive social structure as the basis for socialist revolution, he was unwittingly exposing the discrepancy between theory and facts. Had the advanced industrial countries played the part for which classical Marxism had cast them in theory, no country should have been more congenial to Marxism and socialism than the United States. Trotsky did not and could not foresee that in the next few decades the backward nations would form the ‘mainstream of socialism’, that the ‘advanced West’ would seek to contain it or to throw it back; and that the United States in particular, instead of evolving its own ultramodern version of Marxism, would become the world's greatest and most powerful bulwark against it.”
Let us now pass on to Trotsky’s position on the other question, or rather the other side of the same question — the role of the peasantry in revolutions in backward countries. This question is best discussed in relation to the Chinese experience, to which Trotsky attached a great importance and where Trotsky had a handful of followers. To quote Deuetscher again, “In a statement written two months after the proclamation of the Fourth International he (Chen Tuhsiu, who had embraced Trotskyism some time back—AS) explained ... why the revolutionary movement in China must base itself on the peasantry, and not (as Trotsky and Chen himself had expected — AS) on the urban workers ... The Trotskyites, by their sectarian arrogance, their purely negative altitude towards Maoism, and their insensitivity to the needs of the War against Japan, were cutting themselves off from political reality.”
But Trotsky was too much of a doctrinaire to lake either his followers or Mao Zedong seriously: “Applying the traditional Marxist conception even to China, he viewed with distrust Mao Tse-tung’s ‘peasant armies’, fearing that, like many such armies in China’s history, they might turn into instruments of reaction and come into conflict with the workers, if the latter failed to resume their revolutionary initiative. Despite Chen Tu-hsiu’s warnings, he believed that the Chinese working class would recover its political elan and reassert itself as the leading force of the revolution. It remained an axiom with him that in all modern class struggle supremacy belongs of necessity to the towns; and the idea of an insurgent movement conquering the cities from the outside — from the countryside — was to him both unreal and retrograde. In West and East alike, he insisted, the revolution would either be proletarian in the true sense or it would not be at all.”
We criticise Trotsky not simply because he failed to make correct predictions, but because he failed miserably to grasp the very basis and direction of the world revolutionary process in our epoch. He never grasped the most important strategic conclusion arrived at by the Leninist analysis of imperialism, namely, that coming revolutions will breakout at the weakest links in the chain of imperialism. In this sense, he remained a captive of 19th century Marxism and missed the train of Leninism. More, he remained essentially anti-Leninist to his very end at least on this vital question of world revolutionary strategy. And to the credit of his successors in the FI, it must be said that they followed their leader’s steps with utmost devotion, rendering him more profound in the process. Thus they continued Trotsky’s sceptic attitude to Mao even after t he victory of the Chinese Revolution and refused to rethink their Eurocentric strategic perspectives. Similarly, they never bothered about Mao’s historic struggle against Khruschevite revisionism, for in their coloured eyes it was simply a fight between two “parties of Stalinist origin”, to be welcomed on that ground alone.
As a natural corollary to doctrinairism, Trotsky developed a high degree of subjectivism. This used to be manifested not only in his baseless hopes about the prospects of the FI, but also in his wild expectations that the “Stalinist Clique” in the Soviet Union would be overthrown by “true Holsheviks” any moment. He fondly believed in quick victories, for he believed that that the inescapable “laws of history” were on his side. On this point too, his successors in the FI have followed their great teacher unflinchingly to this day.
Such was Trotsky, such are his followers. Even if we leave apart the numerous other misconceptions and misdeeds of Trotskyism in different periods and different parts of the world, we have to denounce it because it sought—and seeks — to deny and sabotage the twentieth century advance in Marxism bequeathed to us in the shape of Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.
NOTES:
Younger than Lenin by 9 years, Leon Davidovich Trotsky joined the RSDLP in the opening years of this century. From the very beginning he virulently opposed Lenin's political and organisational lines, but did not completely merge with the Mensheviks. In 1917 and the immediately following years he came nearest to Lenin, though differences often cropped up on minor as well as major issues. He won universal recognition, including from a lithe contemporary communists like Rosa Luxemburg, as the Russian revolutionary leader next only to Lenin if not his equal. Lenin too described him as “personally perhaps the most capable man in the present CC” (Collected Works, Vol. 36, p 595). During his last few years — the difficult years of steering the new soviet state — Lenin had the occasion to acknowledge Trotsky's innovative idea which he (Lenin) had opposed but accepted later; and to declare on certain questions Trotsky was capable of defending an idea even better than Lenin (LCW, Vol. 36, p 598 and Vols. 33-36). Of course, Trotsky had his share of Lenin’s criticisms from death bed, but perhaps he got much less of it than Stalin.
After Lenin’s death Trotsky as the leader of the ‘Lett Opposition’ engaged in the bitterest of polemics with Stalin, particularly on the question of building socialism in one country. The opposition was ruthlessly crushed. In early 1929Trotsky was deported to Turkey. There he brought out the journal ‘Opposition Bulletin’ and carried on efforts to mobilise small groups of supporters — i.e., breakaway factions from communist parties — in different countries. Initially he expected that the Comintern leadership would soon be won back from ‘Stalinist usurpers’ by ‘Bolshevik Leninists’ i.e. his followers. When this did not happen and when fascism came to power in Germany in 1933, he set about founding a new, Fourth International. This was eventually set up in September 1938. His main lieutenants were left intellectuals and outcast communists including Chen fu-hsiu, the former head of CI'C.
By (this time he had been granted asylum in Mexico, where he was assassinated in 1940.
Trotsky is best known for his virulent variety of anti-Stalinism and of course his thesis of world revolution. Out perhaps it is worth pointing here to two of his relatively little known observations. First, Trotsky considered Stalinism as a betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution, but through all his ordeals and to the dying day he firmly believed and propagated that USSK was a socialist country. His argument was that the ruling bureaucracy was not a class but only an excrescence on the body of socialism; the class that held state power was the working class. So he was always for defending the Soviet Union, a dictatorship to the proletariat. In fact, he had to pay a heavy price for clinging to this assessment many of his prominent followers abandoned him over difference on this question.
Second, Trotsky was highly optimistic about the international revolutionary potential in the 30s and believed that this potential could be quickly actualised under the banner of the FI. But if this were not to happen, if capitalism were to survive for mo re than two decades, that would spell the end of the Soviet Union, he had warned. In that case Marxists (himself included) would have to concede that they had misjudged their historical moment, and the Russian revolution would turn out to be another Paris Commune on an extended scale.
THERE can be hardly any theoretical discussion without an encounter with the theorists of “crisis of Marxism” or trends that come with a “post” prefix like post-Marxism or post-modernism. But ironically, preceding and to an extent prompting this phase was a period which witnessed a vociferous ‘return to Marx’ and the rise of trends like “structural Marxism”. Interestingly, it is in France that both structuralism and post-structuralism or post-modernism in general have found fertile grounds.
Before we proceed with a critical examination of post-Marxism, let us briefly recall the period of structuralism and structural Marxism. As a methodological-theoretical trend, structuralism sought to understand society by studying not the conscious activity of the human subjects but the unconscious, objective structures these activities presuppose. It evolved from three basic streams:
(a) The linguistic studies of F. Saussure and N. Jacobson who investigated the structure underlying language in general;
(b) Levi-Strauss’ path breaking study of the structure of primitive societies; and
(c) Jacques Lacan’s study of structures in psychology and the early Foucault's study of the conditions of emergence of certain theoretical discourses like psychiatry, clinical medicine etc.
The influence of structuralism in France led also to a structuralist reading of Marxism. The key figure in this trajectory was Louis Althusser. Jointly with associates like E Balibar and N. Poulantzas, he developed what came to be known as Structural Marxism. Its principal features can be summarised like this:
(i) There is an ‘epistemological break’ in Marxism, separating the mature from the early Marx. What we need, therefore, is not a simple, literal reading of Marx but a ‘symptomatic’ reading. What does this mean? In the words of N Geras, “The explicit discourse (must be) read conjointly with the absences, lacunae and silences which, constituting a second ‘silent discourse’, are so many symptoms of the unconscious problematic buried in the text. Like all knowledge, reading, correctly understood and correctly practised, is not vision but theoretical labour and production”.
(ii) Such ‘symptomatic reading’ leads to the rejection of the humanism (i.e., viewing the human essence as the ‘subject’ of history) of early Marx and its corollary, empiricism. But why? In the words of Althusser, empiricism opposes “a given subject to a given object and calls knowledge the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object”.
(iii) The result of Marx’s theoretical practice was the concept of society as a totality “whose unity is constituted by a specific type of complexity, which introduces instances, that, following Engels, we can, very schematically, reduce to three: the economy, politics and ideology”.
Each of these ‘instances’ is a structure having its own peculiar time, its own rhythm of development. But they are also united in a greater structure — a structure of structures. The complex and uneven relationship of the instances or levels (the economy, politics etc.) to each other at a specific time is called a ‘conjuncture’. Every conjuncture is said to be ‘over determined’ in that each of the levels contributes to determining the overall structure as well as itself being determined by it. Of course, the determining role of each level is not equal; their autonomy is only relative and the economy is the determining factor in the last instance.
(iv) The complex process of determination and over determination shows that causality itself is structural. Therefore, history should be conceived of a process without a subject : “The structure of the relations of production determines the places and function occupied and adopted by the agents of production, who are never more than the occupants of these places... The true ‘subjects’ (in the sense of the constitutive subjects of the process) are therefore not these occupants or functionaries ... but the definition and distribution of these places and functions. The true subjects are these definers and distributors: the relations of production (and political and ideological social relations). But since these are ‘relations' they cannot be thought within the category ‘subjects’”.
The basic point is that Althusser sought to introduce in Marxism an overbearing element of scientific rationality and a rigid structuralism which excluded the human beings as the subject of history. His two major works, ‘For Marx’ and ‘Reading Capital’ (the latter co-authored with E. Balibar) were hailed as a ‘return to Marx’ and a powerful attempt to incorporate certain latest achievements in linguistics, psychoanalysis etc., into Marxist philosophy. But many elements of his systems—e.g., the total rejection o f the ‘subject’, the independence of theoretical practice and so on — came to be severely criticised. From the mid-70s, however, Althusser abandoned some of his positions while his associates and followers went further than him on this road. The decomposition of Structural Marxism and the decline of structuralism led to an opposite trend: a forceful return and backlash of the subject and subjectivity. It is against this backdrop that post-modernism arose in France in 1970s.
To look at this backdrop from another side, SIR had already changed and was daily changing much of the basic structure of capitalism, giving it a new lease of life and introducing wide-ranging changes in people’s lifestyles, outlooks and what not. Simultaneously, the symptoms of growing problems in socialist countries had also begun to acquire increasing visibility. On the other hand, the vanguard revolutionary role of the working class and the communist parties was becoming less and less conspicuous even as it seemed to be counter-balanced by the rise of the New Left (with which many of the post-modernists had sympathised or identified themselves in the prime of their lives) and by new breakthroughs in non-class movements like those of women, students etc. The combined impact of these and certain other developments was that for a good section of intellectuals, the tenets of classical Marxism seemed to lose at least some of their validity. In a word, the changed world demanded a new role of the proletariat and a thorough development of its “ism”, its theoretical arsenal. But that was not forthcoming, at least not in Europe. The ideology and politics of post-modernism arose as yet another petty bourgeois attempt to fill this void.
Viewed from yet another angle, if modernism belongs to industrial societies, postmodernism belongs to ‘post-industrial’ societies. Politically, postmodernism seeks to address a new constellation of issues and movements based on gender, race, environment and ecology etc., in contrast to the traditional emphasis on economy and on classes and class struggle. According to some commentators, the history of capitalism can be divided into three phases, each with its own ‘cultural dominant’. Competitive capitalism was linked with realism; monopoly capitalism was the epoch of modernism and multinational capitalism is the age of postmodernism.
One of the basic strands on which post-modernism flays modernism is on the latter’s so-called obsession with “scientism”. Marxism too is accused of being affected by this scientistic bias. Arising in the 19th century milieu which basked in the glory of science and accepted the latter’s lordship over all branches of knowledge, Marxism too had come to be conceptualised and discussed in terms of scientific philosophy, scientific socialism, political economy as a science, the historical science and so on. In his famous speech at the graveside of Karl Marx, Engels had referred to his departed friend as “a man of science” and said, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” The “laws” of Marxism came to be accorded the same degree of infallibility as the “proven” principles of Science.
This “scientific” definitiveness and self-assurance began to melt away in the twentieth century owing to — paradoxical though it might sound — further progress in the sciences. Lenin in his “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (1914) had spoken of “the crisis of Physics” while the subsequent developments in the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, probability theory, etc., called into question many of the basic notions on which stood the grand edifice of science. If Gramsci was the first great Marxist whose intellectual formation in this environment led him to a less scientistic and more open-ended reading of Marxism, the post-modernists half-a-century later often went to the extent of questioning the hitherto undisputed sovereignty of science. They were perturbed by the destructive powers of science as witnessed during the Second World War and the possibilities of a nuclear holocaust. A further cause of worry was provided by the totalitarian tendency displayed by certain communist parties in the realm of knowledge and culture — a tendency sought to be justified by the communist leadership's claimed mastery over the omniscient science of Marxism. It was also fell that emanating from Europe and America, the solemn voice of Science and Reason had actually served as a lieutenant of Capital in its mission of enslaving the whole world.
A zealous crusade against this all-powerful grip of science, a passionate urge to liberate “truth” from the clutches of “power”, provided the basic inspiration to the pioneers of post-modernism. In his bid to “emancipate” all “subjugated knowledges”, Michel Foucault, one of the most influential stalwarts of the post-structuralist or post-modernist school directed his entire theoretical inquiry to analysing “power” and its mechanisms of repression. But “power”, according to Foucault, “is not primarily the maintenance and reproduction of economic relations, but is above all a relation of force ... Power is essentially that which represses. Power represses nature, the instinct, a class, and individuals ... ”
“Power is that which represses”, Foucault rightly points out. But why does it repress? Just for the sheer pleasure of repression? That may be true for sadists, but what is the most common, or the most widespread motives behind repression? Is it not the securing and maintenance of those positions in society which secure economic and political domination? Marxism says just that and designates those positions as class positions, adding that state power in the hands of the ruling class is the most important instrument to carry out these repressions. Do you deny that? And when you call for “an analysis of the mechanisms of repression”, should you not start with the analysis of the state machine, as we Marxists do?
Foucault also rightly defines “the essential political problem for the intellectual” as changing “the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth”. But he maintains a conspicuous silence as to how the intellectual should go about it. Perhaps, this silence is deliberate. Foucault is on principle against any overarching political project of liberation, for any such project, if successful, will only lead to a new — may be more oppressive — institutional ordering of power. So he is openly sceptical of any collective action to end exploitation and oppression once and for all; the only thing he can recommend is localised, partial resistance to power. His political philosophy is an abstract libertarianism that can of and must not set itself any concrete goal, a ‘pure essence’ of rebellion that shuns any real course of action.
Anyway, Foucault does not claim to provide any alternative to Marxism and this is also not the proper place for us to embark on a study and join issues with the stalwarts of this theoretical school. We just touched upon the subject here to point to the emerging theoretical contours where Marxism will have to fight the next great battle for its own defence and development.
Modernism in its broadest sense includes Marxism; so it is only natural that post-modernism should include a strand of Post-Marxism. But while a good number of postmodernist writers including Foucault and Derrida have expressed themselves against Marxism from a great many angles, the term Post-Marxism has been used by a different set of authors generally coming from a Marxist background. To give you an idea of what Post-Marxism is like, we will use an example of one of the most powerful theoretical works in this field. The treatise we have in mind is: “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics” by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). Both the authors are political theorists and professors in England and US. Let us start with a synopsis.
The book begins on a contemporaneous political note: “Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The ‘evident truth’ of the past — the classical forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in conflict, the very meaning of the Left’s struggle and objectives — has been seriously challenged by an avalanche of historical mutations which have given the ground on which those truths were constituted”. The “mutations” refer, first, to the “failures and disappointments in (ex-) socialist countries” and second, to “a whole series of” positive new movements on gender, ecology and other issues. Together, these two developments have “recharged critical thinking” and “given rise to a theoretical crisis”. The authors seek to chart a road out of this crisis by expanding the concept of hegemony “far beyond Gramsci” and outlining a new project of “radical democracy”.
How does this theoretical project relate to Marxism? The authors pose and answer this question in clear-cut terms : “In operating deconstructively within Marxist categories, we do not claim to be writing ‘universal history’, to the inscribing our discourse as a moment of a single, linear process of knowledge. Just as the era of normative epistemologies has come to an end, so too has the era of universal discourses. Political conclusions similar to those set forth in this book could have been approximated from very different discursive formations — for example, from certain forms of Christianity, or from libertarian discourses alien to the socialist tradition — none of which could aspire to be the truth of society (or ‘the unsurpassable philosophy of our time’, as Sartre put it). For this very reason, however, Marxism is one of the traditions through which it becomes possible to formulate this new conception of politics. For us, the validity of this point of departure is simply based on the fact that it constitutes our own past.
Is it not the case that, in scaling down the pretensions and the area of validity of Marxist theory, we are breaking with something deeply inherent in that theory: viz., its monist aspiration to capture with its categories the essence or underlying meaning of History? The answer can only be in the affirmative ... At this point we should state quite plainly that we are now situated in a post-Marxist terrain. It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development, nor, of course, the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared. But if our intellectual project in this book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist. It has been through the development of certain intuitions and discursive forms constituted within Marxism, and the inhibition or elimination of certain others, that we have constructed a concept of hegemony which, in our view, may be a very useful instrument in the struggle for a radical, libertarian and plural democracy.
Further explaining their approach and methodology, Laclau and Mouffe declare that “In the text we have tried to recover some of the variety and richness of Marxist discursivity in the era of the Second International, which tended to be obliterated by that impoverished monolithic image of “Marxism-Leninism” current in Stalin and post-Stalin eras and now reproduced, almost intact though with opposite sign, by certain forms of contemporary ‘anti-Marxism’ ... Our own approach to the Marxist texts has, on the contrary, sought to recover their plurality, to grasp the numerous discursive sequences — to a considerable extent heterogeneous and contradictory — which constitute their inner structure and wealth, and guarantee,their survival as a reference point for political analysis.”
So much for “Introduction”; let us now come to the first chapter addressed to “the genealogy of the concept of hegemony”. Here the authors discuss three responses to the so-called “crisis of Marxism” evidenced in the 1890s. The crisis appeared, according to Laclau & Mouffe, in the context of a transition to “orgartised capitalism” and long boom which “made uncertain the prospects of a ‘general crisis of capitalism’. The first response to the crisis of Marxism was “Marxist orthodoxy” of Kautsky and Plekhanov. This was “not a simple continuation of classical Marxism” but was “constituted on the ground of a growing disjuncture between Marxist theory and the political practice of Social-Democracy.” The second response was Eduard Bernstein's “Revisionism”; the third was “Revolutionary Syndicalism” of G Sorel.
Through an examination of these three responses to the “crisis of Marxism”, the authors seek to trace the different approaches to a developed — that is above class — concept of hegemony. But what about Leninism? This is discussed in the second chapter: “For Leninism, hegemony involves political leadership within a class alliance. The political character of the hegemonic link is fundamental, implying as it does that the terrain on which the link establishes itself is different from which the social agents are constituted. As the field of the relations of production is the specific terrain of class constitution, the presence of the classes in the political field can only be understood as a representation of interests. Through their representative parties they unite under the leadership of one class, in an alliance against a common enemy. This circumstantial enemy does not, however, affect the identity of the classes comprising the alliance, since their identity is constituted around ‘interests’ which are in the end strictly incompatible (“strike together but march separately”).
As we know, the slogan just quoted constitutes the crux of Leninist UF policy. The proletariat should strike against the common enemy (the Tsarist autocracy in the case of Russia) together with other allies, but march separately, i.e., maintain its political and organisational independence. Evidently, the authors do not approve of this insistence on distinct class interests and class identities even when forging a grand alliance. More specifically, their objection is that "The centrality attributed to the working class is not a practical but an ontological centrality, which is, at the same time, the seat of an epistemological privilege: as the ‘universal’ class, the proletariat—or rather its party—is the depository of science. At this point, the schism between class identity and the identity of the masses becomes permanent. The possibility of this authoritarian turn was, in some way, present from the beginning of Marxist orthodoxy; that is to say, from the moment in which a limited actor — the working class — was raised to the status of ‘universal class’.
The main contention here is that if the working class is accorded a special or “privileged” status, an authoritarian trend becomes inevitable.
This is. particularly true when state power is seized by broad masses — i.e., broader than the working class — but the biter's “political centrality” is “upheld as a principle in classical terms” (emphasis in the original). In contradistinction to this “authoritarian practice”, the authors propose a “democratic” one and lay down the theoretical premise for the same: “the deepening of a mass democratic practice ... can be achieved only if it is recognised that these (democratic) tasks do not have a necessary class character and if “stagism” (“the view that democratic tasks are bonded to a democratic stage”) is renounced in a thoroughgoing manner. If this is done, the learned professors assure us, “only then will the obstacle preventing a permanent articulation between socialism and democracy be eliminated.”
There are-thus, “two conceptions of hegemony — democratic and authoritarian”. While the latter is best expressed in the tradition starting with Lenin’s “What is to be Done” and maturing in “the Bolshevisation of communist parties under the Comintern”, the former, i.e., the democratic conception, remains for Mr. Laclau and Ms. Mouffe to develop. We shall now see how they do it. Their “point of departure”, of course, is what they call the “Gramscian watershed”.
Gramsci’s most important contribution, the authors point out, was that he saw hegemony as not merely political (as with Lenin) but as intellectual and moral leadership. “It is this movement... that the decisive transition takes place towards a concept of hegemony beyond ‘class alliances’. Fo”, whereas political leadership can be grounded upon a conjunctural coincidence of interests in which the participating sectors retain their separate identity, moral and intellectual leadership requires that an ensemble of “ideas and ‘values’ be shared by a number of sectors ... Intellectual and moral leadership constitutes, according to Gramsci, a higher synthesis, a ‘collective will’, which, through ideology, becomes the organic cement unifying a historical bloc”.
Thus in Gramsian framework, the authors observe, ideology is not “a ‘system of ideas’ or... ‘false consciousness’” but “an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles. This precludes the possibility of a ‘superstructuralist’ reading the ideological. In fact, through the concepts of historical bloc and of ideology as organic cement, a new totalising category takes us beyond the old base/superstructure distinction”.
If this is a “fundamental displacement” introduced by Gramsci with regard to classical Marxism, there is another—and “most important” one:
“For Gramsci, political subjects are not — strictly speaking — classes, but complex ‘collective wills’; similarly, the ideological elements articulated by the hegemonic class do not have a necessary class belonging”. To prove their point, the authors point from Prison Notebooks : “An historical act can only be performed by ‘collective man’, and this presupposes the attainment of a ‘cultural-social’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills with heterogeneousaims are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world’.
This is immediately followed by the authors’ comment: "Nothing more distant from this ‘collective man’, “welded together with a single aim', than the Leninist notion of class alliance”.
Laclau and Mouffe extol this Gramscian ‘advancement’ over Leninism and then in the next, i.e. third chapter render Gramsci more profound. By means of an intricate theoretical analysis they overcome the last remnants of Marxian “essentialism” in Gramsci : (a) that “the ultimate core of a hegemonic force consists of fundamental class” and (b) that, except during “organic crises”, “every social formation structures itself around a single hegemonic centre”. This refinement really takes them “beyond Gramsci” and to the threshold of their own project in the fourth and last chapter. Well, let us accompany them to the end.
In the last few decades, the authors point out, advanced capitalist countries have witnessed a “proliferation of new antagonisms” and new social movements (ecological, anti-institutional, anti-nuke and so on) together with a “radicalisation of the older struggles such as those of women and ethnic minorities”. Such movements must be conceived as “an extension of democratic revolution to a whole new series of special relations” On the other hand, there has been a notable rise of the “New Right” like neo-fascists. The combined effect of these two developments is “a crisis of the hegemonic formation of the post-war period” which was built up on the model of Welfare Statism. The crisis or vacuum can be overcome not only in a “democratic but also an anti-democratic” way represented by the “liberal-conservative discourse, which seeks to articulate the neo-liberal defence of the free-market economy with (he profoundly anti-egalitarian cultural and social traditionalism of conservatism”. Naturally, the task of the left is to preclude the former and ensure the latter, i.e. the democratic option. In the words of the authors, “The task of the Left... cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology but, on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy”.
Well and good, but what does this term “plural” signify? To be brief, it means that neither the working class nor any other class or strata should be viewed as “an absolutely guaranteed point of total transformation” and that, the Left should accomplish its “hegemonic strategy” through “the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state”. This project, the Post-Marxists assure us, “includes ... the socialist dimension — that is to say, the abolition of capitalist relation of production”, but we are kept in the dark as to haw this abolition will come about. Presumably, this will happen through a “democratic discourse” involving anybody and everybody. No fixation of target, no specification of main forces of struggle. In today’s ever-fluid conditions, “the possibility of a unified discourse of the Left is also erased”, giving way to “a polyphony of voices each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity”.
From “Introduction” through to the fourth chapter, we are thus treated to a wholesome five course ideological diet:
1. The “new conception of politics” can be derived from almost anything from Christianity to Marxism, but the post-Marxists do Marxism a favour by choosing it as their main “reference point”. To make it usable, first they recover from the “monolith” of Marxism-Leninism “the variety and discursivity in the era of the Second International”.
2. This leads them to explore the genesis of concept of hegemony since the 1890s. This is done by means of examining three historical responses to the “crisis of Marxism”: orthodoxy, revisionism and syndicalism.
3. Next comes the Leninist concept of hegemony: the proletariat, through its party, must establish “political leadership within a class alliance”.
This is an “authoritarian conception” of hegemony, for it (a) upholds the specific identity and centrality of the working class and its party as the depository of science and (b) disallows the dissolution of the latter's class identity in the general category of the people.
4. A “democratic” alternative is available in Gramsci : hegemony as intellectual and moral (not merely political) leadership leading to a “collective will”, “collective man welded together with a single aim”. However, even in Gramsci there are some remnants of “classism” or “class reductionism”, which the authors now remove by a neat theoretical surgery.
5. All obstacles of Marxist “essentialism” are thus removed. The path is now cleared for a project of “radical and plural” democracy to be achieved by the Left’s non-class “hegemonic strategy” of extending the field of democratic struggles (most notably the “new social movements”) to the whole of civil society and the state.
Well, perhaps the end-result is a bit disappointing, a bit hackneyed. But is not the whole analysis logically very coherent and beautifully pragmatic? We think so. In fact, this is the first reason why we chore this book; the second being its strong connection with the Gramscian framework, the first topic of our class We have already observed that Gramsci’s texts are highly amenable to an idealistic and non-class reading; now we have seen how this actually happens, how Gramsci can be used as a launching pad 10 fly off beyond the frontiers of Marxism, as the last base camp on the Marxist terrain to move up to the summit of Post-Marxism. Now let us take a closer look at the major points of attack. The first thing that attracts one’s attention is the final good-bye to the doctrine of classes and class struggle. This is something at least one of the present authors—Mr. Ernesto Laclau—had tried to achieve even when he was still on the terrain of Marxism. His book “Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory” (1979) had made this theoretical demand on Marxism itself: “Today, when the European working class is increasing its influence and must conceive its struggle more as a contest for the ideological and political hegemony of the middle sectors, it is more necessary than ever for Marxism to develop a rigorous theory of ideological practice which eliminates the last taints of class reductionism” (pp. 141-142).
However, when several years of futile endeavours convinced him that this cannot be achieved within the Marxist framework, he took the next logical step and authored the post-Marxist volume jointly with Mouffe. But they are not alone in abandoning classes and class struggle. To take another example, Andre Gorz in “Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism” (1982) argues that the future of society lies in the abolition or minimisation of work needed for producing the bare necessities and the corresponding expansion of the realm of freedom. The working class cannot be the vehicle of this transformation because it identifies itself with work, the abolition of which cannot be its objective. The impulse of this transformation must, therefore, come from a “non-class of non-workers”. Splendid, isn’t it?
Now to come back to the Laclau-Mouffe treatise. On what grounds do they reject the Marxist thesis of the historical role of working class; on a deliberate misrepresentation of Marxism, which is formulated along the following steps:
(i) The economy, which is the basic thing in Marxism, is a “self-regulated” mechanism, operating strictly by “endogenous” laws with no “indeterminacy resulting from political or other external interventions”;
(ii) This mechanism, by virtue of its own laws of motion, automatically constitutes “social agents” (classes);
(iii) Those “social agents”, by virtue of their different positions in the relations of production, have different “historic interests” which in their turn assumes specific political manifestations — e.g., the “fundamental interests” of the working class in socialism;
(iv) Working class unity and its socialist impulse is thus a “simple effect of capitalist development” without external interventions from the spheres of ideology and politics.
This straw figure of Marxism is now easily knocked down. It is shown that the above theses are grossly contradicted by real life:
(i) The working class is widely fragmented and subjected to a variety of other, i.e. non-class interests (along the lines of nationality, ethnicity etc., we might add);
(ii) The formation of the working class as a unified force is not intrinsic to or automatically ingrained in capitalist development — rather it depends on “external intervention” like political-organisational efforts from without;
(iii) This is equally true for other sections of people, so there is no reason why the working class should be accorded a privileged status as the revolutionary agent.
Readers can easily see how metaphysical the entire argument is. The Marxist position that the classes are basically determined at the level of relations of production (the economy) is stretched beyond recognition and the spheres of economy, politics, ideology etc. are all placed in separate watertight compartments. A challenge is thrown up to this parody of Marxism : either prove that “an absolutely united working class will become transparent to itself at the moment of revolutionary chiliasm”—or abandon yourself.
In other words, since the economy does not determine classes and their respective political inclinations etc. in an absolute, unilinear way, all talk of objectively determined class positions are simply useless. This is more true in these Gays of increasing social mobility when people partake of multiple and changing social identities. So these are the days not of old class politics but of hegemonic politics — the politics of “discursively constructed social identities”. Some of these identities do occupy subordinate positions, e.g., women vis-a-vis men, workers vis-a-vis capitalists. But they can conceive their positions as oppressive and embark on struggle aga'nst that oppression only in so Tar as they come into contact with the “democratic discourse”. To quote Laclau and Mouffe again, “Our thesis is that it is only from the moment when the democratic discourse becomes available to articulate the different forces of resistance to subordination that conditions will exist to make possible the struggle against different types of inequality”.
But who will be the bearer of this democratic discourse? Who will be the hegemonic force? The two scholars are silent on the point. Presumably, however, who else but intellectuals — great scholars — can shoulder this great responsibility?
So in place of the struggle for a clearly defined goal — socialism — carried out by the working class united in class struggle, the post-Marxist agenda is the struggle for a vaguely conceived “radical and plural democracy” carried out by disparate elements of a plural subject bound together by democratic discourse. Socialism is not abandoned, only it is subsumed in the new broader project. In the process, it is thoroughly declassed : neither is it to be achieved through another class struggle under the leadership of any particular class nor can it be identified with a class dictatorship in the primary phase and with abolition of classes in the mature phase.
No less serious are the ideological and philosophical implications of the new political project First, material production is relegated to a peripheral role in the shaping of social life. Second, the socialist project is dissociated from a particular class and relocated in a loose “popular alliance” whose objectives, principles of cohesion and capacity for collective action are not rooted in any specific social relations or interests but are constituted by ideology and politics themselves. Surely we don't need to explain that this absolute autonomization of politics and ideology implies a grand farewell to dialectical and historical materialism. Post-Marxism here converges with post-structuralism : the ultimate dissociation of consciousness and ideology from any social and historical base.
The Laclau-Mouffe work is, of course, only one brand of post-Marxism. There are many others, but we don’t have the time to take up any other paper here. Let us, therefore, conclude the present discussion by drawing your attention to a comment made by Marx and Engels some 150 years ago on—guess what—post-Marxism. Don't raise your eyebrows, forthey had called it by another name, a name well known to you: ‘True’ Socialism.
“The ‘true’ socialists... innocently take on trust the illusion ... that it is the question of the ‘most reasonable’ social ordtr and not the needs of a particular class and a particular time ... They have abandoned the real historical basis and returned to that of ideology... True Socialism, which is no longer concerned with real human beings but with ‘Man’, has lost all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love of mankind”.
This is what they wrote in “The German Ideology” (see Collected Works. Vol. 5, pp 455-57). Readers will note that our post-Marxists have rendered the theoretical weapon of their forefathers far more sophisticated and modernistic (or post-modernistic, to be more accurate). But the essential linkage is easily discernible: the same non-class, non-party approach, the same indeterminacy of “mankind” (“people” or “popular alliance”) and above all, the same “belief in the power of concepts (power of hegemonic discourse”) to make or destroy the world”.
The ‘true’ socialists and others of their ilk could not, however, hold or. to their ground for long. Some fifty years later, Lenin declared: “Pre-Marxist socialism has been defeated. It continues to struggle, no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism.”
About a century has passed since Lenin wrote these words in his famous article “Marxism and Revisionism”. Today revisionism is no longer so fashionable; its place has partly been taken up by new forms, labels and trends, among them post-Marxism. From “pre” to “post”, a great cycle — spanning a century and a half — has been completed, and Marxism continues its historical struggle: as much in theory as in practice.
Among the many historical weaknesses of the communist movement in India, perhaps the most crippling has been its inability to produce a full-fledged programme for the Communist Party till 1951. In other words, the Party virtually spent the first two to three decades of its life without any clear and comprehensive programmatic guideline. This compares pathetically with the formative history of either CPSU or CPC. Both these parties had come to acquire a solid programmatic grounding early in their revolutionary journey. In Russia, Lenin had produced his brilliant analysis of development of capitalism by 1897 itself, that is years before the Communist Party could take on a really organised mass character. Mao’s analysis of classes in Chinese society, too, marked an early theoretical breakthrough in Chinese revolution.
In these two pioneering studies, the architects of the two greatest revolutions of the 20th century had already set out to accomplish what we call the creative integration of the universal truth or principles of Marxism with the concrete conditions of their respective revolutions. Wayback in 1899, Lenin had pointed out, “We do not regard Marx’s Theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science1 which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life. We think an independent elaboration of Marx's Theory is especially essential for Russian socialists; for this theory provides only general guiding principles, which, in particular, are applied in England differently than in Germany, and in Germany differently than in Russia”.
Creative integration of the universal principles of Marxism with the concrete national reality or equivalently, independent elaboration of the general guidelines of Marxism in specific national conditions — while upholding this essential principle of a Party programme, Lenin also called for conscious introduction of the question of Party Programme into Communist polemics. He was emphatic that “... if the polemic is not to be fruitless, if it is not to degenerate into personal rivalry, if it is not to lead to a confusion of views, to a confounding of enemies and friends, it is absolutely essential that the question of the programme be introduced into the polemic. The polemics will be of benefit only if it makes clear in what the differences actually consist, how profound they are, whether they are differences of substance or differences on partial questions, whether or not these differences interfere with common work in the ranks of one and the same party. Only the introduction of the programme question into the polemic, only a definite statement by the two polemising parties on their programmatic views, can provide an answer to all these questions, questions that insistently demand an answer.”
It is indeed a measure of bankruptcy of the Indian communist movement that it is marked by very little attempts at independent elaboration of the general guidelines of Marxism and the polemics in our movement too have more often than not been clouded by questions of a tactical or organisational nature lacking the clarity and seriousness that can come only with the conscious introduction of the programme question.
Prior to the 1964 split, the undivided CPI witnessed two major phases of inner-party debate, first during the 1946-51 period preceding the formulation of the first Party Programme and then during 1955-56. Yet, party general secretary Ajoy Ghosh had to admit in 1960, “Ideologically and politically speaking, we have been living from hand to mouth trying to tackle some urgent questions as they arise, evading basic questions and overall assessment. The result is drift, absence of direction and chaos ...”.
By the admissions of its own leaders, the track record of the CPI(M) too has not been much different on this score. In a review of the 1951 Statement of Policy (legal version of the 1951 Tactical Line) published in The Marxist in 1985, Basavapunniah admitted that between 1951-52 and 1967-68, the SOP was neither taken up for discussion in depth at any time, nor was its understanding sought to be translated into practice in building the class and mass organisations and the Communist Party. During the 1967-69 split while the CPI(ML) challenged the entire Party programme and SOP, the Eighth Congress of the CP1(M) re-endorsed the SOP; but as Basavapunniah wrote in 1985, it was reiterated without giving any serious thought to the changes already carried out in the Party programme and their implications for the Party’s tactical line. Naturally, differences remained on the question of interpretation of SOP and the inner-PB discussions since 1969-70 and the inner-PB and CC discussions during 1975-76 in particular revealed that such differences even sometimes assumed the polemical character of the 1948-50 period, the so-called Russian Path versus Chinese Path.
The debate continued even after the ouster of P Sundarayya and Basavapunniah too left the issue open in his 1985 article. He enumerated certain negative or adverse developments since 1951 which go against the SOP and also listed out some positive developments that would appear to compensate the adverse factors. The net outcome is that officially the SOP with its accent on urban and rural uprisings remain the tactical guideline of the CPI(M), but it has no relation to the party’s short-medium-or even long-term practice and perceptions.
A similar ‘dilemma’ can be seen at work on the question of party programme as well. The Soviet collapse and the East European debacle had taken the party completely unawares. It was not a question of error of judgement on one or two individual events, but it called for a re-evaluation of the CPI(M)’s entire programmatic understanding of the history of the Soviet Union and the erstwhile Warsaw Pact countries. The party however tried to escape its own theoretical responsibility by shifting the whole blame posthumously on the CPSU’s shoulders on the plea that it was the latter which had always exaggerated the crisis of the imperialist camp as well as the strength of the socialist bloc. But why did the CPI and CPI(M) have to buy the erroneous Soviet perceptions lock, stock and barrel?
Then there has been a sea change in the situation of our own country with the ruling classes bringing about a drastic change in economic and foreign policies without much of a hiccup. This relatively smooth turnaround in ruling policies should also have provoked the CPI(M) to take a fresh look at its understanding of the Indian state and the ruling classes, particularly the big bourgeoisie. The Madras Congress of the party did adopt a resolution on the need for amending the programme. A commission was also set up to prepare the draft amendments. But now the whole process has been stalled – possibly because several basic questions had started coming up – and the forthcoming Chandigarh Congress (scheduled for April 1995) is only expected to announce the met hodology as to how the changes are to be finalised!
Obviously, a vague, ambiguous and open-ended programme and tactical line allow maximum leeway to the CPI(M) to carry on with its politics of opportunism.
As we have already noted, despite two major all-India splits in the party, the debate has very rarely reached programmatic heights in our movement. A major-reason for this confusion has been the fact that the splits have taken place in the backdrop of a larger split in the international Communist movement. Interestingly, while the CPI(M) in the mid-60s always blamed the CPI for dismissing or underplaying the content of the split and instead presenting it as an extension of the Sino-Soviet split, the CPI(M) is guilty of playing the same mischief in relation to the subsequent CPM-CPI(ML) split. The CPC was accused of inciting the split and but for the CPCs open support, the CPI(M) argued, the split would have remained confined to minor cases of desertion or expulsion. Instead of joining issues with the new born party, the CPI(M) CC therefore chose to state “our differences with the CPC”. With slogans like “China’s Chairman is our Chairman” and an uninhibited exhibition of Chinese fetishism, the CPI(ML) too brought not little grist to the CPI(M)’s propaganda mill.
Even before or apart from the Sino-Soviet rift and the Great Debate, the political-tactical debate in CPI and subsequently in CPI(M) has always been conducted within the parameters of Russian Path versus Chinese Path. The freezing of the focus on mere paths of revolution inhibited a deeper programmatic understanding of both Russian and Chinese revolutions and also hindered the evolution of an Indian Programme and an Indian path suited to Indian conditions. The Russian path was considered synonymous with urban working-class insurrectionism and the Chinese path meant no more than peasant guerrilla warfare. Thus a Chinese wall was erected between the two paths and the specific historical settings and situations in the two countries – the determinants of the two paths – were absolutised. The basic programmatic or strategic unity or continuity between the two revolutions came to be overlooked or neglected; it was forgotten that Russian revolution too was waged and won on a substantially agrarian plank. Despite Lenin's pointed observations that “... In very many and very essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian Countries”
The understanding of the Chinese Path too has been rather shallow, mechanical and Soviet-inspired. The 1951 Tactical Line or its legal version, the SOP, contains an interesting section on similarities and dissimilarities bet ween India and China. There we can see certain observations which tend to negate the very significance of Chinese revolution as a victorious application of Marxism-Leninism in a predominantly agrarian, backward and populous country and its relevance for a country like India. For instance, it is pointed out that following the split in the United National Front in 1927, the CPC had an army of 30,000 to begin with. The role of the Communist Party in building a people’s army which would go on to serve as a “magic weapon” in accomplishing the revolution is thus seriously understated.
The SOP also told us that it was only when the revolutionary forces of China made their way to Manchuria and found the firm rear of the Soviet Union that the threat of encirclement came to an end and they were able to launch the great offensive which-finally led to the liberation of China. “It was thus the support given by the existence of a firm and mighty Soviet rear that was of decisive importance in ensuring victory to the tactic of peasant warfare in the countryside inside China”, concluded the SOP. The efficacy or success of the Chinese Path was thus ultimately attributed to Soviet support and not to China’s own conditions and their brilliant utilisation by the CPC.
The SOP also appears to share the view that the Chinese revolution did not really satisfy the condition of working class leadership when it says, “we should bear in mind that the Chinese party stuck to the peasant partisan war alone, not out of principle but out of sheer necessity. In their long-drawn struggles the party and peasant bases got more and more separated from the towns and the working class therein, which prevented the party and the liberation army from calling into action the working class in factories, shipping and transport to help it against the enemy. Because it happened so with the Chinese, why make their necessity into a binding principle for us and fail to bring the working class into practical leadership and action in our liberation struggle?”.
IT will be seen that there have really been two basic attempts at drawing up programmes for India's democratic revolution - in 1951 and then in 1970. Though the 1964 CPI(M) programme effected some major amendments in the ’51 programme, it did not mark any fundamental rupture as we shall shortly see. This is of course not to deny the importance of the changes made in 1964 concerning the characterisation of Indian revolution (People’s Democratic revolution as opposed to the CPI thesis of National Democratic revolution), the nature of state-power in India (bourgeois-landlord alliance led by the big bourgeoisie as against the CPI thesis which excluded landlords from state-power and allowed only “considerable influence” to the big bourgeoisie) and certain other questions of strategic significance. But as we shall see, these amendments, while doing partial justice to the objective development of the situation and the surge in mass movements, could hardly transform the gradualist, collaborationist perspective it inherited from the CPI. These changes did nevertheless stand the CPI(M) in good stead in guarding it against the extreme right-reformist potential of the programme and saving the party from committing the kind of blunders the CPI and AICP or UCPI did.
Similarly, the 1970 programme too had certain Left sectarian traits and the changes we have brought about over the last three Party Congresses have helped us in steering clear of the anarchist or semi-anarchist tendencies latent in our movement. Among the major changes in our formulation have been the rejection of the thesis of Soviet social-imperialism, recognition of the relative autonomy and bargaining power of the Indian state and India's dependent big bourgeoisie vis-a-vis specific imperialist powers albeit within a general framework of dependence on and subservience to world imperialism, and a clearer demarcation between strategy and tactics enabling us to free the question of forms of struggle from the strategic straitjacket of a Chinese-type revolutionary path. Thus, while the CPI(M) has sought to update and perfect the 1951 programme, we have been trying to develop a revolutionary programme on the foundation laid down in 1970.
It should also be noted that both these programmes emerged against the backdrop of peasant upsurges and militant popular struggles and intense inner-party polemics. But while the 1951 programme was born as a centrist compromise meant to take the party away from the road of Telangana, the 1970 programme was steeped in the revolutionary spirit of the Naxalbari uprising and enjoined on the party to spread the prairie fire of Naxalbari all over the country. Moreover, Telangana was called off just when it had started outgrowing its local significance to raise the question of political power
That the 1967-69 split was much more basic and decisive than the 1964 one is also amply borne out by the subsequent evolution of relations between the three parties. Despite the fact that the CPI(ML) has never hobnobbed with the Congress while the CPI went to the extent of supporting the emergency and forging all sorts of adjustments and alliances with the Congress and also that the CPI(ML) has never opposed or conspired against the Left governments in West Bengal and Kerala in a way the CPI opposed the CPM-led governments in West Bengal and Kerala in the late 60s and early 70s, even going to the extent of forging coalition governments with the Congress, the CPI(M) has felt no difficulty in making it up with CPI, even as it always looks for conditionalities and excuses to avoid joint actions with the CPI(ML). Moreover, while the premise of left unity between CPI(M) and CPI(ML) remains far from settled, the merger of CPI and CPI(M) has emerged as a living agenda for both the parties.
JUST as feudal remnants and the colonial legacy continue to retard and barbarise the development of Indian society, the post47communist movement too appears to be weighed down by the backlog of its pre-47 blunders and unfulfilled tasks. Instead of representing and taking care of the future in the present, the CPI and even CPI(M) seem to have been obsessed with settling accounts with their own past.
India’s attainment of political independence in August 1947 could have had only one programmatic connotation — transformation of India from a colony to a semi-colony and a corresponding shift in the principal contradiction of Indian society. The contradiction between Indian nation and British imperialism was dislodged from its earlier position of centrality and replaced by the contradiction between feudal remnants and the Indian people. Yet recognition of this basic change remained conspicuous by its absence in the ’51 programme. The programmatic meaning of yeh azadi jhuthee hat was that the CPI continued to treat the contradiction with imperialism and that too with British imperialism for quite some time as the principal contradiction.
The 1951 programme and tactical line did repudiate all earlier understandings on the question of path of revolution as one-sided and defective. The tendency to dismiss the political significance of August 1947 was also rejected — but the thesis of primacy of anti-imperialism as the central keylink continued. There was also very little appreciation of the new mode of imperialist operation, of the shift from direct to indirect control and the role of the Indian ruling classes in perpetuating the continuing imperialist stranglehold.
This was reinforced by a peculiar Soviet-inspired understanding of the Chinese revolution which singled out the participation of the national bourgeoisie in the Chinese UF as the most decisive feature of the Chinese experience or at any rate as the most relevant lesson for India, the relevance of the experience of the protracted people's war and building of the Communist Party and liberation army among the peasantry having already been minimised in the 1951 Tactical Line or the Statement of Policy. This understanding was first articulated by EMS in two New Age articles in end 1953 which only rationalised the compulsive urge of the communist leadership to work out an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, whether with the entire class or with sections of it and the thesis of primacy of the anti-imperialist task dovetailed perfectly into this scheme. It also matched well with the Soviet foreign policy requirements in the region which assigned a key role to the 'anti-imperialist' Indian bourgeoisie.
The 1951 programme had described India as “the last biggest dependent semi-colonial country in Asia still left for the enslavers to rob and Exploit”. Subsequently, it was felt that the description of the country as a whole as semi-colonial negates the fact that India has attained independence not only in a juridical sense but also in a “real, practical political sense” and the expression dependent, backward or semi-colonial should therefore be reserved for the economy.
There is obviously no room for any confusion regarding the class which led this first stage of revolution. And for the CPI and CPI(M), this was not leadership by default, both parties view the bourgeois leadership in freedom struggle as the working out of a historical destiny. In 1989, BTR made an appraisal of Nehru on the occasion of his birth centenary which opened with the statement “Nehru was the most enlightened leader of the class that was historically destined to lead the freedom struggle of India”.
In the entire course of the inner-party debate of 1955-56, this perspective was criticised only tangentially by the so-called Left group represented by P. Sundarayya, M. Basavapunniah, HKS Surjeet, M. Hanumantha Rao and N. Prasad Rao. There were occasional references to the agrarian tasks and the agrarian revolution as the axis of India's democratic revolution, but they were never logically followed up. Ajay Ghosh too made a couple of mentions of the predominantly agrarian nature of our democratic revolution but only to meet the arguments that the big bourgeoisie alone wielded control over the government and that the stage of revolution had now become socialist.
BECAUSE of this nationalist perspective, the CPI could always be seen looking for avenues of cooperation and unity with the national bourgeoisie. Peace movement was considered a crucial plank in this context. In February 1954, following the Madurai Congress (December 27, 1953-January 4, 1954) the CPI stressed the need to support Nehru’s foreign policy “without ifs and buts”. In April, the Central Executive Committee called for launching a united mass movement with the Congress around the points of agreement on foreign policy. In June, P Ramamurthy, the then Editor-in-Chief of New Age came up with his thesis of formation of a National Front, a broad national platform for peace and freedom, with the Congress. The Ramamurthy Thesis was soon sanctified by RP Dutt who wrote an article entitled “New Features in the National liberation Struggle of Colonial and Dependent Peoples” in the Cominform journal For A Lasting Peace, For A People’s Democracy (FLPPD). Dutt advised the CPI to line up behind Nehru against US imperialism and with the Soviet camp and shed itsearlier obsession with British imperialism, the tendency to judge the Indian government by its attitude to British capital and its continued participation in the British Commonwealth.
The CEC appointed a Special Commission to go into the implications of Dutt’s advice and when the Commission got split into two conflicting positions the Party Centre swung into action and worked out yet another patch-up by combining points from both positions. Two of the June ’55 CEC documents were entitled The CPI in the Struggle for Peace, Democracy and National Advance and Communist Proposals for National Reconstruction. Meanwhile, the February 1955 Andhra election results suggested a severe setback for the CPI, its strength coming down from 48 (out of 140) in 1952 to 15 (out of 196) seats, and the inner-party debate intensified once again.
In strategic terms the debate centred around the question of characterisation of the Indian bourgeoisie. The tactical implication of this debate was the kind of policy the CPI should adopt vis-a-vis Congress — whether to unite with the Congress party as a whole or with sections of it and whether this unity should be merely issue-based or should it also extend to a coalition government at the Centre.
EMS responded to this debate with an elaboration of his 1953 thesis on the dual character of the Indian bourgeoisie and accordingly with a policy of “uniting with and struggling against”. His prescription was : “To the extent to which the bourgeoisie as a whole, or any section of it, goes against this practical basis, goes against the interests of the masses of the people, to that extent has the proletariat and its Party to struggle against it. However, even when carrying on this struggle against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat should take care to see that the struggle is so conducted that all those sections of the bourgeoisie which really stand for struggle against imperialism and feudalism are drawn into the camp of united struggle ...” (Stalin and Mao on the National Liberation Movement, New Age).
But neither EMS nor Ghosh, the two leading ideologues of the CPI, would say which is primary in the Indian bourgeoisie’s relation with imperialism—conflict or compromise. Ghosh in fact said, “this is not easy, this finding out of what is dominant. This will lead to endless controversy”. For Ghosh it was enough to say that “the basic concept of the Programme in relation to the bourgeoisie is that the class as a whole is national, and also that it is not revolutionary but reformist”. In keeping with this dual nature of the “reformist” bourgeoisie, EMS and Ghosh advocated a relation of unity and struggle with the Congress, listing out the issues on which unity with Congress was permissible at different levels.
Addressing a central party school some thirty years later, Basavapunniah would tell us, “the very concept of supporting the foreign policy and opposing the internal policy is dubious since both are an integral part of a particular class policy of the Indian bourgeoisie. A Communist Party, if it is really genuine and loyal to the revolutionary working class, should declare itself as a party of revolutionary opposition, without any prevarication. It is crude eclecticism to go on asserting that we support what is “good” and oppose what is “bad”, and we support the foreign policy and oppose the internal policy. Such a stand compromises the proletarian stand towards a capitalist State, whether it is led by the big bourgeoisie or non-big “national” bourgeois”.
WHILE the CPI was exploring avenues of cooperation with the national bourgeoisie, CPSU ideologues were busy developing the theory of peaceful transition. The theory acquired official prominence in February 1956 in the 20th Congress of CPSU. But the so-called “theory of world revolution in the atomic age” had started surfacing in Russia soon after the spate of People's Democratic Revolutions in East Europe. The first outline perhaps emerged in the Conference of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. In his key report to the conference, eminent Soviet Orientalist EM Zhukov discussed the various features of the People's Democracies and also dwelt on the question of non-capitalist path and the problem of transformation of the National Democratic into a Socialist Revolution.
After the 20th Congress, the CPSU leadership sought to internationalise their new-found enthusiasm for peaceful transition through two global gatherings of communist and workers’ parties in Moscow – first in November 1957 and then in Nov 1960. Thanks to the determined opposition of CPC, CPSU had to amend the 1957 draft to reckon with the possibility of non-peaceful transition and the need for overcoming the resistance offered by reaction through vigorous extra-parliamentary action. But even after these changes, the two statements still remained heavily loaded in favour of the Soviet world view and the CPC had to make several concessions out of deference to the CPSU ‘leadership’s wishes and the CPSU’s stature as the “leader” party. For example, the 1960 Moscow statement had a highly positive assessment of the fighting capacity of national bourgeoisie. The statement said that in the present historic conditions, favourable domestic and international conditions arise in many countries for the establishment of an independent National Democracy”. It further stated that in “the present conditions, the national bourgeoisie of colonial and dependent countries unconnected with imperialist circles is objectively interested in the accomplishment of the principal tasks of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolution and therefore retains the capacity of fighting against imperialism and feudalism,”
Though the Moscow statement also qualified this thesis by bringing in the question of varying concrete conditions, the CPI found no reason to exclude India from the “many” countries awaiting the arrival of National Democracy. The CPSU too made it clear that it included India high on its list of States of National Democracy. In an interview with the Link magazine in 1961, E Zhukov reiterated the point, “Previously we used to underestimate the revolutionary potentialities of the national bourgeoisie in such countries. Now we think that the social position of the national bourgeoisie enables it to lead the struggle against imperialism. The national bourgeoisie in under-developed countries has not yet exhausted its revolutionary possibilities”. The CPI(M) programme too continued to uphold the 1957 and 1960 Moscow statements as “two great Marxist-Leninist documents,... an invaluable guide for all Communists, the working class and all progressive forces the world over”. The only difference was that the CPI(M) would not directly extend the Thesis of National Democracy to the Indian situation.
THE programme adopted by the CPI(M) at its 1964 Calcutta Congress drew heavily on both the 1951 programme and the Moscow statements of 1957and 1960. Instead of critically assimilating this inheritance, the CPI(M) only introduced some eclectic corrections in its new programme. Interestingly, while the CPSU ideologues were making no bones of the fact that their post-1956 formulations differed substantially from their earlier positions-in our case, the 1957 and 1960 statements and the Soviet prescriptions of peaceful transition through non-capitalist path virtually negated the perspective of protracted war and dogged resistance, of “hundreds of streams of partisan struggle merging with the general strike and uprising of workers in the cities” as envisioned in the 1951 Tactical Line - the CPI(M) adopted both the 1951 documents and the 1957and 1960 statements as its basic guidelines and continued to pay lip-service to the 1951 SOP alongside its 1964 programme.
Let us now take a look at the major corrections. The CPI programme describes the Indian State as “the organ of the class rule of the national bourgeoisie as a whole, in which the big bourgeois holds powerful influence. This class rule has strong links with landlords. These factors give rise to reactionary pulls on the state power” (8th Congress, CPI, Patna). So according to the CPI, landlords do not have a direct share in state power and if the powerful influence of the big bourgeoisie and the links with landlords could somehow be eliminated or weakened, the state could be freed from the reactionary pulls and set on a revolutionary course! Rajeshwara Rao later defended these formulations on the following grounds : “Our idea is that every State in essence is a State of one class though that class has its allies. In this case it is the State of the bourgeoisie as a whole, which is the determining factor, with landlords as its ally. Our characterisation of the State as one in which the big bourgeoisie holds powerful influence but is not in complete leadership of the State explains the phenomenon of the progressive foreign policy of our country.”
How does the CPI(M) resolve this riddle? Para 56 of the CPI(M) programme defines the Indian state as “the organ of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and landlords, led by the big bourgeoisie, who are increasingly collaborating with foreign finance capital in pursuit of the capitalist path of development.” The CPI(M) would have us believe that the formulation that the state is led by the big bourgeoisie is sufficient to plug all collaborationist loopholes. But the point is even if the big or monopoly bourgeoisie is identified as the leading ruling class and made a target of the democratic revolution the scope for class collaboration may still remain depending on how we explain the position of the bourgeoisie vis-a-vis imperialism and feudalism, the two basic targets of any modern democratic revolution. And here is how the CPI(M) programme characterises the big bourgeoisie, the leader of the so-called first stage of India’s democratic revolution : “Despite the growth of contradictions between imperialism and feudalism on the one hand and the people, including the bourgeoisie, on the other, and despite the new opportunities presented with the emergence of the world socialist system, the big bourgeoisie heading the state does not decisively attack imperialism and feudalism and eliminate them” (Para 15, emphasis added).
With such an appraisal of the bourgeoisie, what can the CPI(M) have against Ghosh’s profound discovery that the Indian bourgeoisie is not revolutionary but reformist. If the bourgeoisie is not decisively attacking and eliminating imperialism and feudalism, the proletariat and its party are there to pressure it into doing that. Para 108 of the CPI(M) programme clearly states — “The Communist Party does take cognizance of the contradictions and conflicts that do exist between the Indian bourgeoisie, including the big bourgeoisie, and foreign imperialists. They express themselves on the issue of war and peace, on the economic and political relations with socialist countries, on the terms of aid from foreign monopolists, on the question of finding adequate markets for our exports, and on Socialism and imperialism — has undermined the very primacy and essential dence. Entertaining no illusions of any strategic unity or united front with the ruling Congress party, the working class will not hesitate to lend its unstinted support to the Government on all issues of world peace and anti-colonialism which are in the genuine interests of the nation, on all economic and political issues of conflict with imperialism, and on all issues which involve questions of strengthening our sovereignty and independent foreign policy.”
Surjeet brushes aside Rajeshwara Rao’s problem in reconciling the big bourgeoisie’s leadership over state power with India’s progressive foreign policy with a clever-looking question “Since when has the CPI come to the conclusion that the big bourgeoisie is not interested in peace and defence of independence and sovereignty?”
IT is the CPI(M)’s refusal to identify the Indian big bourgeoisie as dependent and reactionary that serves as the biggest programmatic source of all its political opportunism. If this Indian big bourgeoisie is really interested in defending independence and sovereignty, how does the CPI(M) explain India’s increasing capitulation to the trinity of IMF-WB-GATT? Moreover, in the CPI(M)’s view, economy is not the main arena of imperialist intervention and nor are the big bourgeoisie and its principal party, the Congress, the foremost agency of imperialist penetration and pressure. Because that would not allow the party to get away with its vague thesis of dual character without bothering to identify the primary aspect in this duality. The two key channels of imperialist intervention according to CPI(M) are then located in Pakistan and in the secessionist and other national autonomy or statehood movements. In his critique of our Party in The Marxist in 1990, Prakash Karat pointed out that “the IPF-ML have to realise that to fight against imperialism in India today, the struggle against it has to focus on this keylink of imperialist aid to divisiveness”.
This opportunist apology of national chauvinism was theorised in great detail and with great gusto in another article in The Marxist in 1985. The article, titled “Peace in South Asia : the Pakistan Question”, accused Pakistan of bringing imperialist forces into the subcontinental strategic environment, overtly and covertly encouraging, with US backing, our other neighbours to keep up a confrontational posture towards India and striving to diplomatically contain India, pinning it down in endless regional problems and preventing it from playing the larger global role it seeks to play. The author called for giving up the notion which inhibits criticism of the US-Pakistan axis in general and of Pakistan in particular on the ground that it would lead to national chauvinism or softening up of the Left attitude towards the Congress. Pakistan, he pointed out, is not just another state bordering India, but is a peddler of feudal ideology, an agent of US imperialism and a bulwark against communism. The article concluded by exhorting the Left to discharge its historical task to preserve national integrity, fight feudal ideologies and resist imperialist penetration by launching an uninhibited campaign on these issues without being defensive. All these would have been really revolutionary prescriptions for a Communist Party in Pakistan, but when an Indian Communist Party invokes these arguments to rationalise anti-Pak propaganda, it is nothing but the worst kind of opportunist capitulation to the bourgeois ideology of national chauvinism.
There is also an ugly internal face of this chauvinism which manifests itself in the CPI(M) position on the secessionist and other nationality and tribal autonomy movements which are often clubbed together as divisive forces. Incidentally, the CPI(M)’s present policy of extending direct or indirect support to the ruling classes’ way of tackling the nationality question in India can be attributed to the correction it introduced in the concerned chapter of the party programme in the Ninth Party Congress. The 1951 programme had recognised the right of nationalities to self-determination including secession. The Ninth Congress dropped this para and rewrote the entire chapter. All references to India's multinational character were omitted from the programme and the nationality question was sought to be explained away only as a set of residual problems concerning linguistic states, Centre-State relations and tribal autonomy. Since then, secessionist movements and in many cases even demands for statehood or autonomy have lost all their objectivity to the CPI(M) which treats such movements primarily as imperialist-aided anti-national conspiracies.
In his explanatory speech on Party Programme at the 1985 Central Party School, Basavapunniah pointed out that “India is a multilingual, multinational and multiracial subcontinent, and it was merged into a single State under British rule by the British bayonet.” If that is so then one should naturally expect some attempts to undo that forced integration in the post-British period. Some of the North-Eastern movements do indeed belong to this category. But more importantly we must remember that the natural tendency of capitalism is to lead to nation states. The multinational form is quite exceptional and perhaps compatible only with backward capitalism. The development of capitalism is bound to strengthen not merely the elements of pan-Indian consciousness but also what could be called regional or nationality consciousness. The integration of the feudal kingdoms into the Indian Union and the subsequent formation of linguistic states have not eliminated this natural tendency or law of capitalist development but only facilitated it by removing some obvious fetters and providing a new framework for the growth of such sub-nationalism.
JUST as the CPI(M) considers the transfer of power of August 1947 as the conclusion of the first stage of India’s democratic revolution, it may also consider the national question to have been resolved in the main. But the nationality problem is by no means a remnant or residue of the past. If it is a remnant, then like our feudal remnants it is also a live remnant acquiring new meanings and drawing fresh strength from every degree of capitalist development as capitalism develops not just in spite of but also through these remnants. The whole experience of Soviet Union or Eastern Europe would now seem to bear it out. Even in developed Canada we have a separatist movement raising its head. There is thus little possibility that people's democratic or socialist India can escape the challenge of rewriting her national unity.
For Marxists, the right to self-determination is not so much a question of nationalism as of democracy. In fact, as Lenin tells us, “the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism”. “The proletariat”, says Lenin, “cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms ... We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary programme and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc.” Lenin also cautions us repeatedly that we must not confuse “unreserved recognition” of the right to self-determination with any mandatory support for each and every such demand which should be decided on the basis of concrete analysis of each case subject to the overriding interests of proletarian class struggle.
In his lecture note Basavapunniah noted with satisfaction that “the timely correction (of the party’s position on nationality question) has become a handy weapon in the hand of the revolutionary working class movement of India.” He also adds without elaborating “The experience of Bangladesh seceding from Pakistan, and the rising national movements of Sindhis, Baluchis, Pathans, etc. in Pakistan have many lessons for India and its future”. The only revolutionary and not chauvinist lesson for the Indian working class could be to recognise the objectivity of similar movements in India and strive for closer political unity of the proletariat and working people of the whole country on the basis of that recognition. By precisely refusing to do that the CPI(M) has only helped corrupt the revolutionary proletarian consciousness and exposed the working class to the dangerous consequences of national chauvinism.
In this context, let us cite a rather long excerpt from the writings of none other than EMS. Ina polemical piece exposing the revisionists’ bankruptcy on the national question written in 1966 it was EMS who had made the following observation : “... (It is) necessary for all Marxist-Leninists to make it clear to the people that the so-called “struggle between nationalism and the fissiparous forces”, the struggle in the name of which the leaders of the ruling party are trying to beat oppositionist forces into submission is a fake “struggle”. It is the means through which the dominant section of the bourgeoisie is trying to maintain its domination not only over the working people but over sections of their own class. The slogan of “national unity” is thus the weapon with which the dominant monopoly group tries to bring their competitors into submission ...
“While thus exposing the false claims of the dominant and other sections of the ruling classes, Marxist-Leninists should see what is anti-feudal and democratic in the struggles waged by the various national and social groups against the dominant section of the ruling classes.
“Such a Marxist-Leninist approach to national unity and democracy is absurd in the ideological stand of the revisionists ... whether it is in relation to India's foreign policy, or in connection with the internal national problems, the revisionists are adopting the typically chauvinistic approach of the bourgeoisie.
“This is the inevitable consequence of their tailing behind the bourgeoisie, their refusal to fight to bourgeois, ideologically and politically, their effort to unite the working people with the bourgeoisie. Never has there been a more shameless example of subservience to the bourgeoisie and its ideological-political outlook”.
Well, let us only update EMS by pointing out that we now have more such examples of ideological subservience and it is becoming increasingly difficult and absurd to try and order these examples in terms of their degree of shamelessness! But EMS was quite right in linking the revisionist bankruptcy on foreign policy with that on internal national problems. It is but two sides of the same coin, two distortions joined by the same key link - a vulgar, opportunist variety of anti-imperialism. And at the root of this distorted theory and practice of anti-imperialism and the opportunist tendency of class collaboration that follows from it lies the CPI(M)’s programmatic prevarication in analysing the nature of the Indian big bourgeoisie.
BUT just as mere acknowledgment of the big bourgeoisie's leadership over the Indian state and strategic exclusion of this class from the People’s Democratic Front does not preclude class collaboration, it is also not enough to recognise the centrality of the anti-feudal contradiction. Some ninety years ago Lenin had pointed out in his article “Agrarian Programme of Russian Social Democracy”, “The demand for the eradication of the remnants of the serf-owning system is common to us and to all the consistent liberals, Narodniks, social reformers, critics of Marxism on the agrarian question, etc. In advancing this demand, we differ from all those gentlemen, not in principle, but only in degree: in this point too they will inevitably remain at all times within the limits of reforms; we, however, will not stop even at social-revolutionary demands. On the contrary, by demanding that the “free development of the class struggle in the countryside” be ensured, we place ourselves in opposition to all these gentlemen in principle, and even to all revolutionaries and socialists who are not Social Democrats ... This condition is the fundamental and focal point in the theory of revolutionary Marxism in the sphere of the agrarian question”.
In the CPI(M)’s case, it is precisely this “fundamental and focal point” which constitutes the weakest point of the party’s programme in the agrarian arena. In his 1985 review of the Statement of Policy published in The Marxist, Basavapunniah noted that “the Congress agrarian reforms during the last three decades, though they didn’t abolish landlordism and give land to the landless, succeeded in disrupting whatever peasant unity was built in the earlier decades around the central slogan of abolition of landlordism and land to the actual tiller”. His dilemma is that while rich and middle peasant households are not to be moved by the slogan of abolition of landlordism while “the agricultural labourers and poor peasants, who are land-hungry and respond to the slogan of land distribution wherever they are organised and led, have not yet the confidence to go into action for the appropriation of landlords’ land and its distribution among the agricultural labourers and poor peasants”. In West Bengal, the movement for occupation of ceiling-surplus lands “could be undertaken only when the State Government of the United Democratic Front in West Bengal, under the influence of the CPI(M), restrained the police from going against the fighting peasants”, whereas in Kerala the agricultural labourers and poor peasants “are inclined to occupy Government and forest land, but are not yet prepared to seize even the surplus land of landlords on a big scale”.
Yet “in the objective interests of the peasants in general, and the country as a whole” the CPI(M) programme retains the land-to-the tiller slogan as its central slogan. But given the structural changes effected by the Congress agrarian reforms and taking serious note of the existing state of organisation, level of consciousness and degree of unity among the peasantry, this central slogan remains today still a propaganda slogan. And the catch is that until and unless this basic slogan of abolition of landlordism becomes a slogan of action, the peasant movement cannot succeed even in enforcing partial demands such as reduction of rent and abolition of eviction. Moreover, Basavapuhniah tells us, “even these partial demands have serious limitations under the present changed conditions, viz. when tenancy, rents, forced labour, etc. no longer exist in their old form, scale and intensity.” The party therefore seeks to harness different agrarian currents, ranging from the wage question to the issue of remunerative prices, into one powerful agrarian stream so as to develop “maximum peasant unity” or “all-in peasant unity against landlordism and the bourgeois state power”. Though there are ritualistic references to the central role of the rural poor as the core of peasant unity, “a unity built around the rural labourers and poor peasants, and mainly based upon them”, the April 1967 document “Tasks on the Kisan Front”, the CPI(M)’s basic guide to agrarian action clearly spells out : “Our Party should ceaselessly educate the peasant and agricultural labour masses that the basic slogan of “abolition of landlordism without compensation and giving land to the agricultural labourers and poor peasant free of cost” has to be realised through the mass action of the entire peasantry”. In other words the rural poor who can and must be inspired and organised take the initiative to carry out that decisive attaclcagainst feudalism are to be kept under leash in the name of ‘mass action of the entire peasantry”.
It is under the cover of such an ambiguous agrarian perspective that the CPI(M) has forged such close alliances with the rich peasant-kulak based parties like Telugu Desam and Akali Dal, in the very states, where the Communist Party was once rooted among the rural poor. Without an essentially collaborationist perspective in day-to-day agrarian struggles, such lasting political alliances with these parties or for that matter even with parties like the Janata Dal or Samajwadi Party in Bihar and UP could never have been possible.
Alliances with parties like Telugu Desam, DMK or Akali Dal are also facilitated by the CPI(M)’s understanding of the “national question” and its opportunist approach towards utilisation of contradictions within the ruling camp. Para 60 of the CPI(M) programme states, “Underlying these contradictions (between the central government and the states) often lies the deeper contradiction between the big bourgeoisie on one hand and the entire people including the bourgeois of this or that state on the other. This deeper contradiction gets constantly aggravated due to the accentuation of the unevenness of economic development under capitalism.” In his polemics against the revisionists on the national question which we have already cited, EMS defines the proletarian approach to the so-called fissiparous movements in the following words : “The bourgeoisie would consider the “unity” of India as “good” and the “fissiparous forces” as “evil” ... The proletarian standpoint has nothing to do with such abstract slogans of “good” and “evil”. It goes into the essence of these conflicts and uncovers the reality of conflicts among different sect ions of the ruling classes”. A few lines later when he says that “Marxist-Leninists should see what is anti-feudal and democratic in the struggles waged by the various national and social groups against the dominant section of the ruling classes”, he uses the word “democratic” in the narrow context of “conflicts among different sections of the ruling classes” and not in the more conventional sense of reflecting the aspirations of the people.
In other words, the CPI(M) is interested in such movements or forces only to the extent they represent a conflict among different sections of the ruling classes and thus give it a scope to “utilize” the contradictions within the ruling camp. This is perhaps what explains their eagerness to have alliance with parties like TOP, DMK or Akali Dal even as they remain cold or even opposed to the tribal autonomy movements in the North-East. In the case of Assam movement, the party showed absolutely no interest and rather displayed a rigid opposition to the movement so long as it was a real mass movement and reflected the democratic aspirations of the broad masses of Assamese people. But the attitude underwent a sea change after the AGP’s emergence as the ruling party in Assam. The AGP was now a constituent of National Front and the CPI(M) a close ally and staunch supporter of the National Front government. Even in, Assam politics, the CPI(M) started moving with the AGP.
THE opportunism of the CPI(M) perhaps finds its most glaring expression in the united front policy followed by the party. And this opportunism has grown exponentially with every struggle waged by the party against the so-called threat of Left sectarianism. The first seeds were sown during the very inception of the CPI(M). The 1964 Calcutta Congress had also adopted a report titled The Fight Against Revisionism. The report called for a struggle against all manifestations of sectarianism, particularly against the two main manifestations: “(a) sectarianism towards the masses owing allegiance to the ruling Congress party, (b) sectarianism towards the masses rallied behind the parties of opposition which are Right reactionary, or Leftist with rabid anti-communism, as their basic outlook”.
The same report also called upon the party to “intervene in all cases where ministerial or other crisis develops in a State or at the Centre. Removal of particular ministers, wholesale reorganisation of the ministry, charges and counter-charges made by the rival groups in the ruling party — all these occasions should be made use of and so handled as to strengthen the forces of radicalism in the country as a whole and in the ruling party. The attitude of contempt for such ‘petty quarrels’ among the ruling classes and sections within the ruling classes, refusal to intervene in and transform such situations (to whatever slight extent it may be possible) will make the Party a totally ineffective force in a rapidly changing political situation” (emphasis added). The CP1(M) was thus born with the dubious legacy of illusions about the forces of radicalism in the ruling party. Barely two months after the CPI(M)’s Calcutta Congress, the Seventh Congress of the CPI began in Bombay with the singing of Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem. The programme of National Democracy adopted by the CPI Congress had the following vision about the evolution of the National Democratic Front : “As the NDF becomes ever more broad-based, militant and powerful in the course of the rising temper of the mass movement, it defeats the forces of reaction inside and outside the ruling party and comes to the position of taking governmental power into its own hands ...” The fight against revisionism, it would seem, was merely a fight between the two options — strengthening the forces of radicalism versus defeating the forces of reaction inside the ruling party!
But the party did not take the trouble to clarify how its intervention in favour of the so-called forces of radicalism inside the ruling Congress would help it “win the masses over to democratic policies and into the democratic front” unless the CP1(M) was thinking in terms of an eventual united democratic front with a radicalised Congress! Incidentally, strengthening the so-called radical sections inside the Congress was the CPI(M)’s way to fight the “left-sectarian Naxalite disruption” during the late 60s and early 70s, i.e., till the radical Congress turned against the Marxists themselves!
The next phase of struggle against “left-sectarianism” ensued during the Emergency which saw the ouster of P Sundarayya from the general secretary-ship of the party. The party blamed left sectarianism for its low-key and vacillating role during the first half of the Emergency. According to the review report of the CPI(M)’s Tenth Congress (1978), this left-sectarianism consisted in “grossly underestimating the conflict and contradiction between the ruling Congress party on the one hand and the bourgeois Opposition parties on the other, while-tending to exaggerate the basic contradiction between the great masses of the people and the ruling bourgeois landlord classes and parties as a whole”. If the CPI(M) could not play a sufficiently active and dynamic role at a time when the Congress had sufficiently bared its “semi-fascist” fangs, it was surely not because the party had exaggerated the basic contradiction between the masses and the system as a whole. In that case, the so-called left sectarianism should have manifested itself in vigorous anti-system action and not in passivity and vacillations. The Emergency is remembered as the reign of semi-fascist terror not only because the bourgeois opposition too had come within the purview of state repression but also because the people in general and revolutionary-democratic and left forces in particular were subjected to a brutal and systematic torture campaign. What prevented the CPI(M) from addressing itself to this latter aspect? Was it not the baggage of parliamentary cretinism and illusions of Congress radicalism it had inherited from the undivided communist party? Instead of facing this basic question, the party sought to enhance its political relevance and profit by “manoeuvering” the contradictions among different bourgeois-landlord formations, which in real life has been reduced to no more than a deceptive euphemism for the opportunist politics of tailism and power-brokering.
The struggle against Sundarayya’s left-sectarianism culminated in the Jalandhar Congress blueprint of Left and democratic unity. The Congress classified the Left and democratic forces into the following seven categorise :
(i) The CPI(M) and mass organisations led by it,
(ii) Partners of the Left Front in West Bengal and Kerala and their mass organisations,
(iii) CPI and its mass organisations,
(iv) “Large numbers in all parties who take a critical attitude towards the policies of their leadership and take a radical stand in several issues. This potential force has to be harnessed by nurturing it and developing a proper approach to it from issue to issue,
(v) Left and democratic forces in the Janata Party comprising the former Young Turks, radicals from the Congress, members of the Socialist Party, independent individuals with a firm stand against authoritarian forces and radical individuals and groups in all constituents of the Janata Party,
(vi) Forces of the breakaway Congress who are opposed to Indira Gandhi’s authoritarianism and also tend to take radical positions on many socio-economic issues,
(vii) Democratic forces like the AIADMK, DMK, Akali Dal and Republican parties.
This was further theorised by the CC in the wake of the July Crisis of 1979. The CC report adopted at the party’s Eleventh Congress held in Vijayawada in January 1982 rejected the criticism voiced by the West Bengal state delegation that by assisting in the break-up of the first Janata government at the Centre the CC had involved itself in the ‘unprincipled squabbles of the groups inside the Janata Party”. Defending the party’s role in the July crisis the report went on to assert:
“Most of the conflicts and quarrels among the bourgeois-landlord parties relate to the issue of sharing political power, and that is the ‘overriding principle’. The adoption of ‘principles’ and ‘platforms’ by different bourgeois-landlord parties and groups is aimed at subserving that ‘overriding principle’. When sections fell out within’ the ruling Congress party and formed the Bangla Congress, Utkal Congress, Jana Congress, Jana Kranti Dal, Kerala Congress and the like in 1966-67, we did not think some lofty ‘principles’ were involved in it. The CPI(M) had supported or allied with some of them with the only one over-riding consideration of breaking the monopoly of one party rule in the country.
“It is difficult to judge these bourgeois-landlord parties and their inner conflicts and feuds and factional strife through the yardstick of some ‘principles’. The CPI(M), while uniting with some of them on certain issues or in forging electoral alliances and even forming State Governments with them, never tried to judge them and their ‘principles’, though their announced pledges and principles were taken into account. “Enlightening the central party school in 1985 on “Party line on current tactics”, EMS defended his and the party centre’s role during the July 1979 crisis in still stronger language as “the further development and enrichment of the idea put out at-the Seventh Congress on the need for intervention in the various manifestations of the political crisis that erupts in bourgeois politics and how the intervention should be so planned and executed as to strengthen the position of the proletariat and its allies”. EMS did not take the trouble to tell his audience how the proletariat actually benefited from the toppling of the Morarji Desai government by Charan Singh and the subsequent return to power by Indira Gandhi. But one thing was clear: over the years the CPI(M) had freed its tactical line from all sorts of programmatic or principled rigidities.
The party helped topple the Morarji government in 1979 ostensibly over the RSS question only to join hands with the BJP to bring another Janata Government to power after another ten years. Once the Congress monopoly of power was formally broken in 1977 and particularly after the rise of BJP in the late 80s, the CPI(M) would switch back to the late 60s and early 70s tactic of supporting the Congress to stave off the threat of right reaction. Thus we saw the CP1(M) side with the Congress in the last Presidential election and only the other day on the issue of the electoral reforms bill. The whole history of united front politics of L'PI(M) has thus been one of constant oscillation between a democratic (anti-authoritarian or anti-Congress) and a secular (anti-BJP) front. The plank of anti-imperialism and nationalism (national unity or national sovereignty) is invoked as a bridge joining these two fronts while the slogan of Left Unity serves as a stopgap arrangement.
Even their concept or practice of Left Unity is highly economistic and hence capitulationist. Left unity is understood not as an independent political core of any broader oppositional or democratic unity but as a disjointed and dependent economic complement of the politics of alignment and realignments in the bourgeois camp. It is only in relation to the Left Front governments that the Left parties move together as a political front of sorts, otherwise Left unity or unity of fighting forces is mostly sought to be realised through joint action of mass organisations without any political edge or thrust.
FINALLY, let us take a close look at the tactic of forming State Governments.
As a transitional stage towards a Government of People's Democracy, CPI started toying with the concept of the so-called Governments of Democratic Unity soon after the 1951 Congress and the 1952 general elections. In February 1952 itself, the party organised a convention of non-Congress MLAs in Madras state and adopted a Resolution on Guiding Principles and the Minimum Programme fora Government of Democratic Unity. The accent of the Minimum Programme was on providing immediate relief to the people and not on introducing any radical measures or offering a consistent and determined opposition to the Centre. The line was elaborated and theorised in the Madurai Congress which called for directing all partial struggles towards installation of Governments of Democratic Unity with a view to giving “an immediate though limited relief to the people”. By June 1954, Ramamurthy had come up with his thesis of formation of a National Front with the Congress Party. Ramamurthy had the backing of the PB and 10 CPI leaders from UP seized upon this thesis and called upon the CEC to develop it into a full-fledged tactical line leading to the establishment of a Government of Peace, Independence and Democracy as the practical realisation of the Government of Democratic Unity,
While the CEC succeeded in keeping the Ramamurthy thesis and its eager extension by the UP leaders at bay for the time being, inspired by the February 1956 CPSU Congress there was soon a stronger clamour for a national government at the Palghat Congress. On the eve of Palghat, Bhawani Sen called for a radical reorganisation of the government, meaning thereby a Congress-CPI coalition government as an emergency alliance to resist the pro-imperialist pro-feudal offensive. In the Congress itself Rajeshwara Rao, PC Joshi, Somnath Lahiri, Bhawani Sen and others presented an alternative line stating that “the CPI believes that as a result of the development of national unity and on the basis of the changed correlation of forces in favour of the progressive forces, an alternative government of national unity can be brought into being.”
The Palghat Congress rejected this alternative line, but by the time the next Congress took place in Amritsar, an extraordinary Congress convened in the backdrop of a raging inter-party debate on the implications of the 1957 Moscow statement and the applicability of the peaceful transition thesis for India, the following paragraph, the most explicit official statement of parliamentary path ever made in the Indian Communist movement, had already found its way to the preamble of the Party Constitution :
“The CPI strives to achieve full Democracy and Socialism by peaceful means. It considers that by developing a powerful mass movement, by winning a majority in Parliament and backing it with mass action, the working class and its alliance can overcome the resistance of the forces of reaction and ensure that Parliament become an instrument of people's will for effecting fundamental changes in the economic, social and State structure.”
For the majority of CPI leadership, the Kerala experiment was essentially an exercise in peaceful transition through parliamentary path with scopes for providing immediate relief to the people. Immediately after the results were announced, the secretary of the Kerala unit of the party, MN Govindan Nair, told the press, “in our views there is no insurmountable difficulty in having a Communist-led government in the State and a Congress government at the centre”. He concluded the interview by saying that the Communist government would do nothing drastic; it would merely implement the programme of the Congress Party but in a much better and more thorough way. After the formation of the CPI-led government was cleared by the Congress high command, the New Age editorially welcomed the Congress “readiness to accept a Communist-led government in Kerala” as “encouraging signs of sound health of the Indian democracy” (New Age, March 21,1957).
It should also be remembered that the EMS government of 1957 did not ride to power on the crest of any militant peasant upsurge. There has never been a second edition of Punmpara-Vayalar in Kerala and the main movement led by the communists in the 50s was the Aikya Kerala movement leading to the emergence of reorganised Kerala on a linguistic basis on 1 November, 1956.
This ideological and political backdrop of the EMS government was of crucial importance in determining its course. The government did introduce a few progressive reforms in the spheres of agriculture and education and promised to keep the police away from democratic movements. Elaborating his theme of “neutralization of police”, EMS told the press on 23 July, 1957, that his government's “policy of not using the police force in the suppression of the people’s movements does not mean any weakening of the role of the police in rendering that protection and assistance to the person and property of the owning classes to which they are entitled as the citizens of the State. The government recognises that the right of the toiling classes to resort to collective bargaining and direct action has certain well-defined limits. The essence of these limits is that the direct action should not do violence either to the person or property of the individuals and families of the owning classes.” Gherao as a form of struggle and resistance which became so very popular and common during the mid-60s, had already started surfacing in Kerala, but the EMS government was not to recognize it and gherao was considered well outside the so-called well defined limits.
THE subsequent toppling of the EMS government may have helped in shattering the extreme forms of parliamentary illusions, but the basic framework regarding the role of Communists in transitional governments remained unchanged. The perspective of viewing such governments as sheer agencies of relief was only reinforced in the celebrated Para 112 of the CPI(M) programme. The programme called upon the party to utilise all the opportunities that present themselves of bringing into existence governments pledged to carry out a modest programme of giving immediate relief to the people “and thus strengthen the mass movement” (emphasis added).
The essential difference between the CPI and CPI(M) on the question of government formation boiled down to two points: (a) the CPI(M) would not make any categorical statement on parliamentary path maintaining a studied silence on the question of possibility of coming to power at the centre through elections, (b) the CPI(M) would not join any coalition government in states unless it has substantial strength to secure crucial ministerial portfolios while the CPI is prepared to accept the role of a junior partner in any kind of non-Congress government and even with Congress as the Kerala experience showed.
Following the 1967 general election, opportunity came the CPI(M)’s way to join coalition governments in West Bengal and Kerala. The April 1967 CC resolution New Situation and Party's Tasks had a number of crucial observations regarding these governments. Apart from repeating the statutory constitutional caution that such governments will have to function within the four corners of the constitution and exercise whatever small share of power they possess within the constraints imposed by the overall central power, the report also pointed out that “The vole secured by the united front, by and large, reflected the deep mass discontent against Congress rule more than the endorsal of a radical programme with all the deeper implications such a programme entails”. While reiterating the relief orientation, the report also warned party members working as ministers in the two united front governments that “they should not entertain undue illusions about giving relief in a big way”. “In a word, the united front governments that we have now”, the report pointed out, “are to be treated and understood as instruments of struggle in the hand of our people, more than as governments that actually possess adequate power, that can materially and substantially give relief to the people. In clear class terms, our Party’s participation in such Governments is some specific form of struggle to win more and more allies for the proletariat and its allies in the struggle for the cause of People’s Democracy and at a later stage for Socialism”.
So, the governments are to be regarded as instruments of struggle, but the struggle is for winning more and more allies for the proletariat and its allies. And obviously these allies are such as cannot be easily won through the other forms and instruments of struggle wielded by the party. Thus we have a very crucial insight into the evolution of Left-led governments. Not confrontation with the centre and promotion of class struggle and radical reforms but Constitutional cooperation with the ruling party, social peace and stability and relief and reform measures designed to win and sustain the more difficult and delicate allies would be the three cornerstones of such governments.
It should also be noted that Para 112 does not specifically rule out the possibility of forming a transitional government at the centre. GPI(M) leaders, however, assert that “a careful reading of Para 112 would make it clear that the possibilities of ‘forming such governments of transitional character which give immediate relief to the people and thus strengthen the mass movement’ are visualised for the states” and that by implication, it also “rules out the permissibility of bringing into existence such a government of transitional character at the Union Centre ... The concept of a transitional government at the centre comes to the mind when there is a possibility of sharing power and the revolutionary perspective is lost. How can one think that the Indian bourgeoisie can share power?”
The CPI is taken to task for having advanced the slogan of a non-Congress democratic coalition government at the centre as the central rallying point in the 1967 general elections. “If the CPI concept of National Democracy is that of a transitional government, then what is the hesitation in accepting the fact that their path of revolution is a parliamentary one, irrespective of ... whether they have mentioned it in the programme?”, asked HKS Surjeet in his polemics with Rajeshwara Rao in the early 1980s. During the 1991 general elections the same question could be put to Comrade Surjeet himself. The first phase of the CPI(M)’s poll propaganda in that elections revolved round their theme of a democratic coalition government at the centre with the CPI(M) leadership maintaining a suggestive silence on the question of their own participation in such a government with replies like “we will cross the bridge when we come to it”. Even otherwise, in the context of state governments, too, Para 112 has reached a point of saturation. When a state government continues in power for 17 years and far from introducing progressively higher reforms it begins to exhibit all signs of decay and degeneration characteristic of a bourgeois-landlord government, it can hardly qualify itself for the programmatic provision fora transitional government.
Before we conclude, a quick review of two recent critiques of our programme will be in order. I have in mind the critique of our Fourth Congress programme by Prakash Karat and more recently, the review of our Fifth Congress documents by Ajit Roy in EPW.
PROGRAMMATICALLY, Karat has the following main objections :
(1) Adherence to Mao Zedong Thought which allegedly acts as a hindrance to the development of an integrated Marxist-Leninist world outlook; (2) Characterisation of India as a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society which he feels is incompatible with India's political independence and the fact that we have a bourgeois-landlord alliance in State-power; and (3) Characterisation of Indian big capital as comprador.
It is true that many petty bourgeois revolutionary groups invoke Mao Zedong thought only to absolutise the specific path and experience of the Chinese revolution. But for us Mao Zedong thought has its importance precisely as a product of a vigorous ideological struggle to defend the Marxist-Leninist world outlook against Khruschevite neo-revisionism and Stalinist metaphysics. One may or may not incorporate Mao Zedong thought as part of the guiding ideology, but to pit Mao Zedong thought against Marxism-Leninism is to commit the same error which Karat would otherwise treat as something characteristic of petty bourgeois revolutionism - conceiving Mao Zedong thought as an absolutisation of the Chinese experience and deny or fail to appreciate its broader relevance especially in the present-day Third World context. This in turn is rooted in the frozen, Soviet-inspired understanding of the Chinese revolution and an opportunist centrist approach to the Great Debate and to the problems of socialist construction.
As for Karat’s objection to the characterisation of Indian society as a semi-colony and his argument of incompatibility between semi-colonial status and political independence, let us recall that Lenin recognised semi-colonial states as an example of the transitional form of state in the era of finance capital. “Finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise”, says Lenin, “to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. Not only are the two main groups of countries, those owning colonies, and the colonies themselves, but also the diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically,, are formally independent, but in fact are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence, typical of this epoch.” Semi-colony is one form of such financial and diplomatic dependence, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin cites the cases of Argentina and Portugal as two other forms, the former being “almost a British commercial colony” and the latter though formally an independent sovereign state is actually a British protectorate. “Finance capital”, warns Lenin, “is such a great, such a decisive, you might say, force in all economic and in all international relations, that it is capable of subjecting, and actually does subject, to itself even states enjoying the fullest political independence”. We use the expression “semi-colonial” in our characterisation of the Indian society precisely to connote this reality of multifarious dependence underlying India's formal political independence. Otherwise the present set of economic and foreign polices could not have been introduced as smoothly, they would have called for a cow; d’etat in India a la East Europe.
There is absolutely no contradiction between the semi-colonial semi-feudal nature of Indian society and the bourgeois-landlord domination in state power. The bourgeoisie’s alliance with landlords is a necessary corollary to semi-feudalism while semi-colonialism implies the formal exclusion of imperialism from state power.
Similarly, there is no incompatibility between the comprador nature of big capital and its monopolistic mode or scale of functioning. Karat finds a contradiction here, because to him monopoly invariably implies independence. But monopoly capital in India has not evolved on the Western pattern i.e., monopoly as it arose through the classical model of free competition in an independent capitalist context. In India the monopoly houses have reached their present strength by drawing on state protection and patronage and as junior partners of imperialist finance capital. Monopoly does imply a certain scale and strength, but that is certainly not sufficient to get out of the framework of dependence especially given the enormous strength and technological edge of international finance capital.
Karat is equally mistaken when he argues that our analysis of Indian society in general and Indian bourgeoisie in particular makes us soft pedal the imperialist threat and underplay the importance of anti-imperialist struggle. On the contrary, this saves us from nationalist illusions, from reducing the communist party’s anti-imperialist role to merely one of mounting pressure on the vacillating national bourgeoisie, guards us against giving undue concessions to our ‘own' bourgeoisie in the name of waging a common war against imperialism and exhorts us to heighten our own independent anti-imperialist role. Moreover, this also enables us to assert our proletarian political independence from the vicious ideology of national chauvinism, both externally as well as internally.
Karat also finds fault with our analysis of the international situation, particularly with the formulation that it is the Third World versus imperialism contradiction which constitutes the principal contradiction in the international arena. He says this leads us to deny or understate the significance of the socialist system and makes us liable to “lapse into petty bourgeois radicalism which relies on other revolutionary currents and not the primary, the one based on the working class and the scientific system of socialism.” On the contrary, we feel their thesis of centrality of the socialist camp (led by USSR) versus imperialist camp (led by USA) contradiction – as distinct from the ideological contradiction between socialism and imperialism – has undermined the very primacy and essential independence of revolution in India, affected their independent judgement and left them vulnerable to the thoroughly misleading theory of peaceful transition to People’s Democracy and Socialism through the so-called non-capitalist path with the help of Soviet aid. The contradiction between two systems or two blocs generally operates within its own diplomatic framework and though every democratic revolution led by the proletariat today is part and parcel of the world socialist revolution, such democratic revolutions cannot be treated as an extension of any central contradiction between two rival power blocs even if they represent two diametrically opposed social systems like socialism and imperialism.
AJIT Roy too raises somewhat similar objections and questions more or less the same formulations though from a different and largely Trotskyite position
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.”
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.
TO conclude the whole discussion, let us emphasise the following salient distinct ions of our programme and tactical line vis-u-vis those of the CPI(M) and CPI.
1. Our programme accords absolute primacy to the cause of revolution in India. This is the driving force underlying our consistent advocacy of proletarian independence and vigorous activism and independent assertion and initiative of the Left. In the parliamentary arena, this reflects in our line of revolutionary opposition and in the larger extra-parliamentary context in our pursuit of revolutionary alternatives. Assimilation of this integral revolutionary perspective is the most crucial safeguard against the liberal and revisionist (social-democratic) perspectives which reduce the role of the communist party to that of a mere pressure group.
2. Our programme is alive to the stubbornness and resilience of our feudal and colonial remnants, but at the same time it also declares war on the Indian variety of capitalism. We are against any straitjacketing of the revolution in a rigid schematic framework. Any metaphysical or eclectic approach on this score can lead to a whole range of ideological-political deviations ranging from liberalism/liquidationism to sectarianism/anarchism.
3. As staunch champions of proletarian internationalism we are the sworn enemy of national chauvinism both in its external and internal contexts and dimensions. This enables us to preserve our political and ideological independence against all sorts of vulgar anti-imperialism and tailism.
4. Our programme upholds the banner of democracy boldly and consistently in all spheres of state and society. Our commitment to democracy is however not rooted in any liberal illusion of democracy itself being the solution to all problems. As communists we believe in the primacy and ultimate strength of class struggle and democracy provides the best conditions for a free, broad and rapid development of class struggle.
5. In politics, we accord absolute primacy to the people, their strength, initiative and involvement which alone can serve as a bulwark against the politics of patronage, power-brokering and unprincipled alliances and adjustments. The CPI(M) and CPI not only erect a Chinese wall between economic struggle and political struggle, but they feel that the masses are only fit for economic struggle or struggle for relief and petty reforms while ‘polities’ is reserved for the party, or for the coterie of leaders at different levels to be precise. This robs their variety of politics of all the vigour and vibrance that can only come with people’s politics, that is people's politics for power and transformation.
OVER the past four years we have gone into many specifics of the New Economic Policies (NEP) in our party literature and we have no intention of repeating a detailed review here. Rather we would focus more on the interface between the NEP and the so-called New World Order as well as on a few theoretical issues thrown up by these new changes. First, let us take a look at certain key features of the imperialist world economy which partly explain the compulsions behind NEP and its specific character.
The liquidity bubble building up over the world economy is of monstrous proportions. The capital flows in the world financial markets are of the order of US $7 trillion a day. This is equivalent to some 28 times of our GDP, crisscrossing the globe on a single day. Right at this moment when we are talking some US $1200 million would have been transacted. This capital knows no national frontiers; and it is subject to little national control. It has become truely global, going places and changing into currencies guided solely by the prospects of higher returns.
Only less than 25% of the world capital flows today are accounted for by the trade flows. All the rest is mercurial liquid capital not finding many avenues in the present-day world for valorisation. The full implications of this volatile finance capital of mindboggling size is difficult to fathom. It can wreck havoc with the national economies, inflate them at will or trigger off massive capital flight; it can bring the stock markets crashing down or cause enormous fluctuations in exchange rates through sheer speculation, as witnessed in the collapse of ERM mechanism. The national governments have virtually no control over capital flows of such magnitude and will be hapless spectators. After the ‘Black-Monday’ and the Tokyo stock exchange crash, the financiers are a bit weary of going into the stock markets and in the present recessionary conditions with their low average returns, stock markets in the developed world are not adequate enough outlets for this gargantuan-sized capital. Hence it seeks greener pastures. This capital is knocking at the doors of the economies of the so-called growth regions, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, and is trying to gate-crash into the ten 'Big Emerging Markets’ including India. No wonder then that the Euro-issues and bonds floated abroad by the Indian companies are oversubscribed many times.
The post-War long wave of boom seems to have come to an end for good. The consumer boom too seems to have flattened out. After all, computers today cannot sustain such a high growth that automobiles and other consumer durables did in the earlier decades. The ‘Age of Prosperity’ is already a distant dream in the West. The average annual percentage change in the GDP per capita of the industrialised nations between the years 1950 to 1973 was 3.6%: The same tumbled down to 2% between 1973 to 1989.
The most notable feature of the present crisis seems to be the utter inability of the governments to intervene to regulate or stimulate the economy. Long before Keynes’ prophetic forecast about capitalism could come true, Keynesianism itself is long dead. Except perhaps Japan, all other governments in the West are saddled with huge deficits and heavy borrowings and their ability to stimulate growth through higher public spending is nil. Monetarism too has reached its physical limits. Despite lowest ever interest rates in some countries, investments are not picking up. Since the private banks have colossal funds the inability of the central banks to effectively intervene in the volatile financial markets to keep the exchange rates stable is becoming too glaring. The most ironical part of the story, as expressed by an official of the US administration, is that if the Government resorts to some Keynesian measures to increase public spending to stimulate growth, the consumers spend their excess income on buying cheaper goods from China or South Korea, and if the central bank lowers the interest rates to stimulate investment, the investors borrow the money and invest it in China or Thailand where the returns are higher! When the industrial boom in the West comes to an end a boom in overseas investments is only natural.
“If you are going to lose your job you won’t get it back” — this is the popular refrain everywhere in the West. This means that even if the immediate crisis of overproduction is overcome and if there is a cyclical upturn, the employment scenario is not going to drastically improve. The unemployment is structural and hence more permanent. In Europe alone, the number of unemployed will be more than 40 million in a few years. In a country like Spain, 50% of the working population is unemployed.
Large-scale introduction of automation and micro-electronics during '70s and '80s is the direct cause for this. For the first time in the history of capitalism a new technology destroys more jobs than it creates. In order to arrest the declining profits the bourgeoisie in these countries resorted to these so-called labour-saving devices and it has boomeranged. With so many people thrown out of employment their purchasing power declined, the aggregate market shrunk, and the capital is now facing an explosive crisis of realisation. Hence the tendency of the capital to move out to new areas.
The gravity of the crisis is such that it is impossible to overcome this within the framework of these individual countries or even collectively within the framework of QECD. And hence begins a forceful outward thrust of capital as well as a qualitatively new phase of neocolonialism.
In many areas of the international trade, the comparative advantages are shifting decisively in favour of some Third World countries, especially the semi-industrialised ones. According to one study by Vijay Kelkar, for a whole range of industrial products barring high-tech ones, the unit cost of production is lower in India than in the West. According to Marx’s labour theory of value the movement of relative prices is bound to assert on an international scale too and this is precisely what is happening. The main factor here is wage differences. The average wage per hour in engineering industry in Germany is US $22. Here in India it will be less than one dollar.
One response to this was the growing protectionism. Apart from tariff barriers, the non-tariff barriers have become the main instruments of protectionism. According to the 1988 annual report of the Bank for International Settlements more than 50% of the world merchandise trade was ‘managed’ trade, that is, subjected to extra-GATT, non-tariff measures like voluntary export restraints and market-sharing arrangements etc. The growing inter-imperialist contradictions, especially the trade rivalry, is also aggravating the overall crisis of imperialism.
The other response was to neutralise the comparative advantages of the Third World either by invoking the social clause and raising tariff or through relocation of production and capital export.
The total Foreign Direct Investment(FDI) in the world tripled in the ’8Os. By the end of 1990 the total FD1 all over the world had reached US $7 trillion. Between 1983-89, the FDI registered an increase of 29% per annum whereas the world exports increased only 9% and world GDP even much less. From 1983 to 1990 such investments grew four times faster than world output and three times faster than world trade. During the last three years of the ’80s the FDI, in terms of 1980 dollar rates, was more than US $ 100 billion a year, ten times as much as it had been in the first three years of the 1970s.
Though there was a relative decline in the share of FDI flows to the Third World, in absolute figures it steadily went up. The flow of foreign capital to the Third World increased without interruption till 1982. After the recession of the early '80s, initially there was an upsurge in FDI, but again it slowed down. But from 1986 to 1990, FDI increased annually by an average 25% and in ’90s this trend became more pronounced. It went up to 30% in 1992. The share of USA in total FDI in 1960 was 47% and in 1989 it came down to 28% whereas the combined share of Japan and Germany in 1960 was 1.9% and it went up to 20.6% in 1989.
Yet another feature of the crisis in the developed capitalist economies is the diminishing share of the manufacturing sector in the economy. In USA, for instance, less than 15% of the net growth in capital stock from 1983 to 1988 was accounted for by agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, and public utilities — the industries that have the potential to produce more of what the people need to improve their living conditions. 85% went for the expansion of retail and wholesale trade and for the use of financial, real estate, insurance and business service firms (Monthly Review June 1990 p. 2). This reflected in FDI also. For instance, the share of FDI from USA that went into manufacturing was 40%. in both 1966 and 1990 but the share of wholesale trade, banking, finance and insurance together went up from 16% to 39% between those years. And this explains the growing US pressure over India and other Third World countries to open up their financial sectors to foreign investment and the inclusion of TRIM Sand trade-in-services under GATT. On the other hand, manufacturing production is witnessing increasing relocation to the Third World where the labour is cheap.
The contradiction between growing inter-nationalisation of production, through MNCs and otherwise, and the still national institutions of capital is one of the important contradictions of capitalism today. The comparatively high wages in the West is the prime reason for this relocation of production. Secondly, in anticipation of possible trade blocs resulting from the escalating trade rivalry, capital is moving out to gain a strategic presence in zones that might possibly constitute the trade blocs centering around USA, Japan and Europe. The monopolies from the developed capitalist countries are forging strategic alliances with companies in the Third World to exploit cheap labour and enhance their competitiveness vis-a-vis each other. The US Trade Department has identified ten ‘big emerging markets’ in which they would like their companies to have a strategic presence.
And then there is the growing phenomenon of multinationals (MNCs). MNCs had global sales of 4.4 trillion dollars in 1990 and the deliveries between their subsidiaries came to some 1.2 trillion dollars. The Economist magazine estimates that the gross stock of fixed private non-residential capital in the world would be around $20 trillion. The top 100 MNCs account for roughly 16% of the world's productive assets and the top 300 for 25% (The Economist March 27,1993). The division of labour between different branches of the MNCs as well as between different MNCs is coming to the fore as the main feature in the new international division of labour.
However, the MNCs do not just hang from the air and remain very much part of different imperialist national frameworks in terms of origin and in this sense they remain very much national. For instance out of some 35000 MNCs that exist at present slightly less than half are from just four countries — America, Japan, Germany and Switzerland. Out of top 50 MNCs throughout the world 25 are from the first three countries.
The agriculture in the entire capitalist world has gone beyond salvage and is being sustained only by massive state subsidies. The aggregate subsidy to agriculture (pre-GATT levels) was 80% in US, 100% in Europe and around 200% in Japan. In certain crop lines it was very high 300% for rice in Japan and 360% for tobacco in US. Despite strong opposition from the protectionist farm lobby the influence of neo-liberals who were arguing for the dismantling of such high subsidy levels and shifting agricultural production to the Third World was growing and following the Cairns Group and GATT agreements large areas of Third World agriculture it on the former remains to be seen.
As history shows export of capital by the imperialists is never an innocent corporate transfer or a mere bank transaction but is always associated with a bloody neo-colonial political, if not military, offensive. The Gulf War, US gerrymandering in GATT, Super 301 and Special 301 trade weapons, the IMF-World Bank conditionalities etc. fall into a pattern seen in this light. The point is to grasp the qualitatively new element in the present neo-colonial offensive. It is not just a routine broadening and deepening of the world market. A single, seamless, integral world market undivided into different national segments is sought to be built up. All national barriers are broken open for the free mobility of capital as well as for trade. The principal ideological offensive of the neo-colonialism in this worldwide drive is the neo-liberalism, based on a selective use of the neo-classical economic theory that calls forgiving full play to the market forces.
This then is the background for the New Economic Policy of the past four years being implemented by the Congress government. It is through this NEP that the Indian ruling classes have tried to adjust themselves to the New World Order. Seen in the light of the above-mentioned trends in the imperialist world, the rationale behind many aspects of this policy becomes clearer. But whatever may be the subjective calculations and ambitions of the ruling classes, where these policies are taking the country? Here we will take stock of the concrete impact of this policy by way of putting forth some propositions without going into the policy measures themselves.
CONSIDERING the impact of NEP in the past four years we make the following propositions:
Though the Indian monopoly bourgeoisie remained compradors all along they were compradors with a difference. Unlike the Chinese compradors, the Indian capitalists, despite being dependent on foreign capital and technology, had an industrial base, exercised some degree of control over the domestic market and some even enjoyed a certain measure of technological self-reliance. They put the Indian state to good use to acquire some relative independence vis-a-vis the finance capital. But all that is changing under the new economic regime and NEP.
The big monopoly industrial houses of India are vying with each other to enter into ‘strategic alliances’ with foreign monopolies. They are again reducing themselves to managing agencies, trading houses, commission agents and junior partners of MNCs. Even the number one monopoly house, the house of Tatas, was no exception to this; in their competition with Lever they embraced Proctor & Gamble. The Chauhan of Pure Drinks who waged a so-called ‘nationalistic’ cola war against Pepsi for several years succumbed to Coca Cola for $60 million. United Breweries, the market leader in India, has offered 20% of its returns to Carlsberg just to use the latter's brand name. The TVS group, which prides itself for being one of the top 20 monopoly houses in India, considers its bagging of a job order for components from Ford Motors the biggest achievement in its entire corporate life. The entire auto industry is already enmeshed in ‘strategic alliances’. The Indian tyre giant MKF was asked to reduce its stakes to 49% when it sought a collaboration with the world leader, Firestone. Almost all the corporate reports these days read like sell-out reports.
Even public sector enterprises are being offered to the MNCs. The telecom giant ITI was offered to AT&T Bell and the latter was ready to take it over provided they were allowed to retain only 15% of the existing labour force. Foreign banks are also considering outright purchase of some Indian public sector banks and the only hitch seems to be the absence of an hire-and-fire policy. With the entire institutional framework designed to offer protection to the Indian bourgeoisie from the foreign monopolies torn apart, things are back to square one and the bourgeoisie is back to its naked position as compradors.
Meanwhile, let us see what is happening to the Indian economy in the short term.
By now it is clear that the Indian bourgeoisie has not been able to carry out the structural adjustment programme dictated by IMF as they originally visualised. Fiscal stabilisation has gone haywire, the fiscal deficit is back to 7-plus mark, a huge liquidity is again building up and the inflation has already crossed into double digits. At this rate of inflation the advantages of devaluation will soon be eroded and the export growth will fall behind. It may be 1990 all over again.
The first phase of fiscal squeeze sent the economy into a deep recession from which it is yet to recover and the industrial growth is yet to reach even half of the pre-1989 levels. Now with another dose of fiscal consolidation urgently on the agenda, even without IMF breathing down their necks, there are no prospects for the economy to go on to the terrain of higher growth in the short term. In place of vibrant growth that Manmohan Singh promised in three years we only have a perennial recession, a lingering stagflation rather. Even a cautious Manmohan Singh had to admit that it might take at least ten years for the reform measures to bear fruit.
The crisis at the turn of the ’90s was partly structural and partly cyclical. That is, even if one were to grant some merit to the argument that certain structural reforms would create some room for growth and that way accept the crisis to be partly structural, the crisis was primarily cyclical. Or rather one of periodical stagnation because in underdeveloped economies like India the cycle does not operate in a pure form where the recovery is somewhat automatic. The assumption behind the IMF-Manmohan school is that a package of structural reforms, not internally dictated by the prerequisites of deepening the capitalist growth but externally directed by the interests of finance capital, would pull the economy from the doldrums, stimulate the economy and sustain a long, new phase of growth. On the contrary, the structural reforms have only worsened things, added to the crisis of stagnation and postponed any possible recovery. It is now clear that the Indian bourgeoisie is no longer capable of sustaining long periods of growth through heavy internal and external borrowings as they did in the ’80s. Rather the crisis of stagnation which they were facing from mid-60s onwards and which they were trying to overcome in one form or another including controlled development of capitalism in agriculture to some extent, increasing public sector investment, generating a middle class market for consumer durables and increasing investments through enormous borrowings etc., is now finding a most concentrated expression. The bourgeoisie seems to have run out of all other options. The present option, before it can yield any results — no positive result is in sight even in the medium term — will cause tremendous devastation in the economy, erode whatever autonomy and internal viability that capitalism in India had and make the bourgeoisie ever more dependent on the imperialists. This much is evident even in the short run.
True, the payments crisis has been overcome. Exports have been growing fast. But in view of the rising inflation it is extremely doubtful whether the present export growth can be sustained without sending the whole of the economy back again into a tailspin of recession. Sustaining only the export sector at cost of all other sectors of the economy would cause dangerous distortions in the long run.
Despite export growth the trade gap still remains and easing of the situation on the payments front has mainly come about through capital inflows — FDI, Euro issues, remittances and investments by foreign institutional investors in Indian stock markets. The last two categories are extremely risky propositions and at the first sign of trouble they will take to flight as happened in 1990. Earlier the core industrial sector was considered the bedrock of self-reliance, was confined to the public sector and was considered out of bounds for private or foreign capital. But now foreign capital is much sought after in the core sector, with the government guaranteeing fabulous terms as in the power and oil sectors and grumblings are heard only about opening up consumer goods sector to foreign investment where it hurls the private capitalists. Allowing FII investment is an invitation to foreign investors to take over Indian companies and it has already thrown up an opposition pressure group, the 'Bombay Club'. Because of the badly needed hard currency, the state is forced to compromise the interests of the bourgeoisie itself. Here is a concrete instance of how the compulsions of the structural adjustment leads to further compradorisation.
Starting from the early ’80s, the Indian industry has been going through a great flux. Certain traditional industrial sectors like textiles and jute have been partly or wholly destroyed. The past four years have only accentuated this process. Since 1990 many of the new projects have been put on hold and much of the new investments is not going into the new projects but to modernise the existing plants. Liberalisation of imports has dealt a mortal blow at the capital goods industry and there is no recovery as yet in this sector. Especially many units of the machine tools industry have been wiped out. Even though robots have not entered Indian industry in a big way, semi-automation — introduction of CMC machines is now more or less generalised. This has displaced not only thousands of workers in the engineering industry but has also made all the earlier generations of machines redundant which have ended up in sweat-shops manufacturing components for the bigger industries. Everywhere in industry, there is rationalisation, reorganisation of the production process and intensification of the exploitation of the labour power. With massive new changes in the labour process to suit the new technologies and the needs of internationalisation of production there is an uneasy coexistence of pre-Taylorean, Taylorean and post-Taylorean labour processes.
Ancillarisation is now more or less generalised in the entire industry. The German multinational Mico-Bosch in Bangalore puts out its jobs to a certain SSI unit there which too has a German collaboration for 25% of the wage costs. Opening up the electronic industry in stages has caused at least two massive waves of closures. The phenomenon of industrial sickness has increased and the number of SSIs closed has reached around a staggering 2,35,000. Even in the large-scale sector there is a high degree of technological unevenness and many companies in the fertiliser, cement, sugar, heavy engineering and electrical sectors are facing closure. The public sector units, with their financial strait-jackets and callous managements are the least prepared for the new situation and there is a decision to close down as many as 65 PSUs. All these things are happening despite some 60% additional effective protection to the Indian manufacturers through devaluation. In the Indian version of ‘shock therapy’ too, there is too much shock and too little therapy.
Except for the general crisis of green revolution India never witnessed an acute agrarian crisis throughout ’80s. But integration into the world market and free trade under GATT regime threatens to cause serious disruptions in Indian agriculture. Here too all the regulatory mechanisms are abolished in one stroke. In the short run some regions and certain crop lines will be badly affected. For instance, as per GATT agreement, there should be a single common market for food grains in India. If there is going to be free movement of rice from Andhra to Kerala, the paddy cultivation in Kerala, which is already unremunerative and which was being sustained through legislative measures preventing conversion of paddy lands into some other crop lands, will become totally unsustainable because the price difference is Rs.3 per Kg. between Kerala and Andhra. And more than a million people, cultivators and labourers, depend on paddy cultivation in Kerala, a state which already has a very high level of unemployment. And it will have a depressing effect on the wage levels in Kerala, achieved through decades of struggle and organisation. Presently an agricultural labourer on the paddy fields in Kerala gets Rs.55-60 a day whereas his counterpart in Andhra gets not more than Rs.30. Similarly, free movement of wheat from Punjab-Haryana region will have a negative impact on the spread of green revolution in other parts, say the eastern region.
Likewise free imports and exports might cause tremors on the price front. When the Ministry of Commerce decided to import edible oils the coconut prices crashed from Rs.6 to Rs.2 per coconut and that had a devastating effect on the coconut growers in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Though certain commodities from India are competitive in the world market India doesn't have a huge exportable surplus in any of these commodities. Last year when cotton export was allowed cotton prices and yarn prices went up by 30 to 40% and the handloom weavers, who we're already facing starvation deaths in some parts of the country, were not getting the yarn. Only after massive protests by the weavers, the commerce ministry, as a belated move, imposed the condition on exporters of yarn that they should import commensurate amount of cotton. The present steep rise in sugar prices has also something to do with the decision to allow export of sugar last year. First sugar export was allowed, and then when sugar prices shot up in the domestic market sugar was imported, and in the process the bureaucrats of STC, FCI and Congressmen made Rs.300 crore commission and that is free-market GATT regime for you!
Whatever may be the comparative advantages of Indian agriculture it is doubtful whether the real advantages will accrue to the Indian farmers. How the Pepsi manipulated the prices and cheated the farmers of Punjab and how Cadbury did the same to Cocoa growers in Kerala and ITC to tobacco growers in Andhra are well known facts. Those who argue for GATT on the pretext of increased exports overlook how the export-based agriculture of Latin America was totally ravaged by the MNCs. According to The Ecologist magazine 80% of the Third World land on which export crops grow is controlled by MNCs, from Unilever to Nestle and Lonhro. Between 1982 and 1992, the EC depressed world sugar prices by 75% that led to the loss of millions of jobs in the Third World. In Africa, which enjoyed food self-sufficiency till 1960, cheaper wheat imports from the West forced out of market the local food products like corn, millet and rice, and millions of small and middle farmers were ruined. The African agriculture was devastated. Later when the wheat imports became dearer there were famines and, of course, 'humanitarian' military interventions. But the most far-reaching impact of the GATT-regime will be on the class structure in rural areas. More than 70% of the cultivating households in India own between one to four hectares of land. Most of them are small and middle farmers who are highly indebted and are on the margins of independent farming. Large-scale entry of capital into agriculture, sharp fluctuations in prices and full play of market forces will throw millions of farmers out of independent farming. The historically unfinished process of differentiation of Indian peasantry which has been remarkably slow will proceed in a rapid but extremely painful way.
The corporate sector in India “has not added a single net job in the past four years/Rather there has been a negative growth in employment in this sector. A ban on recruitment is in force in government services and public sector. Service sector employment which rapidly grew in ’70s and early ’80s has come to a halt adding to the middle class frustrations. Employment in agriculture is virtually stagnant for the past four years. In many parts of the country, especially in arid and semi-arid regions, the agricultural labourers were getting not more than 90-110 days of work a year. In many parts of rural India there is a huge surplus labour and rural labour migration has reached phenomenal proportions. The only sector where employment has grown in the past four years is the small-scale industrial sector or the so-called informal sector where employment has grown by 6%. This is mainly because of the ancillarisation undertaken in a generalised way by the large enterprises. Anyway, workers in this sector get subsistence wages and hence employment growth in this sector is not of much economic significance.
The distinction between domestic capital and foreign capital in Indian economy is only a technical distinction now and they are no longer two different categories. Correspondingly, the Indian state is also losing step by step whatever economic sovereignty it had. The broad parameters of the macro-economic policy are set by the IMF and even when the government is not negotiating for a loan it has little latitude. The sectoral policies are often dictated by the World Bank, for instance, in areas like health, education etc. Even a chamber of industry from Germany gives a memorandum calling for policy changes and the government readily submits to that on the eve of the budget behind the back of the parliament. If there is a short reprieve from the hard IMF conditionalities, then ‘soft’ pressure is applied on the Indian government by various means. At Davos it is declared the ‘Year of India’, various foreign statesmen shower praise on India’s open: door policy and even the visiting Prime Minister of that little Singapore calls for allowing foreigners to own lands in India and to invest in real estate development. Some radical intellectuals are calling this phenomenon the retreat of the state. Whatever regulatory role the state can have m future will be within the SAP of IMF. True, the state still has nominal powers to take decisions in the national interests against finance capital but in real terms it cannot do so without causing a violent break in its external economic and political relations.
This, in brief, is the scenario after the change in the economic regime in India. In the light of this, let us now consider the basic issues involved.
From whatever has been said above, it is clear that there is an organic link between the NEP and the new world situation. The neo-colonialist pressures on the Indian government to adapt to the New World Order is also well known. But to dispel any impression that NEP is purely a product of external pressure, of a forced situation, let us make it clear that it is primarily due to internal compulsions that the Indian ruling classes have adopted the core orientation of the new policy. This policy is due to the prolonged crisis of the Nehruvian socialism and its collapse as well as the logical continuation of it. The framework of Nehruvian Socialism had run into a crisis by mid-60s itself. Despite some drastic measures like bank nationalisation and MKTP, FERA etc, taken by Indira Gandhi to reinforce the same, that framework had clearly reached its economic limits by the turn of the '80s and a process of gradual dismantling began in early '80s itself. Absence of radical land reforms to facilitate broad-based capitalist development in agriculture, the narrow base and shallowness of Green Revolution and very skewed income distribution are ultimately at the bottom of the crisis and the transition to a new economic regime. In this sense it is only an internally forced situation.
What is new about the NEP is that the Indian ruling classes have lost much of their bargaining capacity. One may recall that in the earlier decades, the Indian ruling classes were trying to bargain for a better deal within the framework of dependence, largely under the slogan of New International Economic Order, even while retaining monopoly over foreign trade and some control over foreign capital. Now these controls have gone and instead of the New international Economic Order the Indian bourgeoisie has been forced to come to terms with the New World Order. Secondly, the new qualitative element is the irreversibility of these reforms.
While earlier the state retained formal powers to curb market forces and protect domestic capital, now, under GATT regime and IMF conditionalities the state is powerless to do so unless it opts for thoroughly breaking with all these institutions which is inconceivable.
Narasimha Rao philosophises too much on the Madhyamika these days. All the attempts by the Indian bourgeoisie in the past decades to follow a middle path between an independent and autonomous development and total and outright dependence, articulated mainly through NIEO, have ended in a total fiasco. Now again they are harping on a middle way between a free market regime and the Nehruvian model. Can they pursue it? Whatever may be the compulsions, can the present course be put to good use by the bourgeoisie and will it enable them to overcome their dependence? First of all, there can be no middle way between accepting the GATT and rejecting it just as there can be no middle way between accepting IMF conditions and rejecting IMF option altogether.
Secondly, just as Ranjit Sau's critique of the theoretical model on which IMF bases its structural adjustment programme amply shows, the SAP is not going to relieve the Third World countries of their crisis, rather it will only reproduce the crisis on a higher plane with greater severity after a time lag. The nation would be leap-frogging from one crisis to another and would be losing its economic sovereignty step by step in the bargain. And this suicidal course would appear fully justified from the point of view of economic rationality.
The centrepiece of the present neo-colonial onslaught is the ideological offensive of neo-liberalism based on a perverse interpretation of the neo-classical economic theory and the logic of the economic rationality of the market. The perverse side of the whole thing will become clear if you take a close look at the IMF functions. Since structural adjustment always becomes a borrower's burden, the institutions like IMF and World Bank never suggest structural adjustment to the OECD countries despite the fact that the lifting of a few protectionist measures in the West would go a long way in easing the payments crisis of many of the borrowing Third World countries. The logic of economic rationality always operates like the one-way traffic. This logic of the market has been internalised and uncritically accepted by the Indian establishment. Economic rationality Vs social priorities — this is the central contradiction not only in the present new course but in the entire path of development of capitalism in India.
If the experience of the Latin American countries is any indication what is in store for India is not difficult to guess: despite some initial growth and greater mobility of the capital there will be debt crisis, capital flight and debt-trap and conversion of debts into capital assets by the international finance capital for which public assets will be offered for a song; selling a way the PSUs for crumbs; sharp slump in growth; higher and even hyperinflation; massive devaluations; violations of GATT regime and reprisals; wage freeze, exit policies, anti-strike laws and anti-trade union legislations; and, finally, food crisis and famines. And also political authoritarianism is always the Siamese twin of economic neo-liberalism. In a country of continental dimensions with a stronger indigenous base like India it may take time for this to happen but this is the sure road ahead.
Alternatively, there may be temporary withdrawals from GATT or IMF, a new round of nationalisation of banks and some key industries and new restrictions on foreign capital etc., — in short, selective delinking — if the crisis comes to a head and a new popular or radical political force takes over power. The neo-liberal package will have to run its full course and it is bound to create the objective conditions for a radical rupture. Just as there is no calling it a halt in the midway, there is no 'middle way' between the two alternatives either.
Many of the ‘leftist’ academic offsprings of the Nehruvian era have gone over to the camp of neo-liberals in the ’90s. Some vulgar Marxists also echo the views of neo-liberals. Even some well-meaning people, frustrated with the earlier control-permit raj and searching for alternatives within the realm of economic theory, have resigned themselves to endorsing the present course. Opposition to globalisation would be futile since it is a historical trend and the only alternative to the market is command economy — so goes their argument. True, globalisation is a historical trend and nobody is opposed to global economic interaction per se. But the point is globalisation in whose terms and in whose interests. The imperialists also launch their neo-colonial offensive under the slogan of ‘globalisation’. The real issue is globalisation with or without self-reliance. Likewise, nobody is opposed to market forces in abstraction. True, the dismantling of the Nehruvian socialism has made capital more mobile and has removed many unnecessary fetters. And our party never held any brief for the public sector as the opportunist left did. But our point of departure is not that of some forward-looking businessman out to make best advantage out of the new situation. Rather our starting point is the consistent defense of the people's interests. It is not for us to choose between this or that bourgeois alternative, between the Nehruvian socialism and the present market regime. Whatever be the option of the bourgeoisie at a given stage, suggesting alternatives to it is not the task of the communists but to defend the people from the onslaughts. Our point of departure is the whole of political economy, the fight against the increasing dependence, the erosion of sovereignty and the betrayal of the nation by the comprador bourgeoisie for its own self-interests.
In opposing the NEP we never advocate autarky. In fact, Marxism has nothing to do with autarky. We have seen how certain socialist countries totally delinked their way to doom. Autarky, when taken to its extremes invariably leads to its opposite — total dependence. That is why we welcome the general direction of reforms in the socialist countries. Even under Com. Mao, China's relative isolation was more due to political reasons and not because of economic isolationism. In this respect we sharply differ from the anarchists. Taking into account the new world situation and recognising the need for some adjustment, we even incorporated some changes in our New Democratic Programme: while we reiterated expropriation of the bureaucrat capital we modified our approach towards foreign capital in India to that of regulation. Likewise we have not fully endorsed some extreme forms in the struggle against foreign capital, favoured by some grassrdotist forces, like calling for complete boycott of all foreign goods and physical attacks on the establishments of foreign capital etc. In opposing the NEP we are not harking back to that decrepit Nehruvian socialism either, as the CPI(M) is doing.
CPI(M)’s harking back to the historically outdated Nehruvian model is not just a matter of nostalgia. This party fails to see the logical continuity of the old policies of the bourgeoisie in NEP. They have always denied the comprador character of the Indian big bourgeoisie and recognised dependence only in a general way and never as-a structural dependence on imperialism. That is why they see the NEP as an aberration. That is also the reason why they interpret the Bombay Club as the opposition by monopoly bourgeoisie to the NEP and are so much enamoured of it. They oppose the new policies from the premise of the conservative sections of the bourgeoisie and not from the standpoint of the people. They utterly fail to grasp the qualitatively new phase of neo-colonialism. Instead of making use of any predicament of the big bourgeoisie in its attempt at renegotiating its relations with imperialism they rush forward to seek allies within the ranks of the ruling class. In their characteristic opportunist manner they search in vain to look for opposition to NEP within Congress (I) itself. But no section of the ruling class or the Congress party seem lobe sharing with CPI(M) any illusion about going back to the Nehruvian model.
In its limited opposition to the NEP, the CPI(M) glorifies the public sector and makes the defense of public sector the central theme of this opposition. True, we will always oppose leaving the workers in the lurch by handing over the PSUs to private capitalists and the corruption of small coteries of politicians and bureaucrats enriching themselves at the cost of national assets. But CPI(M) elevates what is essentially a trade union issue to the level of an issue of economic policy. On the other hand, even when the national sovereignty itself is at stake due to the economic policies of the Congress(I), the CPI(M) would not elevate its opposition to these policies to the political level of calling for the overthrow of the Congress government under the pretext that this would strengthen the BJP but instead would only call for an economic course correction from the Rao government and would confine all its opposition to NEP to the level of mass organisations and trade unions!
We also disagree with those enthusiasts who reduce the whole of NEP as some kind of imperialist conspiracy and who in their eagerness to oppose imperialism make it the exclusive and principal target. Of course, there is a need for greater thrust against imperialism but not to the exclusion or obfuscation of all other contradictions in the country. One can see shades of this approach in some sections of the farmers movement as well as in the single-issue campaigns on seeds and patent rights led by petty bourgeois democrats. Exaggerating the neo-colonial dimension of the problem invariably leads to the belittling of its internal roots.
Moreover India’s position compared to some other Third World countries is unique. It has a stronger internal basis for capitalism. Despite all sorts of neo-colonialist pressures it has not yet become a full-fledged classical-type neo-colony. It has a home market which is bigger than that of some developed capitalist countries. When it opened up it did not collapse like some former Eastern bloc economies. Here the attempts by the imperialists to reduce the country to the level of a banana republic cannot but be very protracted and complicated. The main line of attack should be directed against the Indian bourgeoisie without whose support the imperialists cannot achieve this. The struggle should continue to be waged on a broad front and it is too premature to narrow down the targets.
In our approach towards the imperialism Vs Third World relations we differ from the theories of underdevelopment emanating mostly from Latin America. At least some theorists of this school emphasised the law of unequal exchange one-sidedly to the point of denying any possibility of development in the Third World which has been disproved by the reality itself. Of late, some leading spokesman of this school have come up with a programme of delinking for the autonomous development of the Third World countries. In stressing the so-called inexorable economic logic of world capitalism they reduce what is primarily a class relation and political question – seizure of power by the proletariat and the popular masses — to the level of some economic strategy. True, a victorious revolution in a Third World country basing on radical internal restructuring and self-reliance will effect some restructuring of the external economic relations as well and there may be temporary dislocations due to political reasons also. This is what Comrade Mao's New Democracy is all about. However, delinking and external integration are not absolute and mutually exclusive categories, and ultimately they are also politically determined.
To consolidate a new coalition of social and political forces against NEP, a concrete alternative programme is, of course, necessary. But suggesting concrete alternative proposals to tide over the crisis within the existing overall broad framework, as is being done by some NCOs and CPI(M), is fraught with liberal and social-democratic overtones. One must be clear about the class line too. The CPI(M), for instance, believes that the monopoly bourgeoisie stands in opposition to the NEP and has pinned much hopes on the Bombay Club.
It may be pertinent here to go into the details of the Bombay Club phenomenon. This pressure group of 17 leading industrialists, representing some sections of the monopoly bourgeoisie, in real terms, had concrete opposition to only one aspect of the NEP : that of allowing foreign institutional investors to invest directly in the stock market. These monopolists who controlled their empires with often less than 10% holdings became panicky when massive FII funds — around Rs. 6000 crore — poured in within weeks and when they started bullish buying into some blue chip scrips. It was Swaraj Paul phenomenon all over again and the fear of takeovers haunted the big bourgeoisie. The Bombay Club met and had the gall to come up with some stupid and unrealistic demands like permission to issue non-voting shares, to borrow from the banks against their existing holdings to further augment their holdings and for consolidating their holdings through fresh issues — absurd proposals some of which go against the very grain of capitalism. Later when the government allowed some of the monopoly houses to raise cheap Euro-loans and to come up with new issues to enhance the promoters holdings nothing more was heard of the Bombay Club. Earlier too the big bourgeoisie had lots of grumblings against the license permit raj. Just as those grumblings cannot be taken as their opposition to the Nehruvian model itself the present protests over this or that specific aspect of the policy cannot betaken as their challenge to the NEP itself.
This, however, doesn't rule out the possibility of sections of bourgeoisie turning around to oppose the NEP in future. Large sections of small and medium capitalists, though they do not exactly resemble the old national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries which was a historically rising independent class, are facing more and more severe problems under NEP and their protests too can be channelised into the overall opposition.
Coming back to the question of an alternative framework, such a meaningful framework can emerge, not as an intellectual exercise but out of the objective struggles of the people themselves. And instead of confining ourselves to alternatives at the level of concrete policies we will have to raise a package of issues that have a direct bearing upon national sovereignty to elevate the struggle against NEP to a qualitatively higher level : right to renegotiate foreign debt and to declare moratorium on that; right to regulate foreign capital including the right to nationalise foreign property; right to arrest capital flight and freeze foreign assets; reform of the international monetary system and the liberalisation of the IMF conditionalities; right to protectionism and to annul GATT conditionalities under conditions of BoP crisis; and the right to cancel patent rights in the national interests etc. Only this way we can make preparations for the decisive turning point and concretely pose the question of alternative political power.
MANY of us may recall that more than a decade back, in the backdrop of the then rising Assam and Punjab movements, the Radical Students Union of the PWG held a seminar on nationality question in Madras. The views of the semi-anarchists on nationality question found a concentrated expression there with which we sharply demarcated ourselves. The PWG soon paid dearly for its petty-bourgeois anarchism on nationality question as a major section of their organisation in Tamil Nadu left the party on this very question, advocated separatism and subsequently degenerated into petty-bourgeois nationalist terrorism. Without taking any lessons from this, the anarchists went on to support, in a rhetorical manner, the Khalistan demand and the separatism in Assam and Tamil Nadu etc.
On the other hand, the opportunist left, led by CPI(M), completely went over to the position of national chauvinism of the bourgeoisie and supported Congress(I)’s positions in Assam and Punjab. In contrast to both these approaches, we have remained consistent in our principles of independence of the proletarian party while actively supporting the genuine aspirations of the nationalities. Based on a concrete analysis of the merits of each specific case of the nationality question we developed our positions. In contrast to the empty phraseology of the anarchists we represented an advanced practice on the nationality question. We stood in the van of several nationality movements: we actively participated in the Assam movement and made a timely demarcation with petty-bourgeois nationalist forces there to develop class-based movements; fighting against Assamese chauvinism we also developed the movements of the national minorities for autonomy there; we expanded our work in Punjab in the midst of the Punjab crisis by fighting against both Sikh chauvinism and Khalistani terrorism as well as the slate terrorism; in Jharkhand we put emphasis on developing an independent base of workers and the rural poor in the first phase and on that basis look an active role later in the movement for a Jharkhand state; and in Tamil Nadu we developed an independent assertion of workers and peasants under the left banner in contrast to the petty-bourgeois nationalists.
Our programme recognises the right of the nationalities for self-determination including the right to secede. It also calls for national unification and visualises a federal India with maximum possible autonomy for states. This offers us broadest possible scope in dealing with the nationalities question, which, in the light of this programme remains a practical question, a concrete question of demarcating ourselves from the petty-bourgeois nationalism and the national chauvinism even while actively supporting the genuine nationality aspirations of various nationalities in India. Below we are giving an analytical account of nationality question in contemporary India. Before that we'll clarify some basic positions of Marxism-Leninism on the nationality question because the misreading and misquoting of classics on this question is rampant among radical petty-bourgeois elements, especially the anarchists.
In so far as nation, in the modern 19th century sense of the term, is a product of capitalism we basically approach this national (as well as the nationality) question in the context of evolving capitalism. The nationality question has been substantially different in the three historical periods — the era of pre-capitalist feudal empires, the colonial period and the post-colonial period.
In the first period, the nascent bourgeoisie under feudal-monarchic empires, in order to do away with all the feudal fetters for the free development of capitalism, took up the question of national freedom and fought for establishing a nation-state which can guarantee conditions for such a free development of capitalism.
In the second period, the newly emerging local bourgeoisie of the colonies, whether comprising a single nationality or many, fought against the bourgeoisie of the oppressing imperialist nation for national freedom and to establish its own nation-state that can guarantee its unfettered development.
In the post-colonial period, under the newly emerged nations with a multi-national(ity) state where the economic foundations for capitalist development have been laid and the preconditions for a modern nationhood are basically fulfilled, the nationality question is a question of general democracy, that of equality of nationalities and their self-determination.
It is obvious that the Marxist views and experiences of each epoch cannot be mechanically applied to another.
Referring to the national question in the first historical period Lenin wrote in 1914 : “For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements...
“Therefore, the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The most profound economic factors drive towards this goal, and, therefore/for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the national state is typical and normal for the capitalist period” (The Right of Nations to Self-Determination Vol. 20 pp. 396-397).
In the infancy of capitalism, the complete victory of commodity production, establishing a home-market and economic sovereignty were crucial conditions for a national formation. In the modern world these conditions can be stretched to include a centralised monetary system, regulations over foreign trade, a unified system of economic administration based on national economic policies, necessary infrastructure and a certain autonomy vis-a-vis the world economy etc.
In the later stages of capitalism when such economic foundations were laid for several nationalities collectively in a larger framework the tendency for every nationality to have ‘its own’ home-market and ‘its own’ nation-state was substantially weakened. Hut the whole national question cannot be reduced that of its economic foundation and the formal, politico-cultural side can also be equally powerful in constituting the national question.
While formation of nation-states based on a single nationality was a general rule in Western Europe, multi-nationality national movements emerged under conditions of colonialism in other parts of the world where the nation-state was established encompassing various nationalities like in India. Since the requirements of modern capitalism are largely satisfied collectively for all these nationalities under this nation-state, the national question stands basically resolved for them. Other than in exceptional conditions they don’t manifest a real and sustained tendency towards the formation of a separate national state. In this sense it would be wrong to equate every nationality with a nation and call every nationality question a national question in the classical 19th century sense of the term. In Europe itself there were nations like Belgium or Switzerland with more than one nationality. In contrast to Western Europe, the tendency to form larger states and nations comprising many nationalities was stronger among the peoples of Southern Europe when they were faced with the challenges from the more powerful bourgeois states of Western Europe.
There is no use in arguing that they were only nation-states and not nations. There was no Chinese Wall between the two in many cases. The idea that nations pre-existed the state was a myth; rather, the states were formed first, based on nationalities in some cases, and they constituted the nation subsequently through a process of national unification and nation-building. Here, there is a need to make a distinction between the state form and the content of the state as well. Except in the case of some confederations, many of the so-called multi-national states, whether they are federations or unions in their state structures, like USA and India, for instance, constitute a single nation for all practical purposes. In present-day Europe, when the developed capitalism outgrows the confines of the small nation-state, the latter is proposed to be substituted by a larger supra-national state in the form of European Union.
History has shown that single language is no longer the criteria for national formation. In Western Europe, language became the means of national unification and consolidation, it defined the frontiers of a nation and its culture. And linguistic nations became the norm. But under colonialism, when the colonial peoples were confronted with a more powerful imperialism, small linguistic-nations were unviable propositions and larger national movements developed cutting across language lines and national formation took place on that basis. Experience has shown that a single language is not an essential condition for modern nation building as well.
There has been much confusion over the Leninist principle of the right of nations to self-determination including the right to secede. Let us quote Lenin again : “We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e independence, i.e freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the country, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede” (The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Vol. 21).
“It is impossible to abolish national (or any other political) oppression under capitalism … By transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality 'only'! - with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the 'sympathies' of the population, including complete freedom to secede. And this, in turn, will serve as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations that will be completed when the state wither away” (The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up Vol. 22).
In Leninist terms, the principle of self-determination including the right to secede is only a means for fusion. The principle of national unification, i.e, the unification of all nationalities and the principle of self-determination should be taken in their dialectical unity together. The communists never approach this principle of self-determination as an abstract democratic principle unrelated to any given political context but always approach it in relation to other principles like national unification and anti-imperialism, and above all, proletarian hegemony in the democratic movement.
Moreover this principle figures in our programme as part of a package of radical reforms which include expropriation of the big bourgeoisie, radical agrarian reforms and thoroughgoing democratisation of the state structure including federal restructuring the polity etc. Implementation of all other reforms will substantially do away with the basis of separatism and the self-determination principle is supposed to guarantee against any kind of oppression or coercion of nationalities. Recognition of this principle does not amount to supporting each and every separatist movement in the pre-revolutionary stage.
Real self-determination, as distinct from the formal right, is a long process, especially in the era of imperialism, and call for overthrow of imperialism and establishment of socialism. Secession, under certain conditions, may well be replacement of one form of national oppression by another. Secession of one nationality from a weak (semi-colonial) nation at the instigation of a strong (imperialist) nation is hardly a resolution of the national question. It is more of a Balkanisation. Under conditions of imperialism, strong national unity, i.e unity of all nationalities and a strong centre, even if there is some degree of internal imbalance, are inevitable for a Third World country to stand up to imperialism and these are backed by the patriotic consciousness of the people. Under such conditions a separatist demand in total insularity from the general democratic struggles of the masses but where there is a blatant intervention by the imperialist forces has the least chance of winning the support of the broad masses of other nationalities.
Nevertheless, in the multi-nationality nation states that came up in the post-colonial era all over the Third World there were factors which in extreme cases could lead to the breaking away of some nationalities and emergence of new nations : a weak bourgeoisie, highly centralised state structure with excessive concentration of economic and political powers, overwhelming domination of a single nationality in the state structure and exclusion of all other nationalities from the power structure, inadequate economic integration, extreme uneven development, crisis of the ruling classes and putrefaction and decay of the state and the cultural and linguistic oppression of one nationality over others etc.
What shall be the role of the proletariat? The proletarian party will fight against all forms of discrimination and oppression of the nationalities. According to Lenin: “The awakening of the masses from feudal lethargy, and their struggle against all national oppression, for the sovereignty of the people, of the nation, are progressive. Hence it is the Marxist’s bounden duty to stand for the most resolute and consistent democratism on all aspects of the national question. This task is largely a negative one. But this is the limit that the proletariat can go in supporting nationalism, for beyond that begins the ‘positive’ activity of the bourgeoisie to fortify nationalism” (Critical Remarks on the National Question Vol.20 pp. 34-35).
“The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism; on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national distinctions and remove national barriers; it supports everything that makes the ties between nationalities closer and closer, or tend to merge nations. To act differently means siding with reactionary nationalistic philistinism (ibid, pp. 35-36).
Thus, the positive goal of the proletariat does not lie in perpetuating nations. It supports the nationality struggles only lo obliterate nationality distinctions whereas the bourgeoisie leads the nationality struggle only to fortify nationalism. In his Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions presented lo the Second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin clarified that the communists must not merge with the bourgeois-national forces, but must “under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form ...”.
In the colonial period, the ‘victory of commodity production’, though not complete, had taken place overwhelmingly and a unified home-market was established for the whole of India. A native bourgeoisie emerged. Thus the material basis for the emergence of the Indian nation was laid. A powerful national movement emerged cutting across nationality lines.
If there had been no colonialism, perhaps some nationalities would have headed for a separate nationhood. Due to the weak material foundations for the nationalities question, the nationalisms with a distinct tendency for establishing a separate statehood, except in the case of Tamils, were mainly religious or communal — Muslim and Sikh nationalisms. Extension of the British policy of divide and rule could have played greater mischief. Taking lessons from its debacle on the Muslim question, the Congress too tried to be flexible, at least, on the Sikh question. Anyway, except Muslim nationalism, other tendencies were by and large overwhelmed by the pan-Indian national movement. They died down, at least for a while, following the basic fulfillment of laying the economic foundation that a separate nation would have created for these nationalities.
The creation of linguistic states further weakened the separatist tendency in some cases. In view of the powerful national liberation struggles against British imperialism and the considerable development of capitalism, the base for national unification remained strong and was not something artificial. The impact of the partition was traumatic and the masses could see through the imperialist designs.
In 1947 when the national unification was achieved it was by abolishing the feudal principalities and on the basis of creating conditions for capitalist development. Hence this historical step forward was not opposed by any nationality in a significant way. But after more than four decades of capitalist development this distorted process of capitalism itself has created new inequalities, discrimination and oppression of the nationalities. Hence the nationalities question is back on the agenda on a qualitatively new and higher plane with a qualitatively different content. So the argument that the nationalities question has already been fully solved in 1947 itself is grossly out of place.
The Indian bourgeoisie was not so weak as in the case of many other newly independent Third World countries. Though certain regional sections were relatively stronger initially they were effectively assimilated subsequently. The Indian big bourgeoisie derives its forces from almost all major nationalities and even from among the small national minorities the elites are periodically assimilated into the power structure. In India the state is not dominated by one nationality and there is no oppression by a single or a group of nationalities over others. The central presence of the political and bureaucratic elites from the Hindi-speaking regions in the political process sometimes creates resentment and alienation among other nationalities but this cannot be interpreted as full-scale national oppression. In fact, some of the more developed regions of India are lying outside the Hindi belt.
On the language question also the Indian ruling classes are somewhat flexible. After their initial attempts at imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi speaking states backfired they are resorting to subtler methods. They don’t find imposition of Hindi an essential precondition for running the affairs of the state.
Citing the collapse of USSR some people argue that India too would inevitably collapse. Their theorisation is that the multi-nationality state is characteristic of underdeveloped conditions—whether capitalist or socialist — and with the development of productive forces, whether under capitalism or socialism, it will inevitably break up, for nation state is the norm of developed capitalism. Accordingly, they argue that, with greater development of capitalism in India the latter too would break up. In the first place, the USSR collapse was a system-collapse and the nationalities issue was not central to it. Of course, if the Indian state continues to remain so centralised and if nationalities in India continue to face the kind of discrimination and oppression that they face at present, certain nationalities in India too might go to a point of no return in their alienation and at an opportune moment might breakaway from India. But here the problem is mainly political and to argue about the inevitability of it from the point of view of economic development and absolutising nation-state as the norm of developed conditions would be wrong. First, there is no reason why this should happen under a revolutionary democratic regime. Secondly, even under developed capitalist conditions there are instances of inseparable fusion of nationalities. We are against absolutising either the ‘economic’ or the ‘political’ side of the nationality question, especially abstracting them from the concrete historical stage, and arguing on that basis that either separation is inevitable or impossible. Rather we go into the concrete historic stage of development and the concrete situation in each country.
When we say that the resolution of the national question through formation of a separate nation-state is no longer on the agenda for the nationalities in India we never mean that the problems posed by the nationalities in India has been solved once for all or that it is only a minor residual question which can be taken care of by capitalism itself. Far from that, the nationality question remains one of the fundamental questions of democratic revolution in India. More than four decades of bureaucrat capitalist development in the country has aggravated the inequality, discrimination and oppression of the nationalities and national minorities in India. And the unity of all the nationalities in India is to be built anew on a new basis.
In the first place, the Indian state structure is highly centralised with excessive concentration of economic and political powers. Even though the restructuring of the centre-state relations and devolution of more powers to the states is not a nationality question per se and is a general democratic question, in view of the reality of linguistic states it gets overlapped with the nationality question. The federal restructuring of the Indian state with maximum possible autonomy to the nationalities is very much on the agenda before the democratic revolution.
The distorted path of development of capitalism in India has made all-round development of nationalities impossible. Meagre resources are left at the lower levels for infrastructural or cultural development. There is also extreme uneven development among various nationalities and various regions. While a single home market for the whole of India has gone a long way in bringing about an economic integration, under this framework, those nationalities which did not posses a class of an early generation of entrepreneurs have invariably lagged behind in industrial development whereas most of the subsequent monopolists who continued to dominate the whole of the Indian market hail from a few nationalities. Under the earlier license-permit raj bourgeois sections from some nationalities lagged behind others and in some cases they invoked sub-nationalism to bargain for greater share. In some cases there were 'project nationalisms' too demanding this or that public sector project for this or that state. The free-market regime might weaken some such nationalisms in the short run but will only aggravate uneven development in the long run.
Certain superstructural factors also give rise to certain types of nationalisms. Due to the insularity of some non-Hindi-speaking nationalities, the intelligentsia from among them feel left out in the media, in the cultural establishment and in the academic world—in short, in the ‘national’ or All-India intellectual discourse—and there are periodic assertions for renewal and ‘catching up’ among those nationalities. The public funds going into the development of these areas at the state level are very meagre and all these assertions are accompanied by strong nationalist fervour. While some nationalities with extreme economic backwardness remain dormant, in other cases even such issues like religious provocation, language imposition in schools and colleges or issues like ‘foreign nationals’ have galvanised the entire nationalities, at least for temporary periods.
Let us make a brief survey of the nationalities situation in concrete terms:
Of all cases, it is only in Kashmir the basis for separatism appears to be strong, primarily because of the centre’s handling of the Kashmir question and the ruthless war it is waging against the Kashmiri people now. The historical factors as well as the external interventions are also important there. Though in principle we are in favour of the self-determination of the Kashmiri people we don’t consider separation a practical proposition now. Not only the military defeat of the Indian state out of the question. But an ‘independent’ Kashmir, sandwiched between the two hostile powers, Pakistan and India, and vulnerable to the US designs in an area of strategic importance cannot remain really independent. Since their struggle for independence is going to be a long drawn affair, in all probability it will be a protracted low-intensity conflict trapped in a political deadlock. But what is shocking about the struggle is its utter insularity from other democratic struggles in India. There are numerous forces in India who outrightly condemn India's war in Kashmir even if they don’t support separatist demand and the nationalist forces in Kashmir virtually have no dialogue or cooperation with them. The ultimate guarantee for the self-determination of Kashmir or its independence is the victory of the revolutionary-democratic forces in India and the lasting solution to the Kashmir question can be found only within a democratic confederation of the peoples of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir.
In Punjab the secessionist struggle has come to a gradual but painful end while in Assam it collapsed dramatically. The Kulaks who were backing the separatist movement in Punjab have now shifted their loyalties to the Congress (I) itself and the petty-bourgeoisie in Assam that led the movement is totally demoralised. These experiences show that there is hardly any viable basis for separatism in these states. After realising the impracticality of separatist option or simply indulging in separatist postures for some time to bargain for more powers sections of ruling class forces from these nationalities scale down their demands to autonomy or merely greater powers to the states as they did in Tamil Nadu.
In the case of Tamil Nadu, the demand fora separate nation-state came up well before 1947. The Tamil national plank drew inspiration from the Aryan-Dravidian divide and the anti-Brahminical and anti-religious ideology. The movement had strong anti-feudal overtones and stressed industrialisation of Tamil Nadu. Had it continued the anti-feudal thrust in a thoroughgoing way and laid the basis for further industrialisation it would have carried a great potential for objectively sharpening the class polarisation within the Tamil society itself. Even without the movement being crushed through repression like in Punjab or Assam and even before coming to power at the state level in 1967, the demand for separation was given up in 1962 itself. This backtracking by the Tamil bourgeoise was partly due to lure of the all-India market and a better bargain with the all-India ruling classes and also probably because the bourgeoisie recoiled at the growing mass awakening and popular character of the movement and-more radical tendencies within the movement represented by Periyar.
The two extreme cases where the separatist sentiments rose high in ’80s, Punjab and Assam, mark a contrast among themselves. Punjab is the place where the green revolution reached its climax and the crisis of green revolution was at the bottom of the Punjab crisis. But Assam is a very backward state where green revolution had not begun at all. Thus an advanced region — Punjab — preferred to break away when it felt that its assimilation within the Indian state acted as a drag and put brakes on its further development. With its productivity in wheat approaching advanced world levels it had a better option in exports than being pressed down by the Indian state. While a backward region like Assam with a predominantly backward, self-sufficient agrarian economy, also preferred to break away because it too felt that its association with India was a drag on its development, the means for the plunder of its rich raw materials. Though a backward region generally prefers to stay within the all-India framework to enjoy the greater advantages of association there were some special reasons for the alienation of the Assamese nationality. They were reduced to about 50% of the state’s population.
The parliamentary politics also throws up reactionary-populist forces which engage in such postures to make use of the nationality aspirations to come to power. Such movements are led by reactionary forces or petty bourgeois nationalist forces. Some have a democratic content and others are downright reactionary. And their class character is best expressed by the extreme forms of struggles including terrorism that they resort to and at other times by their dramatic capitulation to the centre. Such struggles go on for more than a decade with very little democratic and national renewal within these nationalities themselves. Resurgence and retrogression go hand in hand in these movements and the distinctions between right and left get blurred. Awakening of the popular masses is accompanied by blurring of class distinctions. The left-wing petty-bourgeois nationalist forces, in Tamil Nadu for instance, assume that they can exercise their leadership over these movements by taking up the nationality issues first. But the question of leadership is not decided by the sequence of who takes up such issues first or most vigorously but by the overall balance of class forces and these left-wing forces ultimately end up in effective cooptation by the right-wing forces.
It would also be wrong to think that the regional bourgeois sections or the Kulaks in such minority nationalities are inherently separatist or regionalist in nature. To cite a few examples: The truck operators, who are part of the middle and small bourgeoisie, especially in Tamil Nadu and Punjab were the most vocal in demanding the abolition of octroi and entry taxes and the powers of the states to levy different transport taxes. The mercantile bourgeoisie, the traders and shop-keepers, were the most strident in demanding that the states should have no right to collect sales tax. The Tamil traders were strongly advocating all-India collection of sales tax and abolition of multi-point sales tax. The liquor barons like Ramaswamy Odeyars and Khodays in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the most lumpenised of the capitalists, are opposing the powers of different states to levy different excise rates. The Kulaks, the capitalist farmers and landlords, who were supposedly behind every manifestation of 'nationalism' and regionalism and even separatism were the very same forces behind the vociferous demand for a common market in India in agriculture, i.e., the so-called pro-Dunkel lobby.
Likewise, as we already mentioned, the centre-state conflict is not fully a nationality issue. While many of the old regionalist forces were making a foray into national politics such demands were being voiced even in states like Bihar and Haryana, vikas munches were floated and reactionary politicians including both Laloo and Jagannath Mishra were raising such demands to serve their narrow political objectives.
And then there are various types of micro-nationalisms of national minorities, ethnic groups and tribal communities who are facing various forms of oppression and even virtual extinction of their cultural identities. They are demanding separate state within the union of India or district autonomy. Due to their weak political nature, these movements, in the process of winning some concessions are often subjected to manipulations by the ruling parties at the state or central level. The ultimate guarantee for protecting their interests lies only with the overall democratic movement.
This has become the most favourite slogan of the Indian ruling classes. Under this slogan they let loose most ruthless repression on different struggles of the nationalities and bulldoze all aspirations for greater autonomy. In practical terms this slogan often boils down to invoking Article 356 to dismiss state governments, sending the army and federal para-military forces, of ten without the permission of the state government, to crush the nationality and autonomy movements and resorting to prolonged state terrorism against them in the name of fighting extremists. Under this slogan they also try to maintain the highly centralised character of the Indian state and to continue with the high degree of concentration of economic and political powers in Delhi. Through this slogan they whip up the national chauvinism and try to further legitimise their hold on the rest of India.
Ironically enough, the CPI(M) is at one with BJP in sharing this position of the Congress(l) and the Indian ruling classes. In fact, one of the most important features of the CPI(M)’s opportunism is their going over to this position of the ruling classes and this is one of the fundamental areas of difference between our two parties. We on our part have declared our irreconcilable hostility to this slogan of the ruling classes and what it stands for. Of course, we too stand for national unity but that has absolutely nothing in common with this position of the ruling classes. This never becomes a pretext for us to support the ruling class policy anywhere as it happens in the case of CPI(M). Rather we stand for a national unity to be built anew on a new basis. We stand for a national unity from below based on the common democratic struggles of the people and not for a national unity imposed from above by the ruling classes.
The CPI(M)’s policy on the nationality question is a direct retreat to the bourgeois policy of national chauvinism. In the first place they don’t recognise the fundamental nature of the nationality question in India. That is why they have given up the right of self-determination in their programme in their Ninth Congress. On the question of autonomy at the maximum they go up to restructuring of the centre-state relations. They never see the democratic content of the nationality movements and look at them as purely externally inspired. They justify state terrorism and crushing of such movements on the pretext of the separatist demand or the terrorist tendency found in such movements. Their opposition to even the demand of certain national minorities for a separate state within India is inexplicable. They consider all other identities like gender, caste and nationality antithetical to class. Apart from being a crude interpretation of Marxism this also provides them a convenient premise to side with the ruling classes and forces of the status quo. Only by fighting against the petty bourgeois nationalism and their doctrinaire interpretation of the Marxist classics as well as the opportunism of the CPI(M) on the nationalities question can we develop the correct Leninist approach to this question in the Indian context.
IN this paper, to trace the origins of the dalit question we take up a detailed analysis of the genesis of the caste system in the ancient communal mode of production in India and the changes in it with the dissolution of this communal mode and the development of commodity production and capitalism. Since an analysis of Ambedkarism was there in the recent Special Issue of Liberation we are not repeating it here but take up certain aspects of dalit movements and dalit politics in post-47 India. We have sought to trace the caste-class interface in different periods in the context of dalit question.
Resolution of the dalit question is ultimately related to the abolition of the caste system. The caste system existed on the basis of certain core principles like endogamy, hereditary occupational particularisation of endogamous groups, a social hierarchy based on oppression, economic exploitation and ritual ranking as well as a social division-of labour etc. There have been lots of changes in the caste system over time. To get an understanding about these changes let us see how the system evolved concretely in history.
The origin of varna divisions can be traced back to the early-Vedic times — the latter part of the second millennium BC — among Aryan tribes in northeastern India. The vedic society consisted of various tribes, both Aryan and non-Aryan. The tribes, mainly the Aryan tribes, were made of numerous clans. The central organizing principle and the binding factor in the clan was the principle of lineage. The clan, as such, consisted of various lineage groups, each owing its origin to a common ancestor, real or imaginary. These lineage groups are referred to as Vamsha, Parampara or Kula.
Rigvedic society was predominantly pastoral. Agriculture was secondary. Only by mid-first millennium B.C., settled agriculture seems to have achieved predominant position. The land was communally held by the clan/lineage groups and cultivated by the households. There was no indication of private ownership in land in Vedic sources. The household is a kin group, a family of three or four generations. This is the setting which gave rise to the Varna system – the division of society into Brahman, Rajanya/kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra – the concrete evolution of which is as follows.
The emergence of two distinct categories of people viz. Brahmans and Kshatriyas as distinct lineages and households is related to the rise of religion and political authority in their embryonic forms inside the clans. The word Brahma (from the root brih) means prayer and Brahman means utterer, or conductor of prayer. The term Kshatra means power and Kshatriya or Kshatrapati means the person who exercises' power. Whole clans, and at a lesser level, lineage groups, emerged after some prominent Rajanyas, notable among them being Chandravamasa and Suryavamasa clans. These Rajanyas backed by their lineage groups exercised power over a territory and in latter Vedas they came to be referred as Kshatriyas. It may be noted that in the early vedic times neither Brahmins nor Kshatriyas were close endogamous groups to begin with nor these occupations, if they may be called that, were hereditary occupations. The urge to have monopoly over positions of social pre-eminence have made these groups exclusive.
Vaishya is derived from the early vedic term of vis. Vis originally referred to the whole clan as can be seen from the usage of this term for non-Aryan clan as well. After the emergence of two distinct lineage groups from within the clan viz. Brahmanc. and Kshatriyas, Vis came to denote the rest of the clan, that is, the ordinary people. In early Vedic times, the Vis were common people engaged in pastoral, and latter, agricultural and other occupations. But there is no reference to their having any hereditary monopoly over these occupations though the Vis/Vaishyas also became an endogamous group subsequently. The lineage principle was not so prominent among them as it was among Brahmans and Kshatriyas. The Vis, latter Vaishyas, were the primary producers and the surplus produced by them went to Brahmans and Kshatriyas in the form of prestations – offerings during sacrifices and religious ceremonies.
The Shudras were probably earlier inhabitants - both descendants of prior Aryan immigrations as well as non-Aryan native tribes conquered by the invading Aryan tribes and put to enslaved labour. It is interesting to note that the concept or practice of pollution — which was central to the dalit question — does not find a single mention in Vedas. It was only after the Aryan conquests were greatly extended and they settled down fully in agriculture in the plains of Yamuna and Ganges, the Shudras seem to have been fully incorporated into the varna system as the lowest varna and were put to a status of total servility.
Yajurveda (800-600 BC), in its thirteenth chapter, mentions various distinctive categories in the community. By this time Aryans had settled down in village community with a certain measure of stability. Brahmins had become a hereditary and endogamous priesthood and they had developed elaborate rituals and detailed religious rites. Gradual centralisation of lineage authority and clan authority into a political authority spread over vast areas was taking place and apart from warfare and internal order and security, land and tax administration had become two important functions of the proto-state. Though the village communities were primarily based on agriculture, a considerable division of labour on the basis of diverse occupations too had developed. Trade, mostly barter trade, too had developed to some extent.
There in no mention in Yajurveda of any ranking among these people engaged in such occupations nor of these occupations being confined to some hereditary group in a fixed manner. Most of these occupational groups and non-Aryan tribal or regional groups were ultimately recognised to form distinctive jatis. Apart from these two origins of jatis, many of the groups known subsequently as jatis were latter attributed by Manu to varna sankara or varns-admixture. Brahminical priesthood considered some occupations low and degrading so that they attributed the origins of those involved in such occupations to impurity of blood and lineage, thereby ascribing a low status to them.
Privileges, status differentiation, ritual-ranking and defilement or pollution first occur in the context of Vedic sacrifices and are mentioned for the first time in the immediate post-Vedic works. Thus these categories and untouchability which first originated in the context of the Vedic sacrifices were further extended and generalized to encompass all aspects social life and became general principles of gradation and social differentiation. In tune with this ritual ranking of various varnas and jatis, the numerous occupations were also ranked as high and low. Here it may be noted that these occupations were not the products of a division of labour based on commodity production and exchange; rather they were based primarily on the self-sufficient village community and on labour-service, and in certain instances, barter. More on this later. The forced labour-service and the religious values attached to certain things like corpses of animals, skin, excrement, hair etc. partly explains why certain occupations came to be considered low. But the low status ascribed to labour as such has a deeper significance. The corvee labour, i.e., forced free labour-service, and the confining of certain groups to ‘menial’ occupations were also the basis for the origin of the hegemony of one social group over another.
The fusion of ritual ranking and occupational ranking in combination with the principles of endogamy and lineage within the kin group gradually gave rise to a social order of varnas and jatis in the form of a hierarchy of hereditary-occupational groups. Tradition and the necessity of the reprod action of the social and economic conditions may have played a role in bringing about the occupational rigidity, that is, herediterization of occupations and occupational particularization of heredity groups. Certain occupations' were confined to certain jatis and members of other jails were discouraged from taking up these occupations. Historical facts amply prove that the social order was evolving in an imperfect way and at no point reached perfection in tune with the theoretical varna-jati model as subsequently propounded by Brahminism.
However, what made this social order rigidly iron-clad was the twofold attempts of the Brahminical priestcraft. The Brahmans developed and interpreted religion in such a manner as to make the social order religiously sanctioned. The Brahminical doctrines like the undifferentiated unity between atman and Brahman, of rebirth, of karma and dharma, or divinely ordained rewards and punishments and high and low status etc., and their concrete interpretation in the light of social realities brought about a sacralization of the social order. The spiritual and material conditions of an individual as well as those of a varna or jati became inseparable. Violations and deviations in either the spiritual or material realm would automatically mean concomitant variations in the other realm. Secondly, the Brahmans gave ideal and juridical expressions to various facets of the evolving social order and codified them into laws called sutras. Once the varna-jati social order was given legal expression and some divinity was attributed to these sutras, they became the dogma and it became obligatory for both the political authority as well as the society to abide by them. Thus the emergence of Brahminism as a full-fledged ideological and political system marks a qualitatively new stage in the development of varna-jati system.
Since caste was one of the organising principles of the communal mode no substantial change in the caste system was possible without a break up of this mode. Here we set aside the controversy whether the communal mode of production existed in India exactly as described by Marx. Whatever might have been the exceptions in certain areas and at certain points in history there in no denying the fact that the village community system existed in vast areas of India down to the British period.
The village community was based on caste division of labour without commodity production or exchange. There was no private ownership of land but land nominally owned by the state was privately possessed. The surplus was extracted for the state but was also shared by the dominant castes at the village level, mainly by Kshatriyas, Brahmins and Vaishyas. The Shudras were made to either cultivate the communally owned land allotted to them in parcels or were put to labour-service. Among those who were engaged in labour-service some were made to work as farm-hands in the households of Vaishyas and other dominant castes who cultivated the land directly and others were engaged to perform various other types of services, both in agriculture as well as in handicrafts, and both for the community as well as for the dominant households.
There were two main forms in relations of production and in surplus extraction — rent-in-kind (in the form of tribute) and labour-service. It is obvious that such economic exploitation based on a generalised relation of lordship and servitude even in the absence of private property in land can be perpetuated only through a generalised system of extra-economic coercion. Caste system, based on an ‘unalterable division of labour’, made unalterable by religious sanction and enforcement by the despotic state, was precisely an institutionalisation of such a system of domination and extra-economic coercion.
In the absence of private ownership in land, slavery did not exist as a mode of production in India. Caste system was a modified form of slavery where slaves were not privately owned but there was attached labour and socialised forms of enslavement. The individual doesn't become independent of the community just as he doesn't become independent of his position in the iron-clad caste division of labour. New occupations created new caste groups but as a general rule one cannot switch over from one occupation to another just as one cannot change one's caste which is a hereditary and endogamous group.
But this caste division of labour was by no means horizontal as we have seen. Under the Brahminical orthodoxy, there was an occupational ranking, and accordingly a ritual ranking and on that basis there was a social ranking. There was differentiation among Shudras based on their occupations and the ranking of these occupations on the basis of the values of purity and pollution attached to them. But in the later context of commodity production the economic significance of these occupations also had a crucial role to play in further differentiation.
The broad categories among Shudras were the cultivator castes who cultivated the land under the possession of Vaishyas and other dominant castes and who paid rent-in-kind as well as extended labour service, the farm hands attached to the households of dominant castes and who were put to agricultural labour, various artisan castes engaged in the production of use-values for the community and various other service castes providing services of different ritual ranking to both the community as well as dominant households.
The future dalits and the backward castes — the cultivating and the artisan castes and the service castes — are to emerge from this category of Shudras. The cultivators and artisans among Shudras in view of their role in production assuming greater significance in the future context of commodity production were to move up within the social hierarchy while the farm hands and some of the service castes confined to certain occupations of very low ranking, the socalled menial occupations, were confined to the lowest rungs of the caste system and came to be treated as the untouchables.
Centering around the two main forms of exploitative production relations — the rent-in-kind and the labour-service two proto-classes emerged. The future classes of peasantry and the landless peasants/agricultural labourers were to crystallise around these two proto-class categories. Within the same caste category of Shudras at least two major categories of agrarian classes were thus to emerge in addition to the petty-producer class of artisans. Likewise, within the class category of (landless) labourers there were numerous jatis or castes with various occupations.
As we have mentioned already, the precondition to any change in the caste system was the dissolution and the disintegration of this communal mode of production. And the key to any substantial change in the caste system was the delinking of occupation and caste. In other words, the principle of occupational particularisation of hereditary endogamous groups should collapse even for some minimal substantial changes in the relations of hierarchy and domination. Introduction of commodity relations was the only subversive force which alone was capable of bringing about this change.
Nonetheless the village community mode had an unchangeable quality about it. Marx said that this mode necessarily survives the longest. The dissolution of this mode means development of commodity production and its generalisation, emergence of private ownership of land and land itself becoming a commodity, labour becoming a commodity and emergence of free wage labour, transformation of labour-rent into rent-in-kind or money-rent etc. Other services should be paid for and be free. Only then the relations of dependence can change from personal and communal forms of dependence to objective form of dependence based on money and commodity exchange. Only then there can be a break up of the old precapitalist division of labour without commodity exchange and hence the break up of the caste system.
But this break up was not to begin in a big way until the advent of the British. True, the commodity production had developed to some extent in some parts of the pre-British India. But only the exchange of products between the communities and between the urban centres and the village communities which mainly assumed the commodity form. Guilds were engaged in petty-commodity production but they were based on attached labour of the kinship groups or artisan castes called Shrenis. Though under the form of rent-in-kind it is theoretically possible for the direct producer to retain some portion of the surplus in some cases and convert it into a commodity its role remained only marginal and not adequate enough to undermine the village community system based on the unison of self-sufficient agriculture and handicrafts. May be in due course of development, gradually it could have disrupted the village community system. But it was mainly the British intervention that caused substantial disruption which was described by Marx as a historically very progressive step.
Before this crucial turning point was reached the society witnessed lots of changes but they were changes on the surface like dynastic wars, succession struggles, rise and fall of empires etc., while the foundation of the society, the village community remained unaltered by all these changes taking place on the surface. Of course, in the mediaeval literature there are many references to the rebellions from the lower castes, especially Shudras but they were all put down by the upper castes and the despotic state and without any substantial change in the development of productive forces they ended up without altering the basic caste structure. At the social level also there were many important changes including those in the caste hierarchy. For instance, with the development of productive forces following the transition from pastoral to settled agricultural society, the Brahminical practice of Vedic sacrifices of cattle amounted to enormous waste of productive forces which was resisted by Kshatriyas and Vaishyas who rallied to put up a powerful challenge to the Brahminical orthodoxy which found reflection in the realm of religious struggles in the form of Buddhist challenge to Brahminism.
It was a powerful challenge which dislodged Brahminism from the high pedestal for a while. Though Buddhism challenged the supremacy of Brahmins and the Brahminical doctrines it was never a thoroughgoing fight against varna-jati system as a whole. Rather Gautam Buddha himself explicitly acknowledged the role of shudras in the caste hierarchy. In this sense the reverence for Buddhism found among latter-day dalitists is totally misplaced. The Shudrus had virtually no stakes or role in the struggles waged by Kshatriyas and Vaishyas against Brahmins. It is because of these inconsistencies of Buddhism, due of course to its historical and social limits, that Brahminism, in a slightly modified form, could reestablish its hegemony again.
There was also the trend of Brahminisation among many lower castes which the sociologist MN Srinivas calls Sanskritisation. There was a tendency among the lower castes to take to the rituals and customs of the immediately higher castes and claim a higher status in the caste hierarchy. Again this tendency too was largely confined to certain higher layers of the caste hierarchy — at the most it came down up to the higher rungs among Shudra castes who were to escape from the total untouchability stigma but who themselves were to treat other Shudra castes as untouchables.
After the British advent, the land settlement, the colonial trade, the development of cash crops in agriculture and the consequent development of commodity relations in a widespread manner started the process if real break up of the village community system. The land became a commodity, wage relations started appearing even though wage labour was not generalised, sections of the populations were torn away from their traditional occupations. There was an exponential growth in the number of occupations, and obviously, the new occupations could not lead to new castes. The people who wanted to escape from the semi-slavery of the village community increasingly found many outlets in the newly emerging urban areas; many areas of economic and social life were becoming secular and comparatively caste-free; and the migration to urban areas and the recruitment of people including from the lower castes into the colonial army and their subsequent demobilisation and the recruitment of a large – labour force for the plantations etc., caused serious dislocations in the rigid village community and the caste system. While on the one hand, they loosened the rigid caste bonds, on the other hand, they increased the oppression of the feudal upper castes who wanted to keep the old system going. The development of modern education by the British for the first time created the possibility of at least a few from the lower castes acquiring modern education. The development of railways, setting up of industries and emergence of big urban centres accelerate all these processes.
But the most important blow that the caste system received from the nascent capitalism was the delinking of occupations and castes. While majority of the people from a caste continued with their old occupations, for the first time there was a possibly of some of them switching over to occupations which are not caste-particular, was opened up, even though this process was very slow. The new occupations did not create new castes. But the new occupations also had some sort of social ranking — as it exists even in the present-day capitalist societies — depending upon their economic significance. For instance, people from the lower castes were mostly absorbed in low-paid unskilled jobs, from the intermediate castes they went into industrial jobs and the higher castes took jobs in the colonial administration. In this sense the new capitalism did not abolish social inequality but only created only a new, supposedly-secular, social hierarchy. The old social hierarchy reflected in the new hierarchy without the rigidity of the caste system however. The possibility for upward and downward mobility was open. This was to throw up certain new dimensions in the caste struggles later as we shall see. Additionally, the capitalist technology and the system of mass production in factories in combination with the generalised system of commodity exchange destroyed many old caste-based occupations and released a huge mass of people from their traditional occupations. Thus capitalism dealt a mortal blow to one of the cardinal principles of the caste system. And this delinking of the caste from occupations, even though it was not complete, was the first major step in the break up of the caste system.
Even in the case of those who were confined to their traditional caste occupations there was an important difference. They were no longer limited to producing use-values but were beginning to produce exchange-values or commodities. So the relations of personal dependence were beginning to be replaced by the relations of dependence on the market.
Urbanisation and capitalist development also started striking at another evil feature of the caste system, viz. untouchability. For instance, there was this obnoxious practice of carrying the night soil by some dalit castes. Several decades of efforts by prominent reformists including Ambedkar could not put an end to this practice. What finally started abolishing this practice was the modern urban planning and the development of the sewage system. While dalits are refused to be served or served food in separate vessels even now in some parts of rural India such a thing is unimaginable in the hotels of big cities.
But these processes had just begun as trends and by no means were complete. Since capitalist development in India did not proceed in a rapid and revolutionary manner they were very gradual and painfully long. Moreover all these processes did not proceed automatically. Even though the conditions were created for them almost each and every change came about through bitter and bloody struggles. As the imperialism and later the Indian bourgeoisie compromised with feudalism, the feudal forces were not destroyed in one stroke but large-scale feudal remnants are prevalent everywhere in rural India even now.
In the setting of underdeveloped capitalism caste ties assumed new roles. They became the means for social mobility and securing employment. The literate upper castes could get government jobs through their caste connections. Caste as an institution became crucial for the development of entrepreneurship. The trading castes like Banias and Chettiars accumulated more money, stole a march over other upper castes in terms of economic power, became compradors to the British but caste connections were very important to their business. Under conditions of underdeveloped capitalism certain castes even turned into corporate groups which brought about their transition to find a place in the new capitalist setting.
Even after the delinking of castes and occupations, caste still remained an endogamous group. Due to the rituals, customs and sub-cultures of each caste it had an ethnic identity as well. But at the social level the hierarchy was still continuing. Not only because of differences in the average economic status and inequalities in employment and education but also because of the wide prevalence of the feudal values of the caste system in the entire society. Capitalism only introduced a formal equality of opportunity which was largely theoretical and not real equality. In real life it only widened the inequalities. For instance, among the top 1000 industrialists in India there may not be a single industrialist from the dalit origin. The role of the pre-existing caste structure in the evolution of capitalism in India is primarily responsible for this.
The beginning towards a real equality is possible only through a democratic revolution in India which can abolish all the remnants of feudalism in a thoroughgoing manner and reorganise Indian society in a socialist orientation. Substantial resolution of dalit question is possible only then. Because, even after four decades of capitalist development only a thin layer of bureaucratic elites and a narrow segment of the petty bourgeoisie has emerged from among dalits. Vast majority of the dalit masses still remain agricultural labourers or poor peasants. Green revolution has made them free agricultural labourers in many areas of the countryside. Though this has increased their assertiveness this has only made them more vulnerable to the attacks from the oppressive castes, especially, the kulaks from the intermediate castes who mobilise along caste lines. This has given rise to certain new features in the rural class struggles and the caste-class interface in the class struggle. Though many areas of economic and social life have become caste-free and many occupations have become caste-neutral in urban areas, the rural areas are still smothered under the heavy shadow of caste. For instance, though it is now possible for a dalit to own land and engage in some small trade it is still not possible for him to run a tea stall or a hotel. It is difficult to visualise abolition of untouchability without abolishing the segregation of dalits in separate colonies in the villages. The lack of recognition of this need for a thoroughgoing anti-feudal struggle and land reforms as part of a larger democratic revolution was a source of many reformistic currents on the dalit question, the notable being Ambedkarism.
Ambedkarism was a product of the great churning process in Indian social and economic life during the latter period of the British rule in India described above. The general national awakening and the national movement, in its wake, fired the educated section of dalits with a strong democratic urge and they launched a movement giving primacy to fighting caste. As a revolutionary democrat operating within the limitations of those historical times Ambedkar led many campaigns against casteism and came to symbolise dalit awakening in the country. Yet two of his basic shortcomings continue to remain the main limitations of the many dalit groups today which go by his legacy. Drawing a total balance sheet of his efforts we can see that he put more emphasis on greater educational and employment opportunities for dalits through reservations hoping that this would enable the dalit masses to come out of the oppressive conditions. Yet the promotional measures by the state are no match for the ever widening inequality spawned by capitalism and this he could not realise. Though he gave a graphic description of the Indian villages calling them bastions of reaction he could never fully grasp the need for a thoroughgoing agrarian revolution to undo the foundations of casteism. Hence his life-long struggle—confined largely to the social plane—was directed at the episodic forms of oppression thrown up at the surface level by the feudalism and the caste system. These two fundamental shortcomings led him away from the communists to the opposite camp and the political assertion of dalits independent of the bourgeois politics and bourgeois constitutionalism became a casualty. These weaknesses are characteristic of many of the present-day Ambedkarite democratic movements led by the petty bourgeoisie.
Notable among such movements are the mass, democratic dalit movements which came up in Maharashtra and Karnataka in the '70s, viz. the Dalit Panthers and the Dalit Sangharsh Samiti. When a minister of dalit origin in the Devraj Urs ministry called Kannada literature bhoosa (ricebarn), there was a sharp backlash from the forces of the upper castes in early ’70s in Karnataka. The dalit students and intellectuals launched a powerful resistance against this. Soon the movement acquired a mass character and developed a rural base. Protests were organised against every major instance of atrocity on dalits. Many grassroots struggles, including some land struggles were organised. Soon the DSS emerged as the major struggling platform of the dalits in Karnataka. By mid-80s the organisations split into several factions. Soon the movement stagnated. Though the movement was led by a group of Lohiaites the ideology was a diffused kind of Ambedkarism. The organisation became no more than an informal network of prominent personalities left only with the capacity to provide a reference point whenever there were emotive outbursts against acts of oppression. The largest faction ended up as an electoral ally of Janata Dal, the party of the very oppressive castes in Karnataka. More or less the similar story was repeated in Maharashtra with the only difference that while many of the Dalit Panther groups have disintegrated, the large chunk of the movement is still better organised under Prakash Ambedkar who belongs to another stream. Both the Panthers and the DSS have a mild hostility towards the left politics but often collaborate with bourgeois parties.
Whether to remain a non-party social movement or to become a mainstream political party is a constant dilemma of such groups. Since politics based exclusively on dalits is not a viable proposition purely because of demographic factors such organisations either go into an alliance with one of the leading bourgeois parties or try to build bridges between dalit community and backwards and Muslims under the slogan of social justice. This social justice formula is the same Mandalite prescription expressed from the point of view of dalit organisations. No matter however differently it is presented or interpreted, it only paves the way for a unity between them and some of the existing Mandalist parties and seldom they become equal partners except under exceptional situations like in UP where they have a stronger presence in the coalition. In the absence of radical class-based mobilisation that can exclude reactionary class forces of the backward castes, the basic social balance of forces tilts against them which makes them for ever a secondary partner. Their socalled political gains undo their social gains. Judging from their original point of departure every step forward becomes at the same time a step in the backward direction.
BSP best exempifies this dilemma. Since we have already covered a detailed analysis of this party in a recent issue of Liberation here we will only deal with the developments after their electoral victory. Setting aside its other reactionary features and covert equations with Congress (I) let us focus on only one aspect. This party whose point of departure was ‘power to the dalits’ graduated to ‘social justice’ to share ‘power’ with Mulayam. But when there were a series of atrocities and a backlash from upper caste forces this party was quite powerless to do anything about it. The difference between holding the office and holding the power became explicit. Social justice through ballot box became a farce. The class struggles from below brought to the fore a different dimension of social justice. Evading the real challenges on the field the party was taking refuge into some sensational debate on Gandhi. All these will only lead in the long run to the ebbing of the vigorous support of the dalits to this party. Pushing Mulayam to the position of a junior partner is a far cry. Any such attempt will only land this party into the lap of the Congress(I). Kanshi Ram’s smart interpretations of the politics of polarisation notwithstanding, reports indicate that the party is now trapped into pincer polarisations from both Congress(I) and Mulayam. The practical course of this party now comes into serious conflict with its own ideology of dalitism based on political parochialism, reverse casteism, cultural exclusivism and anti-leftism. No wonder then that some avowed dalitists have started criticising Kanshi Ram of not being loyal to himself!
In sharp contrast to such experiences we stand for organising struggles against caste oppression and gradually leading them along the lines of more open class struggle by focusing more and more on economic issues. We are opposed to those dogmatic Marxists who mechanically pit class against caste. In a country of underdeveloped capitalism where democratic revolution is on the agenda, the class formation is not fully developed. Caste and class questions are intertwined and no ‘pure’ class struggle exists in the countryside. In many areas of our struggle, notably in Bihar, the movement first began on issues of caste oppression by upper caste landlords and it was only later it took up many economic issues and class organisations were formed. In the process the middle peasantry could be neutralised and poorer sections from intermediate castes could be won over and united with dalits who came to play a leading role in the overall movement and become an independent political force.
Before concluding, let us take note of the phenomenon of caste conflagrations in rural areas. Atrocities on dalits are not new. But there is a new phenomenon which marks a departure from Belchi and Pipra type of episodes. A small incident of atrocity or clash soon snowballs into a major conflagration and immediately spreads to hundreds of villages, there develops a civil war kind of situation, the struggle rages for prolonged periods with numerous armed conflicts in between, the upper caste forces who attack dalits face counterattacks in equal measure, the earlier social and power equilibrium gets altered and when the situation gradually returns to ‘normalcy’, there is a new confidence among dalits and there is a new and altered equilibrium of the local balance of forces. Such conflagration have been witnessed in Tsundur of Andhra, Kambam-Bodi ‘riots’ of Tamil Nadu and Badanavala of Karnataka. The contrast between Kutnher of Rajastan or the recent Marathwada riots where the dalits were totally at the receiving end and the above flare-ups reveal many things — the ability of the dalits to organise powerful resistance (about one hundred thousand people from several districts gathered in Badanavala and in Bodi and Kambam also dalits from hundreds of villages were able to hire trucks to reach the troubled spot to offer resistance and in Bodi the dalits were able to buy weapons including firearms for lakhs of rupees etc.), the spreading of the clashes spontaneously to hundreds of villages and the issue immediately coming into state-level or even national political focus and so on. One uniform feature of all these rural explosions is that in all these areas dalits are economically and educationally more developed. Some sociologists have called it competing equalities. Such flash-points push the upper caste forces into the defensive, at least in the short-term. But often they degenerate into a caste war of attrition without any orientation or conscious objectives. Just as spontaneous class struggles can end either in one class overwhelming the other or in mutual destruction, these caste struggles also end in heavy losses mutual paralysis but without any definite political advance. Herein lies the conscious role of the communist party. Our valuable experiences in Bihar in combining class struggles and caste struggles shows that with a conscious orientation of extreme restraint in the face of provocations, avoiding a struggle on a broad front along caste lines, consciously splitting the intermediate or upper castes through proper political tactics and targeting a few can prevent the situation from degenerating into a caste war of attrition, consolidate class unity and enable political advance. Only such a combination of the class and caste struggles has enabled the dalit masses of Bihar to unite with the poor from other castes and emerge as an independent political force in the political scene of the state under the leadership of the communist party.
IN this brief note on environmental movements we give a commentary on the environmental movements in India, analyse certain issues thrown up by them and set forth what shall be our approach towards them. First we start with a very brief description of the environmental movements and issues in India.
The most powerful movement on an environmental issue in India so far has been the one against big dams. Two such mega projects, the Tehri dam project-and the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), have witnessed nationwide protests by the environmental groups and a powerful local mass movement against SSP has been going on in Narmada fighting against all odds.
These projects are total disasters looked at from all angles — environmentally they will destroy vast areas of forests, and carry the risk of causing earthquakes; the cost-benefit ratio is very high and the per-hectare cost of irrigation is uneconomical; and above all, they will displace a large number of families.
But the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats have a lots of vested interests in such mega-budget projects: the cost of SSP according to government estimates is Rs. 9000 crores and according to Narmada Bachao Andolan it is Rs.25000 crores. The World Bank's new cost estimate is Rs.34000 crores. Under the present Indian conditions such a huge money would open the flood gates of corruption and with such high stakes very powerful vested interests have rallied behind the opposition to the movement.
The movement against SSP is led by Narmada Bachao Andolan, a movement backed by NGOs and committed to the ‘non-party political process’ at the grassroots. With the involvement of the affected people and large number of intellectuals and environmentalists it has acquired character of an autonomous mass movement and has repeatedly come into the political limelight.
Following a long drawn struggle the government agreed to make a review of the project. Due to protests from the environmentalists the world over, the World Bank appointed a Morse Committee to look into the environmental issues and the question of rehabilitation of the affected people. The Committee came up with a report critical of the project on the basis of which the World Bank withdrew from the project.
The police and the administration are launching systematic repression against the activists of the movement. The movement has entered a complex phase where the limitations of a single-issue movement are glaring. All mainstream parties in Gujarat and Maharashtra have engaged in parallel mobilisation of the people to counter the NBA-led movement. The farming community in the dry areas of Gujarat and other beneficiary states had pinned very high hopes on getting water from SSP and they are being misguided and pitted against the movement. The movement has been unable to effectively counter this political challenge as well as overcome the rift among the people.
The movement against the Silent Valley Project in Kerala was the forerunner to both the movements against Tehri and Narmada. It was a genuinely spontaneous movement with the total involvement of all the intellectuals and science community who carried much convict ion with the people of Kerala including the potential beneficiaries and they were able to successfully stall the project. The present slowdown in SSP work may be more due to the scarcity of funds rather than the opposition to the project.
Because of its extreme position of ‘No Dam’ the movement doesn’t have the necessary flexibility and is unable to carry the popular masses in the benificiary states with it. The alternative proposal by a group of people associated with the movement for reducing the height of the dam and replacing one large dam by a few smaller ones which would bring down the submergence area by half and reduce the cost is a welcome one in this context.
Moreover on the question of dams as well as on many other issues of developmental projects the opposition from the West has a dubious dimension as well which we shouldn't lose sight of. These countries which have industrialised and were primarily responsible for environmental degradation across the globe are highlighting environmental issues in the Third World — which are yet to industrialise — and even calling for a halt to many of development projects here. Hence it is very much necessary to set environmental priorities based on our own perceptions and not to merely echo the western objections.
Till about early ’80s the Indian ruling classes successfully peddled the nuclear projects as great achievements of India’s S&T and symbols of development. The opposition to them was confined to only a handful of environmentalists. But the Chernobyl changed the public perception. Though these projects are white elephants from an economic point of view as the unit cost of nuclear energy is the highest the Indian state went on proliferating projects in the interest of its weapons programme. The environmental and demilitarisation concerns converge in this movement.
The total secrecy that shrouds these projects and the DAE not being accountable even to the parliament heightened the concern about nuclear hazards among larger sections. Even some of those who are not against nuclear reactors in principle joined the opposition. The Narora and Kaiga movements came into the limelight and it was only in the case of Koodangulam project of Tamil Nadu the movement was acquiring the shape of a broad-based movement of the local people, mainly fishermen. We too played a significant role in this movement. Following the collapse of the USSR there was a setback to the DAE’s plan to set up new reactors to be obtained from USSR and hence at present there is a lull in the movement now.
Led by the noted environmental activist Sunderlal Bahuguna this was a mass movement in the ’70s against deforestation, with a large participation of women, directed against the powerful lobby of forest contractors. The mass character of the movement led to the first flowering of environmental consciousness across the country and large number of people concerned about the movement were attracted towards it. Soon the mass movement ebbed and the issue was sustained only by the NGOs. The Appiko and the Save Western Ghat Movements were only pale shadows of Chipko and were purely NGO affairs. Yet the deforestation issues are very much on the agenda in large parts of the country and is directed against the corrupt politician-bureaucrat-forest contractor lobby.
The movement against the Baliapal Missile Test Range in Orissa was a genuinely militant mass movement where the local people continued their resistance for a few years and the movement was primarily initiated and led by communist revolutionaries. Here again the environmental movement was directed against militarisation. There is potential for a similar movement against a naval base coming up in Karwar.
A currently very live campaign is the opposition to the patenting of life-forms and micro-organisms and Indian plant and seed varieties as demanded by TRIPS under GATT. Linked up with a section of the fanners' movement, this campaign has a strong anti-imperialist and anti-neo-colonial orientation and has rallied a large number of patriotic-minded scientists.
Unfortunately, a tendency to rail against modern science and technology as a whole on the part of some of the leading campaigners and streaks of mysticism and revivalism found in them puts off large sections of the science community from such campaigns. Moreover with their greater inclination towards the NGO audience they have so far not succeeded in reaching out to the science community as a whole. A very positive development is the increasing number of initiatives by the professional bodies of the scientists themselves on such issues autonomous of the NGOs and their inspired theories of obscurantism on modern science and technology.
The movement against the multinational also had environmental overtones, especially highlighting the problem of industrial pollution. But as a whole the movement against polluting and hazardous industries and industrial projects which are harmful to the environment is rather weak in India despite the fact that anti-capitalist and environmentalist struggles are interwoven in these issues.
Then there is a whole range of issues and movements like the opposition to Japanese-funded township coming up near Bangalore, the Cargill salt plant in Kandla, the movement against tourism in Goa, limestone quarrying in Lower Himalayas and excessive granite quarrying etc. There are also miniscule anti-science and anti-technology groups, groups opposed to green revolution, and appropriate technology groups as well as heritage-protection groups.
The ecology movement is a product of the 70s in the West. Many offsprings of the ’60s student movement, after getting disillusioned with the New Left, found a new cause to champion in the Green movement. In the West, unlike in India, it is not just a movement on certain issues but the Green movement is known primarily for an alternative vision of the society. In its various strands like radical ecology, deep ecology, social ecology, bio-regionalism, new age life-styles movement and eco-feminism etc., the Greens, based on a charmingly Utopian vision criticise the existing society. This advocacy of a new vision of the world sets them apart from the mainstream and 'official' environmentalists.
The devastation of nature and environment by capitalism and the alienation due to the techno-industrial social order have spurred the Green environmentalism. But the Greens are by and large anarchic and they don't know concretely how to get to their Green heaven. Many of them consider modern science and technology and industry as the main culprits and not capitalism or the existing social order. They reject left Vs right divide in politics and the above approach makes it possible for the right and left to coalesce within the Green ambit.
Capitalism has shown remarkable resilience towards the Green movement. Radical environmentalist Yih says : “It seems clear that capitalism can accommodate ecological concerns to some extent, as long as solutions can be commoditised. If people will be satisfied with clean drinking water while river and ground water are polluted, we will be sold bottled water... “While some environmental problems can be ameliorated here and there in the context of capitalism, the ensemble of environmental problems cannot”.
Unlike their counterparts in the West, the environmental groups in India are mainly single-issue movements lacking any such wholesome vision. Despite the attempts by a few to articulate perspectives like eco-feminism and cultural ecology etc., they are unable to come up with a comprehensive Third World ecological vision that can combine poverty and environmental concerns and developmental and ecological perspectives.
Some Indian Greens do talk of an alternative developmental model but for them it is more of an intellectual and theoretical exercise to be worked out more in seminar halls. That is why following popular issues are by and large neglected by the Indian Greens: millions of people having no access to safe drinking water, absence of basic civic amenities and hygiene, industrial pollution affecting mainly the working class suburbs and the question of alternative sources of fuel for the rural masses in place of firewood etc.
Indian Greens, true to their decentralism, are not an organised and integral movement. The great influx of intellectuals into the Green movements here coincided with the retreat of intellectuals from Marxism and revolutionary class struggles in the '80s. These movements are heavily backed by the NGOs and are inspired by the theories of NGO ideologues like non-party political process, grassrootist democracy and autonomous new social movements etc.
At least inane respect many of them have not been able to maintain their ‘autonomy’. There is a heavy traffic between the grassrootist and the governmental environmentalism. The Indian government too has created a large enough space to accommodate environmentalism within the establishment. The high-point was Menaka Gandhi becoming a minister of state for environment. Anil Agarwal, one of the outstanding early crusaders on the environmental issues was assimilated by Rajiv Gandhi. Many lesser Greens and green groups were coopted by the Dept. of Science and Technology. Kamal Nath, the rowdy minister and a Sanjay crony, emerging as the ultimate crusader of the Third World green cause at Rio was nothing strange because there is hard money in it these days.
There is no denying the fact that the environmental groups in India have made a signal contribution in studying various environmental issues and bringing them lo the limelight, creating an environmental awareness, launching some spirited campaigns, and, of late, ma king them mainstream political issues. Let us be frank about it — the original contribution of the organised left in these areas is almost next to nothing. That is why there is a need for a section of our comrades to devise certain forms and ways of taking up such issues, learn from their experiences and to gradually promote a red current within the green movement by developing a Marxist-Leninist approach on this question, starting to take some independent initiatives and giving a genuinely mass character to the movement on such issues. This is an area in which a breakthrough is still pending.
Presently our primary emphasis should be on practical interaction with such groups and not on some abstract polemics. Only over a gradual process we can enable some of these forces to transcend their grassrootist and non-party limitations. The growing influence of our mass struggles and mainstream assertion and the innate strength of the Marxist viewpoint are bound to bring many sincere environmental activists closer to us. Let us be clear a bout a not her thing—we are not out to ‘convert’ these movements. Our main objective in cooperating with them is to forge a united front with them treating them as petty bourgeois movements perse.
Here as well as in the case of defining our relations all other ‘now social movements’ a new theoretical breakthrough is needed. Instead of pitting Marxist vision against their Utopian vision of the society what is more important is to lay down the basis for a strategic cooperation with such movements for the basic social transformation in India. There is a need to arrive at a modus vivendi through suitable ways of interaction and organisational forms for such a strategic cooperation.
The new social movements like feminist and ecological movements have posed some new problems where Marxism needs to be enriched and developed. Hut this doesn't foreclose any debates with them. Many Greens have been accusing Marxism of being green-blind because of its stress on abundance of production and growth. Marxists have been accused of taking an uncritical attitude towards modern science and technology. The colossal devastation of environment is the product of developed capitalism and hence the Greens are themselves the products the latter part of 20th century and it is strange for them to accuse Marx of mid-19th century of not having fully grasped the ecological dimension.
In the first place, the point of departure for Marxism in its critique of capitalism is the divorce of exchange-value from the use-value. It is the mad rush of capitalism for profit through the 'abundant' production of exchange-values which is the source of arbitrary plunder of nature. It is the drive for capitalist accumulation which is responsible for the ravage of environment. Overcoming the divorce between the use-value and exchange-value is what the Marxist praxis is all about. Only this can restore the usefulness of nature collectively for the entire humanity.
Secondly, the philosophical basis of Marxism is incompatible with the reductionism and rationalism of modem science. Even Hegel, the philosophical forerunner of Marx, settled accounts with reductionism and rationalism of science more than hundred and fifty years before the Greens even started posing the problems. Marxists never consider science to be value-free but more than that they don't consider science to be class-neutral, a point which the Greens fail to see. Science is not demonic in itself. It is the bourgeois and the class society which makes it so. Recognising limitations of science need not mean rejecting its positive potential. For instance, every bit of knowledge of the ecologists about environmental problems come from science and a successful overcoming of the environmental challenges is inconceivable without the help of modern science.
Well, these and other debates can go on and they need not come in the way of practical cooperation. Despite different shades in views the Red and the Green can make a colourful rainbow.
IN this note we will make a review of the autonomous women’s movement in India organised under the National Conference of Autonomous Women’s Movements. It is not our intention here to take up a critical review of the general stock of bourgeois feminist theories but to examine a couple of feminist theoretical perspectives which are foundational to the autonomous women’s movement.
The National Conference of Autonomous Women’s Movements represents a wide participation of various women's organisations belonging to diverse streams ranging from radical to pure feminist groups, urban women’s groups as well as rural women’s organisations, feminist intellectuals and women writers etc. The overwhelming majority of these women's groups are NGOs or NGO-backed. Some of these organisations have done exemplary work in many specific areas concerning the women’s movement. The National Conference has, over a decade and a half, succeeded in giving some sort of national character to the grassrootist women’s groups. The first national-level conference of autonomous women’s groups took place in Bombay in 1980, in the context of the then anti-rape campaign. The autonomous groups were defined as, “those who had created their own space as distinct from women’s wings of established political parties, state supported women’s groups as well as mixed organisations of men and women”. According to a note circulated by the National Coordinating Committee — a body that prepares for the national conferences — on the eve of the Fifth National Conference held at Tirupathi, the First Conference was attended by around 200 women from around 38 organisations. The focus of the conference was rape and other forms of atrocities on women though various other issues related to the women’s movement were also taken up.
The second conference was also held in Bombay in 1985 in which around 380 women from 56 organisations took part. This time the conference was not limited to some specific issues but was called to discuss the perspective of the women’s movement and laid the ideological basis for the autonomous women’s movement. Feminism was declared to have provided many of these organisations, “not only a structural critique of society and of patriarchy, class, caste et al, it has also evolved into a way of life, another way of looking at world, another mode of weaving theory with praxis”. Therefore, it is claimed, that “in strategising for change, we have at tempted to personalise politics and politicise the personal. This has meant confronting patriarchy within the family, social institutions, religion and the stale as well as challenging core values like authoritarianism, aggression, competition, hierarchy and centralization”. On this basis, all issue like personal laws, dowry, rehabilitation centres for women in distress etc., were discussed.
There was an attempt lo broad base the participation for the 3rd National Conference held at Patna in 1988. Since the venue was the capital city of Bihar, participation of our women’s organisation could hardly be ignored. Hitherto the conference participants were only small women’s groups. Hut this time the powerful left-led mass women’s organisations, especially our Pragatisheel Mahila Manch, was targeted for interaction. Many of these autonomous women’s groups had earlier participated in our National Women’s Conference organised in Calcutta.
Hence they made a departure from their position on not allowing women's organisations associated with political parties, made a welcome exception to the left-led women's organisations and only rightwing parties were restricted from participating. The feminist perspective was sought to be imposed on all the participants through a draft as the basis of participation. Yet, because of the overwhelming pariticipation of women from our side, the conference was projected as an all-IPF show by the media. Far from the feminist perspective influencing the women’s movement led by Marxist-Leninists, many autonomous group activists left with good impressions about our movement. A section of the conference still tried to challenge our participation opposing politics of any kind and our comrades rightly challenged the participation of foreign-funded groups.
Around 760 women from 101 organisations from 16 states participated in the Patna conference. The topics discussed were violence on women, health, ecology, religion, culture, communalism and patriarchy etc. Anyway, for the first time, the autonomous women’s conference took up for serious discussion the struggles of the rural women, their role in the agricultural labourer and peasants movement and the feudal violence on rural women etc.
The 4th Conference was held in Calicut in 1990. A National Coordination Committee consisting of representatives from different organisations was formed to prepare the conference agenda, from which we were excluded. It was decided to exclude the women’s organisations led by left/ML parties a gain. However the conference made a different departure from its ‘autonomy’ criteria this time. Under the pretext that "various national, international and government agencies had formed organisations which employed women as well as activists from the movement and these organisation were taking up issues concerning women in different forms”, various governmental organisations, apart from NGOs, were also allowed to participate officially.
The Conference this time had strong anti-left overtones and in a left stronghold it created only a negative impact. Ajita, a romantic revolutionary of yesteryears and later a ML renegade, was the main local organiser. Since we still wanted to work with the autonomous stream despite differences we decided to send a delegation of women comrades from different states. They were not allowed by the organisers to participate in their official capacity but only as individuals. Thus though the Calicut Conference was a step backward there was progress in certain other respects. Besides women-specific issues like rape, domestic violence etc., the autonomous women’s movement was also addressing issues like environmental degradation, housing and development policies. Despite the aversion for politics, the focus on issues like communalism and state violence was objectively forcing the movement to articulate its response to the events in mainstream politics.
Despite the participation of 2890 women from 113 organisations, the Conference could not have much impact on Kerala. The background paper of the NCC sums up the Calicut experience thus: “The heterogeneity of organisations like governmental and non-governmental, autonomous and far-left led to sharp contradictions emerging, leading to debates in perspective and ideology, and posing a. challenge to the women's movement”! There were also sharp internal differences among autonomous groups. The venue of each conference was a serious bone of contention. Each NGO-backed women’s group fought for organising the Conference in its own area. Membership of the NCC was another area of contention.
The venue of the next conference was Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. Meanwhile a powerful mass women’s movement independent of the autonomous women’s groups had developed in Andhra — the anti-liquor agitation — which was led primarily by the Marxist-Leninist forces. The autonomous women’s movement is relatively more comfortable with the ML-led women’s groups in Andhra than with us because of the shared grassrootism. Anyway, we were not invited for the conference. In view of the upsurge in women’s movement in Andhra, the 5th National Conference was organised in Andhra. Before the conference some feminist groups based in Hyderabad joined issue with a leading intellectual associated with the ML movement to prepare the ideological climate for the conference. But there was repetition of Patna in Tirupati and the ML-led women’s organsations prevailed. On the positive side there was a greater focus on communalism and New Economic Policy. Though about 3000 women participated in the conference the Conference of Autonomous Women’s Movements was by now a truncated organisation with many prominent autonomous groups not participating in it.
Despite our dissociation with these conferences we continued cooperation with many autonomous groups, we took part in the North Zone Conference of the Autonomous Groups and many of them were invited to participate in the first All-India conference of our women’s organisation.
Gender oppression is central to feminism. Feminists give primacy to fighting the hierarchical and oppressive relationship between the sexes to achieve gender equality. Class, caste and communal oppressions are fitted into this paradigm. With this point of departure, their primary emphasis in practice shifts to gender-related issues like rape, dowry, dowry-killings and other forms of domestic violence, the unequal division of labour at home, the regulation of fertility and women’s control over her body, the repression of women’s sexuality and the commercialisation and commoditification of their sexuality etc.
Many autonomous groups have done pioneering work in all these areas and have made impressive advances in mobilising women to fight on all these issues. It must be admitted that we are still lagging behind in these areas. We also started late on such issues. Though there can be no two opinions on the need for women's organisations, whether autonomous or radical, to take vigorous initiatives on all these issues, there is a difference over priority and emphasis. We stand for organically combining gender-related issues with basic class-related issues within the mass women’s movement. And then there is a sea of difference in the theoretical approach towards these issues. Feminists have never been able to convincingly explain how they can fight gender inequality inside the family in isolation when this institution of family itself is an inalieanable part of an oppressive, uncivilised and barbaric social order of a class society.
There are differences within the autonomous stream itself on this. Rajani Desai has argued in one of her pamphlets, “the overriding fact still remains that most men still do not fashion even the socalled men’s world and most women share their lives with these most men”. She adds : “The feminist trend tends to see the contradiction between men and women as antagonistic. Further, it tends to equate the oppression by the man in the family with the oppression by the exploiter at the place of work, and it represents both as equal ‘enemies’” (Rajani Desai, Sulabha Brahme and Sharayu Mhatre-Purohit in “The Material Basis For Women’s Liberation — Against the Current Trend in the Women’s Movement).
We have already seen how the Conference of Autonomous Women’s Movements define autonomy. They equate government with political parties in general and then they equate all political parties irrespective of whether they are right or left. They don't bother to see whether a given political party fights for the emancipation of women or goes against it. They don’t make any distinction between the class character of different political parties just as they don’t recognise class differences among women. In this context let us quote Rajani Desai again: “Women do not form a class by themselves but form a part of each economic class. And for this reason, despite superficial similarities, the demands of one class of women can never be the same as those of another. That is why different political parties have different lines on the question of women’s rights. Each party approaches this question in keeping with its ideological orientation. Therefore, women’s movement comprises a variety of trends. Indeed, there cannot be a single autonomous women’s movement, because there is not an objective common material base on which it can be propelled forward. The bourgeois and reformist points of view on the women’s question either ignore or play down the class roots of this question. They reduce this problem to one of relationships between man and woman”.
Though the autonomous women's conference has subsequently relaxed their condition on governmental women’s organisations, for obvious compulsions, they have gone back to their hostile position on left-led women’s organisation. This shows that their claims of democracy, pluralism, and avoidance of competition and aggression within the women’s movement etc., are bogus. In trying to place themselves in the middle between the right and the left they only reveal their own petty bourgeois class character which explains their ideological hostility towards the left. But communists cannot be wished away from the democratic struggles with impunity. Objectively they are part and parcel of every democratic movement and are in the van of every democratic protest. The democrats can ignore them only at the cost of lapsing into deep sectarianism and compromising their own professed democratic credentials.
For them the question of autonomy from foreign funding is, however, beyond debate. The absurdity of taking funds from the imperialist government agencies and and on the other hand railing against their neocolonialism doesn't strike them. Some radical feminists take a grim view of the foreign funding. To quote Rajani again : “The feminist trend today is proliferating and being nurtured by heavy foreign financing — directly, and indirectly (through the Government of India). It would be naive to ignore the role of the huge foreign funding for the ‘women’s cause’. It would also be naive to imagine that it is free of its own ideological weightage in a situation where a ‘target-oriented’ approach effectively means that women get a share of the non-opportunities. It can only be aimed at diverting people’s attention from the main fact of non-development, want, and non-opportunity, and a desire to divide people (in this case, division between men and women) in their fight over the crumbs. This, needless to say, aptly suits the interests of our rulers who, therefore, support these programmes wholeheartedly”.
The feminists reduce the question of politics to the level of Foucaultian micro-politics — personalise politics and politicise the personal. Personalising ‘polities’ depoliticises the person. And politicising the personal — interpreted as confronting patriarchy within the family, social institutions, religion and the state — reduces every political conflict to the level of a gender conflict. Not only the conflict within the family is put at par with the conflict in every other social institution but all these conflicts are attributed to the basic gender divide. Communalism is bad because communalists are men! There is violence on women because state institutions are ‘manned’ by men! If a private and ‘personal’ issue like domestic violence or rape is brought out into the open as public crimes and made into a political issue then that is most welcome. But the feministic approach to politics is not limited to this positive side. Their own practice runs counter to this anarchic log-jam. There own opposition to communalism and NEP takes them into the thick of the ma(i)nstream politics. Despite the feminist fetters and attempts by the NGO ideologues to confine all these movements to the well-programmed grassrootist limits, objectively the movement breaks out of these restrictions.
The impact of the feminists’ call for politicising the personal and intensifying the gender conflict within the family on their own following is difficult to gauge. Here too Ms. Desai has something to say : “... the specific methods of resolving their contradiction with men are distinct. They are primarily those of discussion, persuasion and collective assertion — not of combat which characterises their confrontation with their employers and exploiters. Even if women (and progressive men) may collectively beat up the occasional incorrigible male among their men folk, this is the exception that proves the rule of the general method of persuasive correction and self-correction of others”.
It is because of their limited view of politics, the sincere attempts by the feminists to link up with other mass movements suffer from a serious structural flaw. They only land up with the dalit, tribal and other groups floated by their NGO ‘brethren’. Unlike the left parties they are not able lead a mass following among women workers, agricultural labourers and peasants. Abstracting out the question of political power from such movements they lapse into all sorts of developmentalism and rehabilitationism, of course, from within the narrow gender point of view. To quote Rajani again : “ ... to single out women to examine the impact of development on them can in certain situations prove diversionary ... So also does the attempt to build up an autonomous women's movement. And both, by being diversionary, could go against the long-term interests of women”
Well, we can go on debating these differences and they are not to be resolved overnight. But considering the overall weakness of the women’s movement of all shades in India and the gravity of the challenges like communalism and NEP will it not be proper that communists and feminists should take a new look at each other and in spite of all the differences find out ways of cooperating.
