Our Present Situation and What is to be Done
The General Secretary’s Document for the PCC Meeting
Vaskar Nandy
Our Present Situation and What is to be Done
( The document describes the present capitalist crisis with special emphasis on modern warfare. It argues that the threat of U.S.aggression looms large on many other countries, including North Korea Iran and Venezuela. While North Korea has thrown up an open challenge to the U.S.A, big military powers like Russia and China are also not ready to capitulate, and other European powers are in no mood to play second fiddle to the U.S.might. The supremacy of the dollar is also severely crippled, with China emerging as a serious challenger. The document also explains that by playing
a subservient role to the USA and by pursuing firecely anti-Muslim policies at home, along with an expansionist policy regarding her neighbours, India has weakened her position in South Asia. Besides India's diversity and the poor state of her internal connectivity are not conducive for attracting large FDIs. The attempts by Modi and Sangh Parivar o transcend this diversity by extremely coercive means are only disastrous. The document also suggests that instead of engagig in acrimonious debates concerning the credentials of each other, communist revolutionary organisations should unite for a joint struggle against Indian fascism because such a unity is essential for defeating the forces of fascism and expansionist chauvinism. )
There is chaotic disorder in a world suffering not only from nearly ten years of continued economic crisis but also the increasingly bolder prodding from nature about impending climate catastrophe -frequent, devastating hurricanes, floods and droughts, species extinctions, melting glaciers, disappearance of large blocks of ice from the two poles, etc . The nine- year old economic crisis is now moving into a maturing, systemic crisis of the nearly five hundred year-old capitalist order. The ecological crisis, now usually signaled as global warming, is the direct child of the capitalist order and threatens not only the ultimate destruction of capitalism but of all life on this tiny planet of ours.
Uncritical consumers of mainstream public discourse on the economic crisis mistake glimmers of growth in some countries of developed capitalism such as the United States and Germany as signs of an impending release from the world-wide evelopments since 2007-8. But any realistic assessment of the extreme caution with which the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank approach expansion will show how jittery they are about falling back into the worst of the recession –the previously met specter of stagflation. Even in the intellectual haze of neo- liberalism, as its model exhausts itself, the pressure of the secular fall in the rate of profit is doing its work and the resulting tremors are felt sharply by the policy makers. now expand and save itself, however temporarily, only by utilizing, what Naomi Kline calls disasters, man-made or the result of nature’s pent up anger against capitalism’s depredations. But the greatest disaster is modern warfare which takes genocidal proportions, as in WW 2 and every major war since. It is war that the capitalist leaders of the world lust after as the greatest vehicle of disaster capitalism. The major war that followed soon after the greatest war crime in history, the first use of atomic weapons by the US imperialists, the Korean War of Aggression by the same US imperialists, left almost nothing standing in the DPRK and according to their own generals killed at least a third of the population by carpet bombing with napalm. This explains the truculence of Kim and the whole Korean nation fighting their level best not to become Saddam’s Iraq or Gaddafi’s Libya which weakened their defenses, trusting the US and its allies about the promise of peaceful coexistence. Kim will not put his missiles and his nukes on the table unless the US and its allies do so! DPRK is the first small power, other than heroic Cuba, that has defied decades of psywar, subversion by sanctions, infiltration, assassinations and threats of war. The conquest of other small countries by the US imperialists and their cohorts have come by mostly covert or open threats of war, not open wars; assassinations and the power of the dollar were sufficient. Only those countries, big or small, which are cursed (or blessed) by strategic location and/or raw materials (like Afghanistan) and have for nationalistic or other causes resisted total US hegemony, such as President Saddam Hossein’s Iraq or present-day Syria, have had to face devastating wars, as the world has seen. But Korea is not the only country that has been threatened with war by the US imperialists. Iran and Venezuela are now on the top of a long list. The record is clear.The US has been fighting wars continuously, without pause, since the second WW.
The limits of the US aggression have been Russia and China whose nuclear arsenal and delivery systems can match those of the US.
Even before the deranged Trump, Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was threatening the Russians with a no-fly zone in Syria, knowing as the world knew that an unthinkable conflagration between the two biggest nuclear powers could commence. War, the greatest of the lucrative disasters that can prop up moribund capitalism, will not go away because Hillary failed to trump Trump. But a nuclear war between the greatest military adversaries will be the end of the world as we know it, forget about saving capitalism. So Trump blowing hot and cold with Russia in Europe, especially the Ukraine and the Baltic states, and with China in the South
China Sea or the Indian border and the whole sea route used by China (and others) to access the economically most important ocean, the Indian Ocean, is not anything new to the US strategy of war because it is a survival strategy for the US and the greater part of world capitalism. Obama’s pivot to the east is the guideline for Trump. Facing the threats, will Russia blink? Not likely even as the consequence is Armageddon and the death of mankind. A retreat in the face of such naked warmongering as the US is displaying, will mean a return to surrender as in the days of Yeltsin. Putin has resisted that surrender and engaged tit for tat and hence has
become the arch villain in the dollar media. Will China blink? Not likely. Knowing Armageddon’s result will penetrate the skull of even the goonda in the White House, so these great powers will carry on with business as usual without mutually assured destruction unless there are accidents.
Obama and Hillary’s eight years saw NATO tightening the noose around Russia until the Russians boldly cried halt to it by annexing the Crimea and starting a serious proxy war inside the corrupt and disintegrating Ukraine regime where the US got rid of the pro-Russian oligarchs and placed their own. But that was not the end of the story. US and EU sanctions upon sanctions followed. The latest Trump sanction is to bar Russian gas flowing into Germany directly through the pipeline that is being constructed under the North Sea, the so called Nordstrom 2 pipeline, rather than through the Ukraine as now. This means that apart from the harm it will do to Russian capitalism, it is a grievous bodily blow to the German and EU economy as a
whole. As an alternative to Russian gas, the Germans will be forced to buy the much more expensive, low quality American, frocked gas. Germany protests but it has a long way to go to build bridges with the Russians because it had ganged up with the US against the Russian sphere of influence in the Balkans, Georgia, Ukraine etc for many years. But that protest is building and the easing of relations with the Russians have begun. Meanwhile the Russians appear to be going full speed ahead in friendship deals (such as railway linkages, new industrial ventures, etc) with the Democratic Republic of North Korea as strong gestures against Trump’s insane prattle against the most courageous defence of the motherland by the young Korean leader. What about the other close neighbor of North Korea? Contrary to western propaganda that China has been propping up the Koreans for decades and that’s why the latter have survived is not true. The Chinese since the heroic and moral days of Chairman Mao have always sought their own capitalist interests in Sino-Korean relations, navigating between openings inside the sanctions regime imposed by the US. Their ‘’help’’ has not been much in terms of security and economic life except to draw the line between extreme US actions that do not amount to occupation and occupation itself. The Chinese interest has been focussed on one thing alone: the US must not have a common border with China. This is where the Chinese and North Korean interests merge. As long as the US did not directly threaten the DPRK with occupation, the Chinese were comfortable. Maybe the Chinese knew, but the world knew it only vaguely, that the Koreans had accomplished not only a nuclear miracle but also a great and noble reconstruction of their economy through their creed of self reliance. The Yankee would-be marauders have had to hold their horses especially now that the Russians are entering the game in significant ways. The Russians have a formidable
nuclear and non-nuclear arsenal and they are not held back in any way, like the Chinese dependence on the US market. Hillary Clinton and the Nobel Peace laureate Obama came close to playing a dangerous game of chicken with the Russians, and Trump plays it at times. But the Russians are increasingly making it apparent that they will not retreat and will utilise their war-fighting capacities, come what may, as in Syria. In other words the world is approaching a situation where Armageddon or a new world order are the two stark choices before the US and its allies and the rest of
the world. The actions of all 20th and 21st century US presidents, including Trump, while not always matching the demonic rhetoric and actions of Trump, have always presented the world with these alternatives. Some in the world prostrated themselves before the Washington colossus while others protested, but adjusted. Why this real challenge to Russia and China, two nuclear powers with considerable modern fire power? The real truth is that the US is stuck in Afghanistan, Iraq, most of Syria and in several proxy and clandestine wars in Africa. The days are gone when
Venezuela or Iran can be carpet bombed like Korea or the Indochinese peninsula. Even depleted uranium will not be tolerated by the peoples of the world anymore, including the majority of the US people, very soon. If unlikely peaceful settlements come to those places where the US is stuck, it will be forced to abandon its armed might and use its other weapon, the power of the dollar as a hegemonic reserve currency, and its real strength, the petrodollar. Has anyone counted the total number of countries and individuals that have been sanctioned by the US since the second WW? Sanction is basically a raid on the dollar reserves of a country and a selective restriction on its international trading activities. According to Breton Woods, the dollar (with a gold equivalence) was to be the main reserve currency for all international trade. That is how trade moved until the US economy faced the thunder of the Vietminh and plunged into defeat. By then (1971)the cost of that war was so great that, Fort Leavenworth, where the Federal Reserve’s gold was hoarded, became almost empty. So the new President, Nixon, took the dollar off the gold standard, while Kissinger got ready to bully the Saudis, the biggest oil producer and the boss of OPEC, to agree to denominate all petroleum transactions,the biggest world trade transactions, in dollars or face war and occupation. So the dollar, now forced out of the gold standard, began to rule world trade as the petrodollar. We should remember that it was military action that decided on the currency reserved for international trade. Once oil was traded only in dollars, the dollar became the supreme reserve. The present resistance from the Russians and the Chinese on the question of the dollar as almost the sole reserve for international trade has emboldened others such as
the Iranians, the Philippines, the Mugabe regime, the Venezuelans and many others in big and small ways. Not realising the shifts in the power relations, the US, in a frenzy of imposing sanctions on Russia, has now attacked a vital US ally, Germany, the economic heart of the EU. The UK, which is supposed to have a special relationship with the US, is making a lot of anti-American noises about the prohibitive tariffs (really fines) imposed on an Anglo-Canadian aircraft at the behest of a US rival, Boeing. The sanctions regime is falling apart from its own actions.The Russians have seen out the worst of the sanctions through serious restructuring of
their economy. The new entrants to the US sty, the east Europeans who were under Soviet hegemony, have suffered from the sanctions on Russia because their foreign trade is still mostly oriented eastward. Not only Germany over the Nordstrom imbroglio, but the EU as a whole is resentful about losing so many markets, including big ones like Russia and Iran. In fact the sanctions regime appears to be exhausting itself without facing everywhere the kind of resolute opposition shown by the people of the DPRK. Likewise, the US has exhausted its military strength quite substantially since the Afghan war which began unjustly after 9/11. Guerrilla resistance in myriad forms and riding many ideologies from Marxism to Salafism is now rampant throughout the world and threatens to go wider and deeper. All the war planes, the missiles, the drones, and the CIA’s machinations have had their edge taken off by the simple rifle and the home-made explosive device. Then there are the great arsenals in the hands of the great adversaries of the US, the Russians and the Chinese. Even a clownish villain such as Trump will have to think twice before provoking those two powers militarily, as Hillary and Obama tried many times. It is now quite pleasant to see the heroic DPRK threatening MAD (mutually assured destruction) across the Pacific to the US imperialists and giving even the boastful Trump pause. A power which will fall precipitously if its currency fails to maintain its privileged status in international trade, is now near to exhaustion militarily and has the choice of MAD only to maintain its great power status. The whole history of US hegemony after the second WW has been structured around military power and the dollar’s supremacy. How is the dollar’s supremacy faring now? In the IMF’s special drawing rights(SDR) –a basket of currencies in which IMF loans are disbursed – the dollar still holds the 40 per cent position at first place, showing its great strength and a corrective against facile optimism about the demise of US imperialism. The Euro, the Yen are at much lower slots. But the Yuan (the Renminbi –the Chinese currency) has made its entrance recently at 8 per cent, above Sterling and promising to climb further. The Chinese have set up very large loan windows for infrastructure development, parallel to the IMF and competing successfully with it, in Latin
America, Africa, central and far eastern Asia. At the most important level, the belt and road initiative is a currency war with the dollar and its hegemony. Zimbabwe illustrates this starkly. The US and its minions in the City of London, had tied up the country and its leading people in draconian sanctions. The Chinese defied the sanctions, opened a hefty line of credit and built the first railway to the Indian Ocean from that country. We will shortly discuss the fantastic lines of credit that the Chinese have extended to our two principal neighbours –Pakistan and Bangladesh when we look at South Asia. The cost of the railways and the highways that have been and are being built are denominated in the Yuan. Now that’s saying something. The new silk road is many times the size of the Marshall plan that revived war-torn Europe and readied it as a market for themselves, but more importantly, for the US. The Russians and their central Asian acolytes are close collaborators in this currency game. The oil and gas pipeline that will traverse Siberia from western Russia to Vladivostok and two points in China, huge in terms of billions of dollars, is denominated in Yuan’s and the money comes from China. The Russians are trading in Rubles convertible to Yuans. The Iranians are trading their oil with central Asia and China in Yuans and commodities, but not in dollars. Venezuelans are trading petroleum only in Yuans. These Yuans are like the original Breton Woods dollar, convertible to gold. The main banker for this great Yuan rush is an infrastructure bank to which only two major countries, Japan and the US, have refused to join. Even such US stooges as the Australians and the UK joined promptly in spite of US warnings. The British, true totheir bania instincts, have even offered the Chinese to become the hub for financial
services required by the Yuan! Our Modi, the great US hope to become the cannon fodder against China, joined within the deadline.We don’t wish to add example upon example. That can be done later. The main point is that a vast trading bloc, in Asia, Africa, Latin America and a growing part of
Europe, is coming into being where the dollar will either not count for much and will have to compete with other reserve currencies, including the Yuan. The hegemony of the dollar is being dismantled by concerted action from China and Russia and all those who have suffered and are suffering from that hegemony. If Germany rebels against the sanctions on Nordstream 2, a life and death question in the harsh winters for not only Germany but the EU as a whole, then where will the dollar’s sanctions regime go? And where will the US sell its overpriced fracking products? The hegemonists are not only losing the power to force nations to cower before their banking system but, the greatest power of all, to print money at will in a total disconnect with their real economy. Once you are able to do that then your huge current account and fiscal deficits are no problem at all. Just print money. What this very brief account of the international situation shows is mainly that: First, US military power is being systematically challenged in the middle east and elsewhere by small powers who have discovered how to neutralise fearsome fire power by guerrilla warfare of various kinds, including horrific terrorist activities, based on rather tatty ethno-nationalism. Tiny North Korea is also challenging the US, nuke for nuke: keeping their guerrilla options ready on a burning sense of national pride. Second, that military power realises that engaging the Chinese and the Russians militarily cannot force them to retreat any longer, as during the Cuban missile crisis, but will only lead to mutually assured destruction (Mad), a denouement that may not be acceptable even to the moron in the White House, as he has been described unapologetically by his own secretary of state. The US hegemony rested on military power and the power of the dollar. Even the latter power is falling apart. The summary of the situation is that the US is being reduced to one big power among other big powers. In Lenin’s time this would have meant inter-imperialist wars, especially during economic crises. But now, such wars are at best proxy wars or hybrid wars, as in Africa, Syria, Iraq, etc. This is a very unstable situation; local wars, proxy or hybrid, will be the order of the day. The Modi government has chosen the same enemy, China, that the US has. Modi’s war dances get more hectic by the day. But there is also some caution. In the ignominious retreat from Doclam, where India is not a party at all in a territorial dispute between Bhutan and China, the bitter pill was swallowed after an obscene
show of bravado. The biggest shot in the army supplied the comic relief by declaring that he was willing and capable of fighting simultaneously on two fronts, Kashmir and the north-east, presumably meaning that he can take on both the Chinese and the Pakistanis at the same time. Doclam, a small, disputed plateau on the Sino-Bhutanese border, for which the two relevant countries had been negotiating a settlement. Then Bhutan’s big daddy, India, jumped in with much bravado, not once mentioning Bhutan’s name until perfidious foreigners did it. Doclam became a Sino-Indian dispute! The patriotic drums began to roar, the BJP mouths kept up the shrillest worship of the motherland and the martial jokers sounded so confident that they could perhaps take Beijing in one fell swoop! What was all that about? We withdrew because the Chinese did, being awed, according to our Home minister, by our fearsome might. But soon it was revealed that although we weren’t there anymore, the fleeing Chinese were still there going about
building the road they were building when the hullabaloo started. An intelligent guess will be that Modi, the ambitious man aiming to walk the corridors of world power and become the fuehrer in India holding on to the coattails of the white Modi in the White house, was trying to invite big brother to help out to strengthen the encirclement of China. But big brother was unmoved to do any such thing right now without sorting out the question of Chinese manufactures that propel the US economy. Even a moron, as described by his own secretary of state, like Trump would know that the weak Indian economy, made weaker by the arrogantly idiotic policies such as demonetization, was in no position to make in India what the US needs. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping read out his lengthy capitalist manifesto. What struck one was the explicit reference to the Kashmir border with China where no interference will be tolerated. So we have a situation where armed China and US-armed India areworking towards a face off. The US is offering a spot in Afghanistan for India. That is bait to the fools in Delhi. There is much jubilation that Pakistan will be discomfited by a US-backed Indian presence in Afghanistan. Who will explain that Afghanistan loses its strategic importance as Russia and central Asia’s passage to the warm waters through Pakistan becomes feasible? If the US, in its survival game with China and the expansionist Indians in their anti-Pakistan chauvinism wants to engage China and Pakistan, it will have to be in the Hindukush passes. Three nuclear powers in those narrow gorges is
too delicious even for Trump to entertain. Besides, with a belligerent Pakistan, how will the US maintain its occupation in Afghanistan with its only major supply line being Pakistan? Afghanistan’s minerals aren’t all that much if the strategic leverage is gone.
Assuming that a big section of the Indian bourgeoisie – Advani, Adani and their cohorts who back Modi and are rather his puppet masters –want to be with the US to gradually become the manufacturing hub that China is today for the US. Modi’s war dance in the South China Sea or the area around the Malacca Sraits and other faraway places are not particularly discomfiting, but a possible conflict at the doorstep is a different matter. Has Doclam taught Modi or that Modi-backing section of the ruling class any lessons? India’s position in Bangladesh has been considerably weakened by his anti-Muslim politics at home and his continuous threat to ‘’send back’’ to Bangladesh lakhs of Muslims in West Bengal and the North East. India’s other strong arm pressures on Bangladesh, continuously since the Farakka barrage, is finally exhausting even its staunchest admirers in Bangladesh. In such a situation, China has dived in with its BRI and a huge but cheap loan package for much needed infrastructure projects like ports, power and internal connectivity that would be very difficult for India or its US mentor to match. The recent defiance of Hasina on big and small issues and especially on the genocide of the Rohingyias in Myanmar, reminiscent of the Maan in Assam’s history, where Modi saw the victims as Muslims and perhaps admired the fraud-laureate Aung San Su Kyi for what she had done to the Muslims and what he would perhaps like to do in India in a reciprocal gesture to a mind as great as his. Bangladesh cannot of course take a tit for tat attitude towards India because of both history and geography, but it will no longer remain a supplicant to the whims of Delhi. In fact during Swaraj’s visit to Dhaka , India changed its stance on the
Rohingyas to accommodate the Bangladesh perspective.In the case of Nepal also, history and geography play their combined part. There is a
history of brazen and strong Indian interference and political pressure in Nepal’sinternal affairs over nearly six decades. The successive blockades of Nepal, in violation of international law on the passage of landlocked countries, especially the last one where the rather transparent Modi pretence was that he and his government had nothing to do with it, have been the most ludicrous. The Indians were demanding that Nepal should abandon an important plank of their just enacted Constitution. Being basically separated from its other big neighbour, China, because of the
Himalayas, Nepal had no means of seeking a way out of the blockade. In contrast to all earlier Prime Ministers of Nepal who made it a habit of surrendering their sovereign rights to Indian expansionism, the PM at the time dared to open communication with China on short and long term solutions that could balance out India’s unilateral hegemonism. China agreed to send emergency supplies of oil and agreed to long term arrangements for road and rail networks between itself and Nepal. Right now, these arrangements are being concretised by the near completion
of road linkages between Kathmandu and Sigatse, the second largest city in Tibet as a part of the BRI. The railway has been given the greatest priority. The railway line penetrating the great Himalayas will b e mainly on bridges and inside tunnels. The connectivity with China will be no match for that with India but it will have two advantages: 1) It will be effective during blockades and other calamities raining down from expansionist Delhi; and 2) It will give Nepal linkages to a vast Chinese and, through central Asia, to European and African markets. Sri Lanka, having in the recent past shown strong signs of moving into Chinese strategic planning calculations, is now as it were suspended between India, the erstwhile hegemon, and China, the aspiring one. But the tilt is still towards China. So it would appear that we have lost or are fast losing our important friends in South Asia while acquiring great risky friends far away such as Japan and the US. As expansionist compradors, our ruling class requires mentors such as these. Modi as the principal political instrument of the strongest sections of this ruling class, is required to follow their interest. Their interest is to force the neighbouring countries into their own market imperatives as submissive entities. But in the great power clash between the US and China, the bourgeoisie sees an additional opportunity to replace China as the workshop of the US. Hence ‘’Make in India’’ and the ugly surrender to US
strategic interests. But our underdevelopment in all directions is such that we have not yet made the grade. So, the golden showers of FDI have not fallen on us yet. India is not China in one very important dimension. Chinese cultural, religious and ethnic diversity is in the western border regions with very small populations. Demographic homogeneity (Han) paired with an economic system that has attained enough homogeneity to mark the national sphere as capitalist without many qualifications except the usual unevenness that capitalism can never transcend. In contrast, India is a vast country with prominent linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity. The economic system is also diverse with more or less fully-fledged capitalist systems in urban centres and in large swathes of agriculture in many states and large regions. But large areas are in their production system still feudal or prefeudal but linked, however tenuously, to the international market. Our internal connectivity is still very poor. Skill management is still rudimentary. All these diverse factors do not attract large-scale FDI. Law and order is another big item for foreign investors. International capital is extremely shy of situations where civil or state violence destabilises the prevailing order. The Chinese system being autocratic, they can suppress all adverse opinions and actions with extreme violence, but quietly. Foreign investors don’t mind that. Not only not mind, they relish such a situation. Museveni of Uganda has ruled for decades and assassinated hundreds of protesters and rivals, but the foreign extractors of Uganda’s wealth don’t mind, so the dollar press keeps absolutely quiet. Everything is fine in Uganda. Modi and the Sangh want to transcend our diversity, the binary of autocracy, by attempting to impose a ‘’one religion, one language and one flag’’ type of fascism on our diversity and our civil society traditions. The Muslims, the Christians and the Dalits have been singled out for attack in order to unite the rest. They have unleashed a formidable number of organisations at every level of society –from the heights of parliament, to the occupational groups including the working class, to the tribal villages, the educational system, the women, to even minority organisations such as the Shia organisations, to Dalit communities, to national minorities, etc, everywhere one looks. The sangh has also created many terrorist organisations that foment riots and pogroms and kill secretely.This fascism has penetrated not only the pores of civil society but has been taking over state institutions such as the various levels of the judiciary, the top echelons of the bureaucracy, the educational establishments, the security forces etc. This is perhaps the most well organised fascist organisation that the world has seen. All its efforts lead to the service of the neoliberal agenda of the multinationals and their chosen compradors.This sangh parivar fascism has deep roots in the British imperial project of dividing and ruling India. The othering of the Muslims and the monolithic Brahmanism of the Orientalists helped to establish the Manuvadi gospel of caste oppression. These were partly reworked and reshaped old ideological beliefs fostered by the British imperialists that the sangh has clung to. Not that they were not grateful to their imperialist masters; the abject surrender to the raj of their founding theoretician, the man they still admire, even worship, gives the exact colouration of the sangh parivar’s relationship to imperialism. None of the leaders who now strut about the Indian stage have any record of fighting the British during the Raj. That’s the patriotism that these leaders want to impose on the citizens of India. It remains to be seen if the people of India can soon overcome the sangh’s latest fascist prostration before the imperialists, the US imperialists. A class alignment of the working class, the peasantry, all sections of secular society, the small and medium bourgeoisie and even sections of the big bourgeoisie that estimates greater profits by linking themselves to other imperialists and are being
squeezed by the sangh’s favourites. Such a class alignment is not easy to materialize unless the othered communities and identities and their organisations (i.e. mostly the SC, the ST, the Minorities, including the Christian clergy, the oppressed OBCs, oppressed nationalities like the Gorkhas and the Kashmiris, etc) are also brought into the alignment by a thoroughly democratic and secular programme. Such a programme should stand for internal reforms without violent or judicial repression
and is patient enough to await the strong power of progressive, innate dynamics in these communities that is wary of the vested interests of the proto bourgeoisies that have grown among them and are often cultural separatists. In the class alignment that we seek, the working class, the most numerous class in India and the only one capable of becoming the vanguard and the major force of the anti-fascist struggle, must, while struggling against capitalist attacks on wages and benefits, unemployment, price rise etc, must unerringly turn the struggles against the root causes such as fascism and imperialist prescriptions for neoliberalism and war.
The workers’ own organisations, the trade unions, are still a long way to go to lead such anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggles, but if they fail to do so, then fascism and the US and Indian expansionist inspired wars will become inevitable. The revolutionary working class movement that is firmly rooted in the class for itself will have to abjure economism and concentration solely in the work place, important as it is, and organise also the communities in places of habitation through class and united front work against fascist and imperialist suppression and exploitation. This work
simply cannot be palmed off to some vanguard organisation although the class should work cooperatively and harmoniously with such organisations as long as the help rendered shows the way forward. There are many organisations claiming vanguard status. Although advice and cooperation from any source is welcome, it is necessary to keep in mind the long, sustained struggle waged by the so-called Naxalites. These comrades are splintered in various organisations, big and small. Most of these organisations have proved themselves as sustainable in very hostile circumstances. Some of them have heterogeneous parts as the result of splitting and grafting. What is important for us is to remember the great divide between perhaps the largest organisation of Naxalites,the Maoists, and all the others. This division is primarily about the path to be pursued
as the overarching strategy for the revolution. The CPI (Maoist ) has been waging armed struggle against the state ( guerrilla struggle) for decades in central India where the terrain is hill-forest and the rural people are mostly Adivasis. It believes that all the other Naxalite organisations have deviated from the path of revolution (revisionism) because they are not pursuing this strategy. The non-Maoist organisations have in their turn marked the CPI (Maoist) as adventurists. This has locked both sides out of any unity explorations. We believe that both sides are wrong in this reciprocal naming. We have ourselves been guilty on this count. Why are both sides wrong? We now believe that India is too vast and socioeconomically diverse even in its rural areas that different revolutionary strategies are applicable in different areas. Fully capitalist agriculture with good connectivity, as in the Punjab, Haryana, coastal Andhra, etc will not let the Maoist strategy last for very long. In such areas the working class must intensify the ongoing class struggles until insurrections or, at least barricade skirmishes, become the order of the day, opening up opportunities to wage war against the state. One need not therefore engage in acrimonious debates concerning the credentials of each other. It is harmful to both sides and is the main barrier to the unity of the communist revolutionaries when such unity is essential to defeat sangh fascism and its imperialist master, the US imperialists on an all-India scale. The communist revolutionaries, not fractured by impassable divisions, is the necessary core of all revolutionary advance. The working class, in all its activities in India, should do its internationalist duty to defend the countries under imperialist and expansionist attack, whichever direction it comes from, especially upon our neighbours in South Asia and its environs. Pakistan was the only exception to India’s hegemony in South Asia. Now that we are approaching a hostile South Asia, we must be very careful about the warmongering provocations of the Indian expansionists and promote peace at every opportunity .Intensify the Class struggle led by the Working Class! Unite the Communist Revolutionaries of India!
The task of building the Broadest United Front against Fascism and US imperialism Brooks no Delay!
(2) Fascist Danger and India Today
( In this paper it is elaborately argued that capitalism's unrelenting drive for profits has given rise to climatic change on such a scale all over the world that the existence of life on this planet is itself threatened. Hence the struggle for a better society must include a movement by all the forces that are aware of this chage .Yet, the paper, after describing the present international situation in brief,
argues that the imminent danger for the Indian people is fascism
propelled by the ideology and fores of Hindutva. These forces have penetrated all the pores of the Indian society and the immediate task is to build up a coherent opposition to them by uniting all forces that are against fascism in varying degrees. This paper also outlines the various facets of the crisis of capitalism and competitions among big powers, and places the expansionist attitude of the present Government of India and the forces of Hindutva in this context. ) These are extremely perilous times for the earth as our common human habitat. Capitalist accumulation has encroached into nature’s vitals in such a way that life on earth in all its myriad forms is in danger of perishing within a few decades. This is scientific truth.Has that truth reached the millions with the urgency that is required? Not at all. The corporate media that dominates our lives do not pay the kind of attention that the situation demands. Instead, a large section of it is busy challenging the facts of the case so that capitalism can go on as it is. Fossil fuel companies are spending trillions of dollars promoting their products knowing full well that such fuels are the most responsible for the carbon emissions that are largely responsible for the state of our climate. They not only promote such products but spend billions of dollars misleading the public by false propaganda. As floods and droughts devastate and temperatures rise beyond past records, millions of the world’s poor suffer and die. Already, many island populations have lost their habitats and finding relocation extremely difficult. But that is only the beginning. Bangladesh which has already lost large landmasses to the sea will, along with our Hoogli delta, see the
displacement of millions of people as sea levels rise on account of the melting of polar ice due to global warming. The droughts, floods and the rise of the seas are already with us in the subcontinent. Millions are starving, thousands are dying, lost homesteads are replaced with shacks or worse. And yet the movement against global warming is very weak in our country. The greatest tragedy is that the eventhe revolutionary camp in India (including ourselves) does not exert enough pressure to build up a movement that includes all forces already in the field against climate change. Why is this so? Why it is that we have still not fully comprehended that climate change is due mainly to capitalism’s unrelenting urge to appropriate nature in order expand production and profit? The earth is doomed as long as imperialism exists and thrives. Only when we realise this that we can understand that the battle against climate change is a battle directly aimed at imperialism. Opposing imperial technology to solve our ecological debacle or exposing the farce enacted from time to time to contain climate change such as in the recent Paris Declaration and many other points of conflict with the imperialist world order must be considered seriously in any programme of
action by a revoliutionary party such as ours. Such action however will raise the fundamental questions regarding the path of development for countries of the South such as ours that wish to not take the capitalist path of development and eschew the path of further aggravating the ecological status of the world. The non-capitalist path means socialism, but have we or other socialists regarded the changing of the relations and forces of production alongside the humankind’s relation with nature? I think not. Not even us. This must be looked at self-critically as we go forward, as we must, into the struggles on the ecological fronts.
Within the socialist project, technology must be rethought in terms not only in terms of renewable energy but of redistribution not only of incomes but of decentralised, cooperative production systems that are coordinated to gradually eliminate the coercive powers of the market that capitalism has established. Market socialism is nothing but capitalism in disguise. Soon the disguise proves inadequate and we get something like the Chinese capitalism of today. State of the earth will remain a most urgent long term focus of our work, but the immediate urgency is the danger of communal fascism that stalks our land.The epicentre of communal (Hindutva) fascism is the RSS. It is not an ordinary right-wing organisation; its ambition is to create a corporatist
state in the image of the Nazis and the Italian fascists (whom it lauds and builds itself in their image) so that it can fulfil its epansionist dream of creating akhand Bharat across South Asia and beyond by first eliminating or enslaving the Muslims and other minorities in India today. Unlike Italy and certainly Germany in the twenties and thirties of the last century, India is a country of vast diversity. In order to negotiate this diversity, the RSS has built up a very complex network of organisations, unlike the Nazis and the Italian fascists. At the apex of these organizations is the BJP with Prime Minister Modi and the organisational head, Amit
Shah, both of who are high-ranking RSS functionaries. The government is swarming with such high-ranking functionaries. Some RSS functionaries, such as Advani and his cohorts, who do not see eye to with the present RSS leadership have been sidelined even if some of these have largely ceremonial posts in the government. The same kind of RSS hegemony prevails in the BJP-ruled states. In the newly installed BJP-led coalition in Assam, the decimation of the minorities will be relatively easy for the RSS has as their main partners, the AGP and the Bodo terrorists who have a heinous track record of massacring the Muslims of Assam to a greater extent than Modi in Gujarat. In states where BJP aspires to power soon, such as UP and Karnataka, BJP MLAs and functionaries provoke communal violence, even take part in them. As a ruling party, the BJP cannot openly espouse communal hatred of the RSS kind, but it is not backward in its inuendo and use of legal subterfuges to drown out opposing voices, such as the concerted attacks on climate change activists, anti-communal forces such as Teesta Setalvad, left and liberal student activists, etc. It is proving particularly adept at using antediluvian, colonial laws to charge opponents with sedition and sundry other offences. The RSS has many other branches, some with open and secret parts to their organisation and some entirely subterranean. Open terrorism and clandestine terrorism are the order of the day. But no one is ultimately punished due to supine police and intelligence personnel. Such supine behaviour is increasingly the norm in the higher bureaucracy. What do they care if they can filch the fisk while sharing the bonanza with RSS operatives? Parts of the judiciary are hand-in-glove with the RSS. Anyone or any book that is judged by these chaddiwalas as “distorting” or “falsifying” the beliefs of their so-called Hindus are arraigned before pliant judges to get outrageous judgements. The judicial process is further confounded by threatening or removing conscientious prosecutors of cases against Hindutva terrorists. Thousands of RSS “schools” and seminaries have opened up in tribal and backward regions in the name of upliftment and development while what they actually do is the transmission of the poisonous ideology of Hindutva and a false notion of the nation as some sort of mother goddess. What the RSS has been able to do is set up a vast and formidable network that has operatives for every season with suave presenters among the chatterati, capable diplomats and ministers, through to various functionarie graded according to function, all the way to the paramilitaries and the terrorists. Local sources of large-scale finance are obviously the large corporate houses that are reaping bonanza profits under the hard and monolithic neoliberals of the BJP. Another source is the remittances from NRIs, and under their umbrella foundations, hard dollars from the US military industrial complex. This is a formidable enemy of the people of India, intent on demolishing all socialist and libertarian protest, crushing all religious and ethnic diversity and setting up a Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan! A fascist programme if ever there was one, with a strong organisation to muscle its way to a totalitarian state. But first we must review, however briefly, the international context in which this fascist process is proceeding. The US imperialists and their allies and henchmen prefer authoritarian regimes in the South because such regimes can and do what they want, i.e., use armed force when needed to pour down the gullets of the population heavy doses of neo-liberal austerity, extreme inequality and the whole paraphernalia of imperialist globalisation. The US would therefore be very glad to warmly welcome PM Modi, the genocide specialist from Gujarat and the silent bystander after Dadri and so many other incidents. But
things are not going too well for the US imperialist. he world economy over which it presides shows no signs of a robust recovery. Many well informed economists are predicting a crisis worse than in 2008 by next year. Whatever that may be, it is certain that there is no recovery from the effects of 2008 in the near future. Imperialists are at each other’s throats. The eurozone (except to a certain extent Germany) and Japan are sinking. The east Europeans have sunk, Italy and France may be next. The drastic fall in oil prices had Russia on the ropes but it seems to have weathered the worst. Chinese growth would appear to have
stabilised around 6 per cent. Its efforts to come out of extreme export dependency and create a strong internal demand and move towards high tech innovations may bear fruit within the next decade. There is new scramble for Africa. The French have been fighting direct and proxy wars in their ex-clonies for quite a while. But the US is moving into the continent in a massive way. The Chinese who have been investing heavily in Africa are to be ousted and the process of a reconquest of Africa is on the cards. In Latin America, the larger countries which moved leftward, at least toward a challenge to US hegemony, are being rehegemonised through severe sanctions, peaceful coups-d’etait, etc. But matters have not come to such a pass that US is in physical conflict with its partners in Europe. Great power conflict is now focussed on Russia and China.The encirclement of Russia in Europe is in its final stages. Within Russia’s sphere of influence, from the legacy of the old USSR, Georgia has been wrenched apart. Moldova is under great pressure while the attempt to wrench Chechnya out goes on. Some of the central Asian republics are ambiguous in their loyalties. Only in the Ukraine, Odessa has been recovered, ensuring Black Sea navigation and the Russian-speaking eastern border has been supported in order to wrench another borderland out of the hands of the US. Finland, Sweden and Norway are already on board to thwart Russian passage through the Baltic. Russia’s strategic response to these aggressive manoeuvres has been mainly three-fold. First, it has imposed counter-sanctions on all items exported to Russia by the Europeans, creating a crisis in mainly the farm sectors in many EU countries that are already undermined by the world economic crisis. Second, Russia has come to the aid of Assad with its military might and has already foiled the US plan to hegemonise the whole of Western Asia. As part of that battle to stop the advance of US hegemony, it has, along with China, flexed its muscle diplomatically to get the Iran deal through. In the process, the US has been forced to go against the wishes and actions of its long-time allies such as the despicable states of the emirates, the Saudis, the Israelis, and Turkey and thus breaking up or at least weakening the iron grip of the US over the whole of the oilbearing region.Third, but most importantly, the Russians have forged a military, and crucially, an economic alliance with the Chinese. The killer Obama and the habitual killer, Hillary Clinton, must seek some pause, but they do not because imperialism wants to save itself by another world war. We will look on the Third World War presently. China’s encirclement along the Pacific coast and blocking the passage of
its goods through the Malacca Strats are the obvious threats the US is trying to intensify. Japan is being militarised. Some weak countries in the South China Seas, such as Vietnam and the Phillipines, have been taken on board to pressurise China, but the larger countries and the bigger economies, largely producers of intermediate products for Chinese industrial production, that belong to ASEAN are as yet not on board. But US pressure on them is relentless. The policy is to subdue Russia in order to reesstalish war fighting dominance throughout the world without any challenge, as in Syria where the Russians seem to have halted the unhindered dominance of the US in the great oil-bearing region in the middle east. The challenge to the US from China is not yet one of war fighting, although the Chinese responses to the US military provocations in the South China Seas is a strong military posture and subtle diplomacy. The Chinese moves in the financial front are a clear and present danger to the US by threatening the unquestioned dominance of the dollar. The Renminbi is already some way towards becoming a challenger to the dollar. The IMF has already, quite reluctantly, included the Renminbi in the basket of currencies in the SDR. The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians. Some African states such as Zimbabwe and sundry central Asian states are already demarcating their mutual trade in the Rouble or the Renminbi. The British have offered the financial services of the City of London to the Chinese. Except for the US and Japan, all great powers and others have joined the Chinese infrastructure fund. The BRICS bank is however not doing well at present. At present, the security arrangements between China and Russia poses the
greatest threat to US military dominance throughout the world in spite of the frantic military activities of the US warmongers. The balance of forces that this has achieved is extremely fragile especially on Russia’s border with the rest of Europe and the South China Sea. Simple tactical errors or accidents could trigger if not a world war but at least something as devastating as the Second World War. The EU is teetering on the edge of a precipice and that would weaken NATO, not just militarily but politically. US world hegemony, now seriously weakened, could push the US warmongers to throw the future to the winds and begin to intensify aggressions that could lead to another world war. So these are extremely perilous times in the world today. Where do our fascist protagonists stand in this situation? Modi has moved far along military and naval alliance with the US imperialists, focussing on the Indian Ocean. He imagines that this will drive out the Chinese from it and make India the lord and master of that ocean. This is like getting the lesser “enemy” by embracing the biggest. The US manoevres blocking the Malacca Sraits for some time was for the US interest and not for India. India thinks that if it can pose as the great enemy of China then the US masters will reward it. But the Chinese are long term strategists. Their Sinkiang Baluchistan road and the huge railway and road connexions from mainland China to that region and Tibet will not deter them from reaching the Indian Ocean. Military and naval exercises in the Malacca Straits are all very fine but will Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia cooperate when the chips are
down? As of now, the answer is no. Besides, they have opened up railway networks to central Asia, Russia and Europe, reducing the paramount importance of the Indian Ocean. Where does that leave Modi? Even under Modi India remains semi-colonial and its leaders and the bourgeoisie will not give uncritical support to the US. So Modi is trying to balance the US outreach with a on again off again camaraderie with other great powers, including the Russo-Chinese bloc. There appears to be some movement in the Indo-Pak and the Sino-Indian border question. As far as the first question, it seems to have boiled down to their Baluchistan and our Kashmir creating an unreal world where the people of those regions are never consulted or their aspirations respected. That creates the fertile humus on which terrorism (or looked at the proper way, national liberation struggles) flourish. The mutual blame game continues, but of late there are faint signs of a thawing of the hard rhetoric. Long years of liberal and rightwing anti-Pakistan hate mongering cannot change overnight, but a hard rightwing government such as Modi’s can carry off some sort of rapprochement with Pakistan by keeping the dogs of Akhand Bharat on leash. Trade is an incentive but more pertinently the US
imperialists have a genuine interest in stabilising the region from here to Afghanistan for adventures beyond, to the heart of Russia. The other great power involved, China, would welcome such a change if for nothing else than a peaceful passage from Sinkiang to the Indian Ocean.A Kashmir settlement acceptable to the people of the Valley, however flawed, impinges on the Sino-Indian border question because of the share of the border that China has demanded, from 1959 onwards, that saves their strategic road throgh Pakistan. During the second UPA regime, there was apparently some movement on the border question with China, involving Chinese relaxations on the huge current account deficit that India has piled up in its trade with China. The US has no interest in a settlement with China but on the contrary would much appreciate another anti-China chauvinist wave helpful to a project of encircling China. When the UPA was negotiating, the US imperialists had not declared a “pivot to the East” so it remains to be seen how far or how quickly India inches towards a settlement.
All the great powers wish to impose the harshest neo-liberal prescriptions such as labour law reform, land grab, multinational entry into agriculture and the services, not to speak of industry where they are comfortably ensconed. Our task is to create large-scale mass movements against imperialism on the question of global warming and neo-liberal globalisation. We must oppose the oppression of the Dalits, the minorities, the tribes and the weaker nationalities. We must stand steadfastly with the people of the Kashmir Valley. We must fight to save free speech and democratic values. And we must fight resolutely against the advance of fascism. While we depend on our own strength, we must seek to unite with all forces that can be united with in carrying through these tasks. There is no question about doing this with the genuine revolutionaries, including those who have deviated in a sectarian and adventurist direction. But uniting with these forces is not enough, although such an unity may spark large mass actions. With all their vaccillations and ideological baggage, the Congress and the Left Front can be allied with under varying circumstances. The problem here is that both of these formations are losing their mass appeal. The regional parties can be united on the question of federalism but their stance on liberalism, the danger of imperialism and democratic values vary a great deal and requires careful attention when uniting with any or some of them. The masses of the poor, the working class, the peasants and the enlightened intellectuals are seething in anger against the fascists but there is as yet no coherent opposition on a national scale. It is the task of the day to create such an opposition.
(3) Draft Programme for the CPI(M-L)-PCC For the Special Congress, November 2016
(This document discusses the history of penetration of capitalism in Indian agriculture since the colonial period and argues that Indian agriculture has made its historic transition to capitalism. It further analyses the place of imperialism and the domestic big bourgeoisie in present-day India, and asserts that India is a semi-colonial, not neocolonial country. The document goes on to analyse the structure of the working classes and highlights the crisis that confronts the majority of this class. It emphasizes the need to go beyond immediate economic issues and to mobilze the working class in the struggle against imperialism, struggle on ecological issues, intervention in local selfgovernment, struggle in faour of depressed identies and struggle for greater democratic spaces.)
Prologue The 1951Programme of our party, then united as the CPI and advised by Comrage Stalin and the leaders of the CPSU, declared India as a semifeudal country. Long years after that, the eighth Congress of the party or the fist Cogress ( 1970) of the remained CPI(Marxist-Leninist) again revrted to the semi-feudal description. Now the question arises as to whether that still holds and whether the slow transition to capitalism that began with the entry of capitalist imperialism that subjugated us directly for more than a century has taken a decisive turn. In order to delve into this question, it is imperative to divide British imperialism into two phases: the pre-industrial phase when it was basically minterested in plunder, pure and simple, of our country's great wealth that was accumulated by us as one of the most advanced agricultural and industrial powers in the world, and a second phase when, as the first country of agrarian capitalism, Britain developed into the first country of industrial capitalism in the middle of the nineteenth century fro internal causes that were much strenghtened by the remittances from India. If we take 1757, the famous battle of Plassey, as the beginning of British paramountcy in India, then from 1793, with the enactment of the Permanent Settlement and subsequently the Ryotwari and Mahalwari settlments, the regularisation of the agrarian plunder began. Before 1793, it was largely unregulated and venal plunder and rapine by the Company's military-bureaucratic leaders. The turn to the regularisation of plunder with the collaboration of an Indian social base, consisting of old revenue farmers of the Mogul military bureaucrats and others such as the innumerable, mostly Hindu, land revenue officials, prepared the ground for the penetration of British capital. Land revenue had to be paid in currency, forcing self-reliant subsistence farmers to sell their crops, partially or wholly in an increasingly capitalist market. This marketing soon morphed into an internatinal market for grains, mostly to feed and propel the industrialisation of England. Deepening industrialisation in England, by the middle of the nineteenth century, soon transformed old and new agricultural produce into commodities in the national and international markets. Raw cotton, edible oils timber indigo, tea raw jute, etc each became by turn national and
international commodities. Capitalist market imperatives, by the end of the nineteenth century, became dominant in agriculture. But subsistence agriculture, mostly under the tight grip of the money-lender ad the landlord, persisted in ever weakening strength till the late twentieth century. And so did feudal sharecropping till then. By the seventies of the last century both subsistence agriculture and feudal sharecropping began a precipitate decline. Spurred on by the first steps ( early to middle seventies in the last century), the Indian big bourgeoisie took towards export-led growth, i.e. globalisation, backed by the first tranche of a 5000 crore of structural adjustment loan from the IMF. By the time of the post nineties, globalisation got going, agricultural was to enter a prolonged crisis due to broken down infrastructure and lack of investments. By the turn of the century, 60% of the rural population ( in the aggregate) were wage slaves.
Another 20 percent did some agriculture on their plots for a minor part of the year and spent th e rest of the year as wage labourers. Big landlords had vanished from more than half of the country and where they existed, they had transformed or were transforming themselves into capitalist landlords. Sharecropping of the semi-feudal kind, the major relation of production till the seventies, was vanishing except in small enclaves by the noughts and reverse tenancy, i.e. where the landlord leases leases the land of the poor peasant against a money rent made its presence significant. Similar to this, there is the agrarian capitalist who has little or no land but who leases land seasonally for cash cropping mostly from the landpoor who are unable to sustain agricul;ture for all seasons. These latter are to be found everywhere , but they are strongly distributed in in Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and all states where big landlordism is either extinct or becoming so. Capitalist market imperatives and the overwhelming evidence for the prevalence of wage labour show that Indian agriculture has made a decisive turn to capitalism. This agricultural capitalism is weak, so weak that is cannot sustain the labourers it has freed-- the latter are thus forced to migrate in large numbers to th e cities for informal work under tremendously bad conditions. In the rural areas too th is kind of informal work is the norm. India is thus no longer a semi-feudal country. It has made its historical transition to capitalism. The Programme 1. India is a semi-colonial country. It is oppressed and exploited y several imperialist powers in a globalised world. The meaning of “semi-colonial” is that imperialism carries on its oppression and exploitation through the
big bourgeoisie class that is indigenous and is rooted firmly in the mode of production, but whose survival and development require junior partnerships with imperialism in order to access the vital ensemble of capital, technology and markets. These partnerships are a form of capitulation that is short of surrender under normal circumstances. These capitulating big bourg'eois are therefore called compradors, not puppets. Each such partnerships comes at the expense of a certain amount of loss of hegemony over the state. As a result several imperialist powers with some degree of hegemony contend within the state sometimes dividing compradors, the bureaucracy and political leaderships according to geopolitical clouts and/ or material blandishments. While several powerful imperialist powers contend for hegemony in the state power the local compradors remain relatively independent-- that is the proper semicolonial state. But due to economic or political crisis or geopolitical compulsions out of control of the local ruling classes, the state faces the possibility of the exclusive hegemony of one imperialist great power. When such exclusive hegemony is established, the puppets of the great powere assume important roles in the state. These puppets are usually
characterised as people without any direct role in the relations of
production, but sometimes even some compradors lose their relative autonomy and become puppets. When puppets rule the state becomes neocolonial, a colony of a new type proliferating since World War II although the U.S, with its “manifest destiny” and Monroe Doctrine has ruled some or all of Latin America as neo-colonies sine the nineteenth century. Under a semi-colonial or neo-colonial dispensation, the broad masses of the people are mercilessly exploited and oppressed. The limit of this exploiyation and oppression extends to the small and medium bourgeoisie
and is routine in the case of capitalist landlords and agrarian capitalists. These can therefore be classified as a national bourgeoisie, i.e. a class that has a potential for anti-imperialist struggles in spite of their exploitative nature rendering them characterised as a vaccillating class that needs a relation of struggle and unity according to issues that come into focus, such as their exploitation and their( weak) anti-imperialist struggles such as on retail trade and other issues such as the decimation of the small and medium sectors of production. Indian feudalism had its own structures of extra-economic coercion such as a firm caste-hierarchy, ostracising of non-Hindu populations extreme
forms of patriarchy, routine orppression of Dalits and Adivasis etc.
Capitalism has adapted all these structures for super-profit just like U.S.capitalism which reinvented slavery as the dynamo of its cotton monopoly at the dawn of industrialisation. The alliance of the big comprador bourgeoisie with imperialism never allows the former to dominate it and it is this alliance that forms one pole
of the principal contradiction in India, the other pole being the masses of the Indian nation and the peoples. The relentless class struggles of the Indian people against this alliance, consciously or not have both a national content and a democratic content. The present stage of the Indian revolution is therefore national democratic or New Democratic. 2. Feudal exploitation exists in certain niches where the working class must continue the struggle against it for as long as it takes to eradicate it. The peasants and workers must be organised to sweep away all feudal remnants from the land. 3. A very large salaried middle class works in the corporate and state sectors, which has been nurtured by the state in accordance with World Bank-IMF planning to provide a large market for goods and services provided by the corporate sector. Larger and larger sections of this lass suffer from anxieties regarding well-paid, stable work for their next generation that is being swept away by the swelling tide of unemployment. A growing section of the youth of th is lass is getting radicalised. The state's retreat from the public sector and its encouragement of the private sector especially in IT and banking, has forced engineers, accountants and management into back-breaking work schedules and uncertainty of continuing employment.The self-employed middle and lower classes often face ruin and are kep
busy fighting off high inflation in food and essential items of consumption. The children of these swell the ranks of the unemployed along with the children of those below them in the economic and social hierarchy.4. The rural bourgeoisie and the middle class of traders and contractors dom not have the scope of expanding accumulation due to the state's virtual withdrawal from building agricultural infrastructure. The contractors and local muscles accumulate black money by riminally colluding with politicians and bureaucrats but it is rare for this black money to convert it self into capital and it is mainly expended in conspicuous consumption. 5. he wage earning classes in our country work in heterogeneous milieus and conditions. Roughly around 10 percent of the work force has permanent status but their conditions of employment vary considerably. The best placed-- the top 10 percent-- are the permanent workers in the
public sector and the corporate private sector. These have decent work and fairly good benefits. But very large sections of 60 Percent of rural households are wage earners without any other occupation, although sometimes a member of sucha household may become precariously self employed as van drivers, repairmen carpenters, masons etc. A further 20 percent combine a little agriculture on small parcels of land seasonally with wage labour for the rest of the year. These figures are aggregated from all-India data. Local conditions will of course present a wide array of differences. Most of these rural wage earners get work only seasonaly in their own rural environment because of the pathetic state of agriculture in the country. This will get worse as agricultural business corporations, mostly multi-national, take over our agriculture and and introduce intense mechanisation, intensive chemicalisation, theirown seeds, including GM crops, and corporate marketing. As of now, these wage earners have to
travel elsewhere in their own state or to other states. But this rural
migration is nothing compared to the temporay or permanent migration to the towns and cities where starvation is kept at bay by living in squalor and working as casual labourers under the harshest conditions. These wage earners are definitely the Indian proletariat that has become the overwhelming section of the revolutionary force to fight for the democratic revolution in India.
6. Working class struggles begin with the question of wages, benefits and decent conditions of work. The majority of workers are on contract and informal work. The struggles of these workers for legal rights ( such as minimum wages) and the satruggle against the state which attempts to change good labour laws are the foundations of consciousness building and linking them to the new democratic revolution and a socialist future. Rural workers must be mobilised against the struggle against imperialism as it rushes into agricultural production with G.M seeds, h armful pasticides and cmontract agriculture. This is an immediate struggle in many areas and it will expand with the further penetration of imperialist capital. This struggle should be conducted with fostering a serious concern with ecology and global warming. In fact all working class struggles must be suffused with the awareness of the danger to the globe and all life forms due to capitalism's drive for accumulation. All ecologically destructive ventures such as big dams, sponge iron fatories must be opposed as a good beginning for greater awareness. While the struggles focus on NRGEA, proper distribution of PDS rations,
ICDS functioning , healthcare etc, th e workers must seriously intervene in local self-government and local and wider planning.
In all working class struggles, special attention must be paid to women's struggles for equal remuneration, leae with pay before and after child birth and other problems faced by women workers. It is extremely important to lift women to positions of leadership at all levels. There must be resolute struggles to eradicate patriarcy both within ourselves and in the wider society. The majority of workers come from the social categories of ST, SC, Lower OBCs, Manional Minorities and the Muslims. These groups face repression and discrimination on a daily basis. Workers must position themselves in the forefront of all struggles in solidarity with these groups, especially when it is not easy as in the support we must give to the masses in Kashmir for self-determination. It is not just a question of a show of solidarity; workers must come out in the villages and towns and fight alongside them. If there is state terrorism against the legitimate movements against these groups, then the workers must join them in every form of resistance. As in their own struggles, workers realise that open democratic movements provide the best conditions for struggle but when such conditions are closed off by the state then the struggle will be for opening up the democratic space with all forms of struggle that match the circumstances consonant with the mass mood and adequate organizational preparations. Parliamentary struggles must accompany extra-parliamentary struggles.Boycotting parliamentary struggles is the illusion of the ultra-left; such boycotts are only feasible when the masses are ready to smash the present state and seize power. 7. The alliance of imperialism and the big bourgeoisie is powerful not only because of the armed forces it commands. It is powerful also in its hegemony over ideological and political structures. At the present juncture, the Sangh Parivar brand of fascism, backed by the US imperialists and the big corporate houses, is penetrating every nook and corner of the state and the deep state. This is a formidable force which has already compelled the abject surrender of the media. War cries against Pakistan and killing of Muslims under various pretexts have become routine. China is now the add-on in the list of military targets. The Dalits are getting their houses demilished or burnt and some are tortured or killed. The working class will have to forge, step by step, the broadest united front with all classes, organizations parties and individuals who hae contradiction with this fascism. It is not an easy task but we must persevere. Our struggles cannot make their mark unless such a United Front comes into being.
(4) A Brief Note on Santosh Rana’s Withdrawal from Party Membership
Prior to the last Assembly elections in West Bengal, there were three major political formations in the fray, viz., the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Left Front (LF) it ‘leads’ as its tail, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
No political observer, including ourselves, imagined the BJP to play anything but a marginal role in the outcome of that election, but it certainly increased its strength very significantly over large swathes of West Bengal, mostly from among CPI (M) supporters and cadres. It was no one’s case to immediately call for a secular, anti-fascist front in the state as far as the then current polls went. There were some communist revolutionaries in the fray whom we supported in order to build up the left movement and not assuredly for any hope for victory.
That left the TMC and the Left Front to fight it out for the next state ministry. The question arose in the PCC as to who to support or reject as the next ruling party in the state. The majority thought that there was nothing to choose between the last few bouts of the Left Front and the TMC as far as democracy, delivery of state ordained welfare measures and the support given to the people’s just struggles went. So we should ask the people to vote None of The Above (NOTA} and let us discover how the current TMC rule or its predecessor of long standing were judged by the people.
Comrade Rana, as the spokesperson of a tiny minority of 3, dissented and felt that the Left Front’s record was democratic and on that score, compared to the TMC’s rule, far superior and deserved our support. He was reminded that the PCC unanimously agreed that the rule of the TMC was violent and undemocratic but it did not credit the Left Front rule as one belonging to the democratic category.
He was reminded that the Left Front (LF) began its ruling by the betrayal of Bengali refugees sent off to unfavourable terrain in Cchatisgarh by the Congress government and who had been guaranteed rehabilitation in West Bengal once the LF came to power. But it was not rehabilitation, it was criminal genocide when some of the Dandakaranya refugees infiltrated back to West Bengal and chose a small island on the Ganga delta, named Marichjhanpi, uninhabited by man or beast but one where wells delivered fresh water for living and farming. In spite of the pleadings of the overwhelmingly Dalit peasants of Marichjhanpi they were either mowed down by the police and paramilitary who were even allowed to chase down those who jumped into the turbulent sea waters to die drowning or die by the bullet.
Marichjhnpi was only the starter’s signal. Countless mass murders by the CPI (M) establishment were enacted or helped and egged on by the leaders and the cadres. We mention here only two extremely vicious examples. The first followed soon after Marichjhanpi. Several monks and nuns of the Ananda Marg, a small, politically militarised, right wing, spiritual organisation, were holding a meeting in their office. The CPI (M) cadres surrounded the office and took whichever nun or priest they could catch and took them several kilometres away and burnt them alive in broad daylight on a usually busy railway over-bridge.
The other instance of this kind that might be cited is the killing of our party’s Nadia district committee as a whole while engaged in a routine internal meeting. The CPI (M)’s “democratic” history flows through its entire administration. Many North Bengal comrades remember the blinding of our two good peasant leaders in Coochbehar district, both landless peasants, who had dared to organise the local peasants under our radical peasant banner. They were tied to trees by the CPI (M) cadres and asked to disown their organisational role, and when they refused to do so, their eyes, all four of them, were cut through with razor blades.
One of the big propaganda pieces in the CP (M) arsenal is its record of democratic decentralisation through the Panchayati Raj (PR) institutions. But when it came to the devolution of powers to the largest working class population in the state, viz. the tea plantation workers, the so called workers’ vanguard denied it to them. Not just denied, but joined hands with the tea magnates to violently put down any democratic sentiments rising from a serf-like existence of the lakhs of such workers and their families. One of our comrades was so severely assaulted by the CPI (M) goons while addressing the demand for PR in the tea gardens that he had severe brain injuries and had to be shifted to a medical college for protracted treatment.
Every day in the life of the Left Front government could bear witness to such “democratic” activities somewhere or the other in the state. But such incidents were not the worst of it. The worst part of all this was the systematic capture and transformation of all democratic institutions and organisations, including the much vaunted PR bodies by cadre placements through the centralisation of all appointments and transfers in the hands of a few top leaders. The semblance of democracy had stolen away its life.
Throughout the LF years and afterwards, Santosh Rana had seen all this and agreed with the opinion of the majority. Suddenly what made him change his mind is his business, but the tragedy was that he did not counter any of this but simply went on to state repeatedly that the LF rule was democratic. And when he saw that he was unable to convince even a tiny part of the majority he resigned from party membership. In the end he left with only one other PCC member.
The majority tried to convince him even after that, with each one of them speaking repeatedly with him face to face and by electronic means. At a PCC meeting where he was invited to attend but didn’t, he was requested to put his point of view with a full document which would be sent to all party members along with a PCC document countering it. After completing that process, the PCC would call a Plenum with delegations in the same proportion as in the last Congress.
When this resolution was taken to Santosh Rana by a delegation, decided by the PCC, of three state secretaries of the party, Rana rejected it and refused to join any plenum process.
So be it.
(5) Edotorial : Sixth Special Congress of the
COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA ( MARXIST-LENINIST ) –PCC
The Sixth Special Congress of the CPI (ML) convened by the Provisional Central Committee (PCC) was held in November 2017.
There were three main items on the agenda: 1) To seek closure on the nature of Indian society and economy that was passed with an overwhelming majority in the very recent Fifth Special Congress after some pockets of dissidence appeared on the scene; 2) To analyze the present situation in the world and India so that the party can sort out its course of action in the next period of instability and disorder in the world-wide capitalist order; and to elect a new Provisional Central Committee.
The Nature of Indian Society and Economy
In 1951, all the communists of India unified in a single revolutionary Party, held a very important Congress after the seemingly insuperable differences among them were resolved through mutual exchanges among the two evenly matched groups and long discussions with the CPSU under Stalin’s guidance.
The view that emerged from that Congress (1951 Congress) regarding the nature of the Indian economy and society was that India was semi-colonial, semi-feudal where guerrilla warfare in rural pockets could be combined with mass movements in cities and other capitalist sectors and could take on appropriate insurrectionary forms. This view belonged to neither of the two abstractions -the Russian Path and the Chinese Path – that are still in use in the political discourse of the left, but a combination of both. Unfortunately this third view was never practiced appropriately, while the leadership of those times slowly plunged the party into parliamentary cretinism.
The Sixth Special Congress has resolved the issue in favour of seeing India as being now a capitalist country in the aggregate and that there are still pre-capitalist enclaves within it. The Congress therefore sees the working class, the overwhelming majority of the population, as the main force and the vanguard of the Indian revolution that will end the rule by the alliance of imperialism and the comprador bureaucratic classes. The peasantry and all the other anti-feudal and anti-imperialist classes will be the allies of the working class.
This line is to be practiced in the present situation and, therefore, Congress, has produced the other landmark document, “The Present Situation and What is to be Done”.
The Present Situation and What is to be Done
This document highlights the present capitalist order and its extreme crisis due to impending ecological disaster and the prospect for the Armageddon of world-wide war (nuclear and non-nuclear) in the contention for world hegemony between the US imperialists and rising great powers such as China and Russia.
The contention is on two fronts, military and reserved currencies. The abandonment of the decreed, hegemonic Breton Woods dollar and its conversion to the petro-dollar as the hegemonic reserved currency is analysed as one of the two most powerful tools for US hegemony over the last few decades. So far, the overwhelming military power of the US imperialists has been the other such tool. But this tool has been nearly equalled by other great powers but the challenge to the US hegemony was never sustained on account of the gargantuan size of the US economy, advantaged as it is by the hegemony of the dollar.
Now great powers such as China are challenging the hegemony of the dollar and the US is being forced into retreat. The US is therefore seeking a military solution to its retreat on the economic and currency fronts. The nuclear stalemate is however a great barrier to such a solution on this front unless one is prepared for Armageddon, the end of the world as we know it. But beyond the nuclear, there are the various non-nuclear powers that the US seeks to subdue militarily in order to exploit them to the hilt and prevent the other great powers to supplant it. But here come the real problems for the US imperialists: the US is failing to overcome the resistance of countries, nations and peoples who do not have any weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones. The ongoing scenario in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq are very good examples of it.
Our country has already gone far into an alliance with the US imperialists, not just economically but also militarily. The expansionism of the Indian ruling classes has been augmented among the most rapacious and the most lawless such as the Ambanis and the Adanis have achieved ascendency by backing the sangh parivar and the US imperialists, and is now directed to encircling China and Russia to those countries’ access to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
Indian expansionism has always targeted Pakistan as its natural though elusive prize, failing that it could cow down the other South Asian neighbours such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and the Maldives and make them do its bidding by diplomatic pressure or the employment of the strong arm. Those days are fast disappearing into the far horizon. This seems to have our home-grown fascists and their US masters into frenzied behaviour in the middle-east (the new policies on Israel) and in the eastern Pacific. Thus the totality of the world disaster is bringing war closer to our shores. This danger of war must be thwarted by a bold Indian peace movement that challenges the fake patriotism of the fascists where so-called national security trumps all reasonable discourse with violence or the threat of it.
The battle against the alliance of the US imperialists and the expansionist, comprador bureaucratic capitalists must realise that these are powerful forces that require the maximum possible mobilisation against them. The core of the mobilised forces will naturally be the working class and the peasantry because they have proven throughout our history that they are capable of carrying the burden of our freedom with intelligence, courage and a lack of fear of extreme sacrifices. The petty bourgeoisie and other intermediate classes are already stepping up to the plate for this grand struggle. Sections of the big bourgeoisie that are relatively distanced from the centres of power on account of economic and political alliances with powers that are increasingly acting contrarily to the dictates of “US First” may also help the people’s forces in a vacillating manner when civil war against the fascists and their imperialist master becomes the order of the day. There is no escaping such a view of alliances to stop fascism and imperialism in its tracks, no matter whether war brings annihilation of the world or it brings revolution.
At this juncture, the Present Situation document presents an important problem and its solution. The communist revolutionaries of India, divided into hostile and semi-hostile camps, continue to stay with and lead the core forces of the Indian revolution, i.e., the workers and the peasants, in various pockets, big and small. This obviously does not generate the ideological strength and the sheer strength of mobilisation required to topple this iniquitous order. But that does not seem to bring any initiative for either mergers or united actions. Each group or grouplet thinks of itself as the revolutionary vanguard and does not explore the differences with a unitarian view.
For example, the Maoists, working to plan for People’s War in the hill forests of central India and still easily the largest group among us, have been ideologically and politically patient and have not feared sacrifices. Instead of looking at that struggle in its very positive aspects, many communist revolutionary groups have denounced them as adventurists and left extremists. (We have ourselves been guilty of such behaviour but even when we have criticised them correctly and soberly, we did not read them out of the movement, as some still do.) Everyone should understand the diverse conditions in India in terms of the path to be followed and not jump to premature conclusions, while maintaining a critical perspective. What everyone should realise is the precarious condition in which the world and India find themselves and emphasise what unites us and not what divides us in order to build the forces that can at last open the way towards socialism though another epoch of class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
May the Teachings of the 6th Special Congress Live on and Carry forward our united Revolutionary Praxis!
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