Subcontinental Strategies for Revolution.

This is my rejoinder to an article of Mr. Achin Vanaik published in July - August 2011 issue of New Left Review.

The article of Mr. Achin Vanaik: http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2910

Subcontinental Strategies for Revolution.

K.N.Ramachandran

Mr. Achin Vanaik’s New Left Review article on Subcontinental Strategies mainly deals with the problems of the left in India. According to him, the existence of both parliamentary left and Maoists  with comparatively bigger strength here than in other countries is due to “macro-structures of bourgeois liberal democracy co-exist with extremely undemocratic, violent socio-political  realities at the macro and micro levels, especially, but not only , in the country side. Secondly steady capitalist development has brought dramatic polarizations between prosperity and extreme deprivation, overlaid onto the enduring pre-capitalist structure of the caste system, with great social at one end of the hierarchy and contemptuous exclusion at the other”. According to him, in such a context “traditional Stalinized  and Maoist notions of developmentalism in the name of socialism continue to exert a powerful appeal for large masses of people”.  The author will have to strive hard to substantiate this argument. In spite of the presence of basically similar objective situation, and of both ‘Stalinists and Maoists’ visible in a number of other countries also, why  the ‘real or false’ subjective forces are not powerful enough in many of them compared to these few countries mentioned by him? Either he is not aware of the strength of the revolutionary forces in many countries or he is cutting down the subjective forces in many countries to suit his argument.

 In this article, one of the points on which the author  has gone nearer to objective reality is the present condition of the CPM-CPI forces in the country. He has correctly analyzed that both CPM and CPI “are increasingly incapable of carrying out mass mobilizations among the poorest and most deprived, either to defend them or to help fulfill their basic needs and aspirations”. According to him, if Europe’s former mass communist parties went from Stalinism to Euro-communism to ultimate submission to their Euro-socialist competitors, here CPM and CPI have become the main social democratic forces in Indian politics. “Formal commitment to a communist future leaves no imprint on these parties’ programmes or behavior”. According to him, during the last four decades the transformation of these parties to social democratic positions has completed. Again, following the Chinese policy of inviting FDI to promote industrialization, the CPM’s state leaderships took advantage of the 1991 reforms to push the party towards an increasingly neoliberal line. This was the strategy that led to the Singur and Nandigram episodes of state sponsored violence, which backfired dramatically in political-moral as well as electoral terms. “It has no other vision except gaining its lost positions in its strongholds. If the chance to join a central coalition government arises, CPM will this time most likely take it”. Almost  a very objective evaluation.

Another aspect which the author has gone nearer to truth is the state’s over reaction to the Maoist violence by dubbing it as the ‘enemy number one’. “The government’s stance is all the more dangerous because it receives legitimation from a whole array of intellectuals , academics and media figures”. The author correctly points out that “the forces of Hindutva have carried out violence and brutality on a scale that dwarfs anything the armed Maoism has done”. The author also correctly points out that the state’s efforts to ‘eliminate Naxalism’ are a cover for de-legitimizing all forms of radical left politics”.

But while explaining the spread and strength of the Maoists the author is only repeating the intelligence reports the government issues at frequent intervals. He is repeating the fable about the ‘red corridor’ also even after the relations between the Maoists in India and Nepal have strained to a point of no return. At the same time he has explained why the Maoist politics is going to face a setback and the limitations of its militarized strategy. But while dealing with the ‘Naxalite’ forces, or the forces who uphold the revolutionary heritage of Naxalbari Uprising, except Maoists the author sees only the CPI(ML) Liberation, which according to him is ‘itself stagnating’. He refuses to see or is unaware of those forces who have rejected the sectarian approach of ‘Chinese path is our path’, and have taken up the development of the ideological-political line based on a concrete analysis of the present international and national situation and is seriously pursuing the party reorganization at all India level. We shall return to this point later.

In the concluding part, while discussing about the radical perspective before us, the author has pointed out the justification given by many for continuing to support the CPM-CPI forces that they are preventing a further rightward drift to communalist, anti-democratic forces. Along with this, the New Economic Policy(NEP) , contrary to the Leninist position that it was only a temporary retreat which should be thrown out as soon as the initial crisis faced by the new born Soviet state is over, is theorized and a flawed perspective that the transition to socialism will involve ‘some kind of interrugnam of social democracy or its equivalent in developing countries’ is propagated justifying the formation of ‘third front ‘ and pursuing ‘imperialist globalization with a human face’. The author calls for ‘a much more radical and offensive perspective, guided by explicitly anti-capitalist politics’. He has given some examples for these radical ruptures which show that his theoretical position, do not go beyond his age-old critique of Stalinist, Stalinized approaches he has repeated ad nauseam all along this article. As a result, in spite of a fairly good critique of the right opportunist politics of CPM-CPI like forces and of the Maoists and about the political situation in the country, he has not contributed anything on the basic causes for the disintegration and degeneration of the Communist offensive except repeating Stalinism as the only reason for it. That is, his theoretical positions have not gone beyond the realm of Trotskyist critique of Stalinism, made during the pre-Second World War years.

Trotskyism Revisited.

According to the author, “In South Asia, the ‘socialism in one country’ perspective of both Stalinism and Maoism was and is a disaster”. For him the main crime of the ‘Stalinized mainstream left parties’ is that they ‘have been consistently unprepared to offer a public repudiation of Stalinism’. Though Stalinized, they inspired involvement in mass struggles in the past, “there is no question of CPM somehow rejuvenating itself to become a much more radical anti-Stalinist force”.  In this manner he is repeating  his  attack on Stalinism as if it was and is the only reason for the severe set backs suffered by the international communist movement (ICM) as a whole. Then, naturally one will be compelled to ask the question: if Stalinism is only responsible for the set backs suffered by, and degeneration of the communist movement, why the Trotskyist forces including himself summarily failed to rejuvenate the movement, in spite of their attacks on Stalinism for the last so many decades?

The problem with Trotsky was that, in spite of the glorification by his followers, in theory and practice he was metaphysical in outlook. Take the case of his attack on the ‘socialism in one country’ concept itself. For Trotsky, it was bound to fail and one should work for ‘permanent revolution’, for world revolution, starting from the capitalist-imperialist countries. So, he was against the Bret-Listovik Treaty to help the survival of the Bolshevik revolution. He wanted the Red Army’s advance to Western Europe to promote world revolution, a suicidal step in the then European situation. Lenin, on the contrary, called for consolidating victory in Soviet Union and advancing towards building it as the base area of world revolution. Putting dialectical materialism in practice, Lenin linked building socialism in Soviet Union with the task of fulfilling international tasks. For him there was no Chinese wall between national tasks and international responsibilities, of course always taking the latter as the principal task. Trotsky rejected this dialectical approach and stood against the building of socialism in SU, turning his contradiction with the CPSU leadership in to antagonistic one. As Mao evaluated in the Critique of Soviet Economics’, since Stalin was also metaphysical to a great extent and reversed the relation between national tasks and international ones the other way round, giving priority to the former, he could not tolerate the criticism of Trotskyists and saw it antagonistically. The problem with Achin is that he takes Trotskyism as a gospel. As the Trotskyists  are far away from revolutionary practice they still fail to see the flaws in their approach. They refuse to see the failure of Trotskyism everywhere in practice, in spite    their voluminous writings.

Another example of the metaphysical approach of Trotsky was that unlike Lenin who through his Colonial Thesis analyzed the two streams of World Proletarian Socialist Revolution, the socialist revolution in the capitalist-imperialist countries and the People’s Democratic Revolution (PDR) in the colonial, semi-colonial, dependent countries under the domination of imperialism, and put forward the strategic approach to be followed in both under the leadership of the proletariat, he failed to distinguish the two and applied same strategic and tactical approach to both these streams of revolution. His mechanical understanding was criticized by Mao and the Marxist-Leninist forces in the course of the debate on the colonial question in the Comintern.

The great contribution of Lenin to the treasure house of Marxism is that when the Second International was facing liquidation under the influence of Kautsky-Bernstein like forces who put forward an erroneous evaluation of imperialism at a time when capitalism had transformed to the stage of monopoly capitalism, that is imperialism, he through his epochal work: Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism developed Marxist theory according to the concrete conditions of imperialist era. But in carrying forward this Leninist tradition there were weaknesses in the post-Lenin decades. But Trotsky could not contribute anything in the debate taking place on the perennial crises confronting the imperialist system. Similarly, except for repeating his condemnation of  the so-called concept of ‘socialism in one country’, on the question of developing an alternative to the capitalist-imperialist concept of ‘development’, or on the question of transcending bourgeois democracy and developing proletarian democratic concepts also there were no contributions from Trotsky. In short, Trotsky’s criticism was limited to critique of forms only, they did not go to developing the content of the two streams of revolution, the relation between national and international tasks, to developing an alternative development perspective against the imperialist concept of development, and to developing democratic concepts in continuation to the contributions of Marx and Lenin. So, when the Comintern was dissolved in 1943, the Troskyists had lauded it, but could not explain why their Fourth International could not advance an inch forward in developing the ideological line of ICM. They rejoiced at all weaknesses getting manifested in Soviet Union under Stalin, but could never provide a positive Marxist critique of it.

After the Second World War, when under the leadership of US imperialism the colonial forms of plunder was transformed to neo colonial forms, in line with, and developing the practice the US had developed in the Latin American countries for almost a century and under it the territorial domination was replaced, by and large, with control through imperialist capital, market control and technology, developing IMF-World Bank like financial institutions, United Nations like political instruments, numerous military alliances like NATO and transforming the cartels to MNCs controlling international production and markets, the followers of Trotsky could not provide any insight in to them. If the socialist countries led by Soviet Union and the powerful communist parties and the national liberation movements (all led by the Stalinists, according to Achin) almost failed to evaluate these transformations taking place at international level and started collaborating with many of these imperialist initiatives, leading to later erroneous theoretical evaluations like ‘peaceful competition and peaceful co-existence with imperialism and peaceful transformation to socialism’, except parroting the old gospels of Trotsky, his disciples had nothing to offer in theory or practice to overcome these errors. As a result in countries like Sri Lanka where they had considerable influence once, all of them degenerated or disintegrated fast. And in countries like Pakistan where they have some strength they are incapable of putting forward a revolutionary line before the people.

It is this theoretical bankruptcy which is repeated by Achin in this article by defining India as a sub-imperialist country. His friends in Pakistan call that country as a capitalist one ready for socialist revolution in spite of the virtual control of the US led imperialist forces in every field. Internationally they minimize the importance of imperialist domination in new forms under neo-colonization. For them,       whether in US like countries, or in India, Pakistan like countries, the stage of revolution is socialist. They refuse to see the importance of overthrowing the imperialist domination and the rule of the compradors, agents, lackeys or dependents or junior partners or whatever one may call the ruling classes in these countries, uniting all those who can be united, in countries like India, in order to reach the stage of socialist revolution.

As a result,  similar to what  the ruling class and the corporate media do to distort the political forces confronting the ruling reactionary system, by reducing the left forces to CPI-CPM like ‘mainstream’ parties on the one hand or to Maoists or utmost to Liberation like forces who still stick to semi-colonial, semi-feudal, people’s war’ approach on the other, Trotskyist  writers also follow the very same reductionist approach to obliterate all other ideological-political strands. It is in this context the ideological struggle launched by the CPI(ML) in the pages of its theoretical journal The Marxist-Leninist becomes all the more important. In order to intensify this debate it has published a paper on the ideological challenges confronting the ICM in its July-September,2011, issue which is available in its website(www. cpiml.in) also. It is a fact that the Marxist-Leninists or Maoists or Trotskyists, or any other stream of left forces are concerned, in spite of the ever-intensifying crisis faced by the imperialist system, making the objective conditions of revolution more and more favorable day by day, even in the countries Achin has mentioned or anywhere else in the world, the subjective forces of revolution, the communist parties capable of leading the revolution to victory, are not existing presently. Though unlike in the past one or two decades in almost all countries the Marxist-Leninist forces have emerged or strengthened, still their strength is not sufficient to influence the mass upsurges taking place and to overthrow the ruling forces, achieving a revolutionary breakthrough. Similarly, even after the socialist experience starting with Paris Commune, almost one and half century of revolutionary experience, even when the internationalization of production has reached unprecedented levels opening the possibility of the victory of world proletarian socialist revolution more than ever, many of the forces who are sitting on judgement on others are not daring to take up a comprehensive evaluation of the sources of the shortcomings of the movement, and ways to overcome them. This is a serious lacunae, the revolutionary movement has to overcome. It is with this understanding the CPI(ML) has called for the  intensification of the ideological debate on the problems confronting the ICM.

On Achin’s  Proposals to Overcome the Setbacks.

Before concluding it will be better to mention the three differences, which Achin has mentioned,  visible in West Bengal and Kerala, according to him,  after the CPM led rule there. Firstly, in Kerala, though the ‘ten cents of land’ was given to all households in 1970s beside distribution of a part of the government and surplus land beyond land ceiling, no land reforms based on ‘land to the tiller’ was implemented there also. Besides, in spite of passing of the Adivasi Land Protection Act to give back land taken away from the them, it is not implemented in Kerala also. So struggle for land is still one of the main tasks in front of the revolutionary forces there. Secondly, it seems that Achin has a misunderstanding about the Panchayat system and the much lauded ‘people’s planning’ in Kerala. As Kerala has reduced to one of the best show-cases of neo-colonial plunder, the ‘efficient’ panchayat system  and ‘people’s planning are utilized to integrate the society from the lowest level with micro-financing, self-help groups etc. Panchayats are reduced to neo-colonial institutions taking corruption to lower most levels, blocking any revolutionary change. Thirdly, in spite of the far superior levels of health and education in Kerala, all these are now almost totally commercialized and the inequality in all fields in the society is intensifying at an alarming rate. The alienation created by the present ‘development model’ and the domination of caste and religious influence in new forms have led to de-humanizing the social values which had strengthened under the renaissance movement followed by the early phase of the communist movement. That Kerala’s per capita liquor consumption is the highest in the country and sex tourism has reached an extreme level  are not signs of social progress, but of degeneration. As much of the published material by government, NGOs etc are giving an erroneous macro and micro analysis about the situation in the state,  one should not be misled by them. What is happening in  Kerala and Bengal like areas after decades of CPM led rule also is a factor to be taken in to consideration and analyzed along with what happened in the erstwhile socialist countries after capitalist influence started coming to dominance there, when the Marxist-Leninists are taking up the debate on the ideological challenges  confronting the ICM.