Right in Left and Left in Right
Western logic goes by Descartes’ deterministic binary distinction- ‘Black and White and there is no admixture’! The Indian epistemology talks about the distinction flickering in time. The best expression is given in the Chinese-Buddhist-Japanese description of Yin/Yang- the image is a simple circle with a large S replacing the diameter, one half of the S is White and the other is Black. But it is layered! Truth or Fact is layered! The White rests on Black and vice versa- any particular point or line in the circle [line is the cross section or geodesic of the circle – the previous derivative figure] has a portion of Black and the rest White- this is true two dimensionally or even three dimensionally, that is every point has a certain portion of Blackness and the rest Whiteness, and the point in question depth-wise. There is a time dimension to it too! The “S” is not fixed, it moves around, moves in time and therefore at any point in time if the whiteness of a particular time is x% then it would be different in any other time. – The Reality seems to be aptly described by this image-definitely so in the case of Indian National politics- the politics of Left and Right.
In the entire Left spectrum starting from CPI/CPM to CPI(Maoist)[or you might say from CPI(M) to CPI(M)] shows some amount of Leftness in Right and Rightness in Left, And then this degree changes along time. Till today we have not seen any reversal or re-tracking the path but the opposite is always increasing inside each organization. This has transgressed the Left parties and is now a stark phenomenon among almost all the bourgeois parties of India.
Baby steps of Revisionism:
Instead of fishing out examples in a very big time period, that is from the period of birth of CPI in India, we can exemplify this phenomenon from the birth of CPI(Marxist) and then carry it along till date- the rest of Indian history is no different from this rather long snapshot. CPI(Marxist) had right from the inception started walking its anti-talk or talking the anti-walk, it had always waded toward the right. Very interestingly there had always been avowed Rightist parties from the rightist block that had donned leftist rhetoric and attires filling up the National political scenario [ I am deliberately making a distinction in the political scenario of the country into National – meaning the events and phenomenon that gets reflected in the mainstream media, about things that creates waves in the legislative bodies and the “other” which is a consistent and continuous class struggle which hardly gets noticed unless there is an upheaval and a massive “law and order” problem or the problem that the bourgeois quotidian life feels a shivering threat to their existence]. Since 1969, we have seen the occasional rise of the fascist personality centred political camps shooting up in prominence by taking Leftist stands to which the Left parties either sheepishly trailed or got decimated by opposing it through rightist rhetoric. The Right becoming Left elbowed out the Lefts who turned Rights. It was always an essentially increasingly Leftward politics that got re-presented by one or the other Rightist parties or forces where the spirit of Leftism was hijacked in every such moment of contemporary Indian political history.
History- LEFT tall talks and RIGHTist acts:
CPI(Marxist) came into being through a flimsy ground of supporting China in the India-China war, apparently a very left sounding rhetoric and the semi-founded allegation that the “Rightists” among the erstwhile CPI betrayed the names of the Leftists to the National authority and thus it was impossible to carry on inner-party-discourse within that party. Out came a party declared in the massive Brigade Parade Ground of Kolkata by the best known CPM orator the high-priest of Rightism – Don Jyoti Basu-ji [This person had much more often being declared as “babu” or “ji” than Comrade]. Such a person declared the effective launching of the party by proclaiming that India is the attacker and went to jail to complete his course of putting up the Left coat. Till the other-day history shows that he was very much for the Rightist camp but over night shifted camps when saw the possibility of less of a competition in this new camp. Here is a party born that did not explain its birth in terms of any concrete program of the left, nor through any radical assurance toward a change in the general Class struggle arena. The organization started its journey with the Rightist government’s blessing of a probationary period in Jail and out came after graduation a bunch of highly corrupt and arriviste leadership but highly regarded in the eyes of the lower middle class and the hapless workers of Bengal. The black patch of Telengana betrayal by the erstwhile Communist leadership was wiped out by the Sundaraya-Basavpunnyia group because of the political penance of the jail term. As soon as they came out their regular politics was to organize the party with one objective after the other and that to face the elections. Though the number of elections was not as frequent as it is today, organizing for each was not that automatic and regular machine-like, efforts had to take longer turnover time. The cadres read into the party’s existence [not in its program though] revolutionary potentialities and a perceived expectation of moving toward a revolution, the leaders used this strength as a pawn to negotiate safe berths in the bourgeois system in the name of giving relief to the “people” [compare this famous adage against Marx’s critique to the Gotha Program, where he roared against the people syndrome obfuscating the essence of class struggle]. “Relief” means peace in status-quo, “relief” means requirement of money and “relief” means thaerfore sharing of public resources requiring sharing of power. That was the innate gene of Rightism that knew undeterred growth till its ultimate festering open some time down the line-the line came obvious some 50 years later at the fag end of 2010.
One after the other Party Congresses dealt with mainly or rather only in one clause- the famous clause number 112 of the party constitution that dealt with the sharing of political power with the bourgeoisie in some structure without any direction specified to where this power-sharing would ultimately head to.
Simultaneously the Rightist hawks who all sat by the fence waiting for the carcass of LEFT, learnt the left-trade from them and adopted toward usurping power. A deceitful hobnobbing with either Imperialist camp or with the newly arisen revisionist turned social-imperialist Soviet Union the Rightist got the propitious and providential opportunity of timely melange of the greatest scope of all times with the nationalistic agenda of dividing Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh in the name of “freeing” a besieged nation. This admixture gave the Rightist Fascists enough of the impetus to drive the course of history for the future to come.
Godot: Clause 112 – apocalyptic journey
Clause no 112 has reached metaphoric proportions. During the seventies when the price level was very low and the salaries of government employees in nominal terms were peanuts as compared with those in the present, our walls around Bengal had the writing “ Police tumi jotoi Maro.Maine tomar 112” [ Police- however you beat us, won’t get more than 112 Rupees] . So prophetically, this number 112 is a jinx everywhere in every situation, it signifies a limit bar transgressing which is a problem. The same happened with CPM, they could never move beyond 112 in the last 35 years.
Before we go into the magic of the downward vortex called 112 let us first remove all allusions that the CPM cadres from the lowest branch level worker up to the state and central leadership study their own program.- No they don’t, that is more of a danger. They might carry it along and would make sure of not reading it, less so study it. The result is horrendous- they heed to all sorts of apprehensions, alibis, hearsays, and third hand interpretations about 112 and gobble them up. They never check what they are devouring but digest a cocktail of whatever they hear from all possible scrupulous sources. We in this perspective therefore should peruse the popular perception of 112 among the CPM rank, file and the all-knowing-fools that crop up in every neighbourhood.
Jyoti Basu really did not believe that the Left front will stay on for more than one term, and always had the premonition that by some pen-stroke the Central Indian government would de-throne the LF state government. This led the CPM prepare mentally for their sudden dethroning – this was from 77 till 87. This particular fear psychosis that was a fruit of his previous experience of Kerala and Bengal in 1967, led the Politburo invent the theory of economic blockade. This was like waiting for Godot! Godot never came. Economic Blockade never came, and there were no reason whatsoever to be so. The Congress party in power never for once believed in some kind of any economic blockade in any part of India, not even in Kashmir and not ever in any part of the insurgent-infested North East. Congress party being the most trusted and proven representative of the Comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie in India would never do any such silly thing. Ecnomic blockades actually would simultaneously stop the flow of surplus from the peripheries to the Centre. Congress is not so fool! What slipped out of the gaze is the Elephantine surprise! They never saw what happened to the Political blockade!!!
At the beginning, it was a genuine mistake, then it formed and ossified into a deliberate conspiracy. Revisionism always puts economism over the politics in methods and activities. A general disdain and fear to deal with politics had always been a general method of Revisionism throughout the world and of course so in case of India. This economistic bent of mind then hegemonises their thought process and then eats up and devours the political spirit. In Jyoti Babu’s case it was same! A fear of economic blockade turned the attention of all the cadres toward minute details of how the Central government authorities through all its tentacles are putting off the inflow of money and investment in Bengal, no one checked out the numbers but believed before hand. This is interesting. When the normal public inflow kept pouring in normal pace and frequency and even in amount the entire CPM “management epistemocracy” did not have the time and scope, method of how to deal with it. The primordial concept of “Relief” to the people went unaddressed and unattended, they never bothered, did not see, and did not plan and never implemented any mechanism for a proper distribution of those public funds and make an optimum utilization of that. Year after year, funds came and were sent back unutilized. Seven terms went by and they never could break off that mind-set, funds were sent back un-utilized. West Bengal topped the list of states where from funds of public investment for infrastructure development went back un-utilized. This resulted in less and less funds being advanced in terms of public investment. Bengal slipped back on every year in Capitalist or rather State Capitalist fund flow and relegated ever downward in the Capitalistic development scale.
Public fund for Private hands
Private Capital always flows the way of Public investment. Private Capital despite all tall and romantic claims of Capitalistic economic Pundits and their Oracular forecasts, had always in the history proved to be very weak and too dependent on the trajectory of the Public investment. It was quite natural that the Private fund flows would then take a track of Mumbai-Bangalore-Hyderabad-Pune and end up in National Capital Region. This trajectory is very politically motivated and pre-meditated. Bourgeois hawks mind always what the liberals have to say, the entire system of Parliamentary façade is made to do so, they heeded the general holler and cry of the liberals that in a federative country like India the Centre would juice out all resources to the Centre. Yes, the aim of the National bourgeois [let us not mix it up with any illusion of having a nationalistic bourgeois, we are talking about the National level comprador bourgeoisie here who lives as subservient agents to Imperialism] is to do exactly that but would do so in a longer time period and through many veils and facades that would make the people think that the extraction of surplus is done in the most democratic way. Jyoti Babu cried hoarse about the “step motherly attitude of the Centre” and then generalized this slogan on a national scale claiming that the States in general are not getting their dues from the Centre and the Centre is juicing out much more that what they are providing. While factually this is true, had always been and will always be, but the way the Central Congress party power used it is to first give preferential treatment to states competing with Bengal and then took a whole circular way of developing fringe metropolises as Capital formation spots at the cost of Bengal or Kolkata. [Please do note that in the parlance of “development” with the Indian bourgeoisie development of the important cities tantamount to development of the states – with no regard to the vast countryside] This is Elephantine political slip. It was never an economic blockade but a political heist when the revisionist LEFT never even understood. When they eventually realized, they had no other option than to follow suit. They became a part of the conspiracy. The vacuous cries of an imaginary economic blockade took off the gaze of the revisionists that they are left high and dry in the big political picture of the country whereby leaving them living and thriving in one corner of the nation-state India does not really bother the Centre any more, the revisionist left stopped becoming any threat to them and had to be easily incorporatable to the machinations of the NATIONAL bourgeois class. “Leave them to rot in Bengal and Kerala and they would soon be insignificant in the Indian politics” . CPM never could make any inroad in the Hindi heartland despite their strong trade Union presence. It was a classic and very skilful touch-of-class of a tactical line of political-isolation-turning-into-political-blockade. Once isolated and blocked thereafter, they would be left rotting in terms of first resources and then in terms of loosing people support and when all the revolutionary and romantic zeal is lost they would be a discredited fossil to be only swished off the political map. CPM fell for this grand Congress tactic just standing by, thinking and relishing their self-fashioned and self-imagined greatness just to find that all others around are smarter but were silent- So typical of a Bengali middle class – a product of the imbecile Bengal Renaissance mentality – a semi-colonial vestige without any serious de-colonisation.
From perceived blockade to isolation and to political pariah
The next step was almost directed and dictated- follow the suit or you would perish unsung and no resources left- fall in line with corruption- mend your own resource making- manage and store for rainy and heady days, and pave your own way out- we need a Red Carpet and you would lay it down. It will be a smooth democratic takeover and you would usher US [with all the Pun possible intended here!] in.
The general psychosis was that “totally unprepared, we have been gifted with a power, when actually the Centre wants to prove us a failure”, but in this ascendancy they gathered the moss that were not quite responsible in creating a new society. On one side the dedicated workers left them in favour of more Radical politics, those who were left behind minded privileges more than anything. Rightist politics were merit based, that is why all colonised intellectuals who could have been good marketing and sales managers with their gift of the gab gravitated to them. The lumpens also joined them, because they had the guts to go out of the society and take risks of crime, persecution, rise and fall.
A new class formed – the corrupt class of public servants and middle echelon- bedrock of revisionism
The middle strata who feared to take risks, and wanted to have all the privileges flocked to this section- all most overnight the privileged government workers, who are used not to work but are used to bag privileges legally or illegally became joined the organizations and we found a fantastic combination of “organized employees” eulogized as “organized workers” , teachers, functionaries who form the executive of a bourgeois STATE power. This executive section was in the middle, did not have any such enterprise to build anything new but had to be supported to maintain the overall grip of the LF over the people of Bengal. Once this was achieved, it had to be maintained, and corruption was the only common means to keep this entire section assert as a “class”. Nowhere in the world government employees, public servants and officials is termed as a part of the proletariat. The substitution of salariat as proletariat was the first definitive institutional corruption strategy and policy for Left front… all other corruptions followed suit. The complete subservience and capitulation of this LEFT front that is the most decided strategy of LEFT going RIGHT had been “achieved” so to say with this methodological base. An entire class emerged with class consciousness and complete understanding and understanding of relations with other classes. This is the class that does not have any vision[ typical of the bourgeoisie] or ideology other than to live and thrive through corruption. If Congress and the Rightists introduced lumpency, it did so on individual scale, the LEFT galvanized that on a class basis, because the consolidation of the salariat class itself by default and definition is institutional lumpency.
And yet all these, this class cannot bring in or develop or form CAPITAL or resources. The second step toward RIGHTward walk of the LEFT started from this point of departure. There was this overall hanging fear of “blockade”. Unfounded or not, whence something takes up a position in the popular perception, that is the reality and investigation becomes unnecessary. When there “is” the blockade, money needs to come, who would give that? . Building up resources from agriculture, nature and/or remodelling industry to develop resources requires very serious understanding of the economic position along with a seriousness to investigate. The same middle class mentality of the LEFT leadership taught them no skill, no seriousness, no social relations, and had imbibed no skill, no tenacity and perseverance to check out alternative tracks of resource development. The revolutions that erupted in China, Vietnam, Cuba and other brought out many revolutionaries and the collective research with which they could garner different indigenous ways and means of cultivating resources. That revolutionary spirit was never an integral part of the revisionist politics. Revisionism came into being by downgrading the innovative capacity of revolutionary spirit. So Capital should be gotten. There had to be a two pronged approach therefore. A huge number of petty suppliers in the real estate [the only sector where Capital formation could be done fastest, almost without investment] should be developed. These innumerable actors formed a class of their own, who would devour every possible open space or natural space and turn it into a concrete space – the space that will never became a means of extended reproduction, nor something that may be used for other production. A huge wasteful production that will attract all the pent up Capital in the hands of middle class Bengalis [saved for rainy days] will come out fast in the market and would form this class of cadres who over the shortest period would have enough cash that can sustain the entire Left front shibboleth. A cadre-class now turned into a lumpen bourgeois class. This creating the base over the already existing class of public servants would create the base of a group of classes who have no qualms of not having any ideology and yet would not have any problem in donning whatever shirt of whatever colour. And yet, this is insufficient to sustain a regime for time immemorial.
The leadership of the Revisionists, who do not know how to change, shift, rotate and retire needs a continuous flow to sustain their dependant and parasitic life of lavish existence. The bourgeois culture instilled a culture in parallel – the bourgeois culture – the culture of formalism- the culture that tends to create fashion statements. The left leaders became icons of fashion. [Jyoti Basu was appreciatively touted the most elegantly dressed leader and Buddhadev babu donned a dhoti that had 500 counts to a mm- the best possible dress human society till date can spin] The LEFT leaders openly declared that their objective is to show the bourgeoisie that they are far better in managing CAPITAL than the right- their first flagship of a weapon was “stability” of rule, and then an apparent lack of quotidian chaos. LEFT wanted to become better managers, that means better custodians of the spirits, behaviours, traits, codes of the RIGHT. All these require more and more money. All these require a kind of assurance to the bourgeoisie that the LEFT could be the real sentinel of the RIGHT. The transformation had already taken place, and that too irreversibly. This is Revision – Revision of the spirit of the left to become RIGHT.
Now that two strong classes are formed all spruced up and prepared to PROTECT the RIGHT, the LEFT now moved into alluring the RIGHT directly, that is alluring CAPITAL and alluring all kinds of RIGHTISM – including parochialism, nationalism, communalism, casteism and everything. The traditional section that supported the LEFT –viz, the Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims, rural Christians and other Tribes found themselves left out of grace and pale. In came the urban middle class, upper middle class and of course the traders – from petty up to monopolistic ones -, so called entrepreneurs who bag in all the public monies, loans and other “subsidies” for their “enterprises”. They get huge prized land from the government in zero value [ Rs 1 for 10 acres of prized urban land] and lap in easy soft bank loans, build up their empires, get tax holidays and long credit terms. This is the luring of the private CAPITAL, directly, alluring with protectionist measures of assuring them of taking care of the labour unrest by public authorities, immunity from normal industrial practice laws and impunity from law of the land. Ensues a competition, a competition with the known RIGHT provincial governments and parties and in that competition again the LEFT wanted to surpass the RIGHT in their RIGHTist methodology, armoury and skill. CAPITAL poured in, promises of pouring came pouring in more and less and less the real dough. The revisionists lost their traditional culture of educating their cadres through party schools – this they had in the early sixties. So the all-knowing middle class did not comprehend that CAPITAL is nothing but an ADVANCE, an advance with the attached string to extract out more what it had advanced. So an extended reproduction is needed. Real Estate is no industry in the real sense because it cannot reproduce, it can generate money as a commodity, but the commodity looses its market after the first transaction. This is really funny. A Real Estate property gains in its exchange value fastest in the shortest period, but the inert value or the valorisation goes down, the entire difference of ever increasing exchange value [Only to the stage of the perceptional balloon burst] and the ever decreasing value of the internal material for return, was the monotonically automatic growth of speculation Capital formation. This is wasteful as the material cannot be used for other purposes not creating any by product. So here is a commodity market without it being an industry in the strict sense. This can only go on for a very small period after which the fall cannot be impeded. Someday all these El-Dorado would run dry as fast as it came and that has actually happened in reality. The CAPITAL masters advanced their CAPITAL, they started extracting out their interest, Rent, profit and Super-profit, and the economy ran into tight money with less and less saved money in the hands of the middle class that acted as a holy cow for so many decades. Now there is less and less takers and the huge real estates lay haunted without fetching even the cost advanced. Balloon burst, the empire crumbled LEFT’s RIGHTward journey saw the end of paved road lost in the dreary wilderness.
The CAPITAL masters left the LEFT as fast as they could and the LEFT were left crying hell with their legs and limbs stretched apart.
A psychosis turning into reality
A simple concocted slogan showing the fear psychosis among the unsure LEFT leaders helped these little Left parties and a Big brother CPM gel in a unity which they termed as a “little more than a loose front and little less than a solid party”. The same fear psychosis gave other dividends to these middle class oriented organization like a faster organization by demanding frequent hikes in their salaries, bonuses and other privileges, - this phenomenon ensued a great success in catapulting a competition between the Central government employees and the state government employees and secondly in having a solid justification in asking for more money to meet up the salary requirement of the government employees. A huge amount of money is spent in what is in actuality a “subsidy” to a non-productive sector, when on the other hand the public service did not augment in spread and depth. An augmentation of service would have fetched the government authorities at different level more and more resources within its net and more return on investment, but that would have increased the accountability and would empower the people. Revisionism would be the last to do so. This sector helps the social democrats increase their base to hegemonize the general society. Every such public servant who had really not much to do in the professional life have enough of leisure time to control the public life to the benefit of the government and the party in the government. This pushed down a hierarchy of government control over the people over and above the general executive authorities the STATE already had. The effective control of the STATE over the SOCIETY was therefore undertaken by a huge army of civilians who was thus seamlessly integrated into being “the ears and eyes” of the STATE. Every trade organizations and mass organizations were led by those individuals who had some connection or the other, either directly or through their familial relationship by these “public servants” or those who had been paid mercenaries of the local Left parties. Inside these organizations the selection is being done through nominations which seldom anyone opposed as those who would oppose would be previously bought over by the party’s higher functionaries. This increased the hegemonic grip of the party over all mass organizations, trade organizations, simple clubs and cultural establishments. The grip became over-engulfing. [This observation will become handy when we would discuss the anarchist reaction to this by the Radical ultra left anarcho-militaristic sections]. This is the ideological, executive and political super-structure of the STATE over the SOCIETY.
Instead of weakening of the STATE the revisionists augmented the scope and grip of the bourgeois STATE - that is the RIGHTIST essence of the revisionist LEFT. The biggest flipside and/or the gaping under-cavity is that in order to have a good up-keep of this huge edifice of the STATE the resources had to be generated, developed, re-produced, controlled and spread over in ever increasing speed. This innate demanding growth rate put the pressure on this revisionist political project more bitingly with growing menace. Here it failed miserably. Revisionism, being devoid of innovative productive capability could not manage and increase production, with the huge demand in distribution and re-distribution the edifice showed gross cracks along predictable fault-lines. It was known where and how it will fall when it will fall, and it fell right in the same lines. The productive forces were juiced out to serve the middle class, the middle class edifice and in the next higher analysis the urban edifice, could only stand erect based on the strong performance of the rural producing sector – that is how even in Capitalist terms China surpassed the cultures of the other developed industrial nations. Domestic resources can only stand the last guarantee for industrial development or the Urban development or the urban middle class. LEFT could survive all RIGHTIST affronts based on LEFTISM, not the other way round. Fall of Revisionism is the glaring example of this.
Faces of corrupt functionaries:
To have a practical appreciation of the corruption turning into the only methodology within CPM, let us examine some typical profiles of their cadres:
Profile 1: Urbane Kolkata theatre:
Area: Erstwhile Refugee Colony in South Suburban area now turned into a semi-posh area where all inhabitants have their own plot of land and where the land promoting business is booming. The population mainly stayed here through a land grab movement in 1949 and hence settled down against all odds and have now prospered, they are building G+ 4 storied buildings and living off the rent they get by renting off one or two flats and they live in another plot. The chunk of the profit is enjoyed by the promoter who first advanced the money to build and now is enjoying the selling off of all the flats.
Party relationship: There are at least one promoter and/or associate suppliers of building materials for every 30 people when there are only 3 doctors to serve the population of a lakh of people in the neighbourhood. The suppliers in the neighbourhood would be hand-picked by the CPM party and the promoters have to pay at least 15% of their net profit to the party through various functionaries. In addition to these the party offices and the CPM affiliated clubs need to be built up by the promoters.
Party funds: The local party gets around 4.5 to 5 lacs [ 5,00,000] rupees every month from these promoters if there are 30 promoters in a named neighbourhood. This actually comes down the promoter paying a protection amount of Rs 1,80,000 to Rs 2,00,000 in a year or as in most of the cases Rs 1.5 to Rs 2 lacs per flat and usually a G+4 flat complex would fetch Rs 25 Lacs from the sell. This complex would typically have 16 such flats. Out of which the original landowner would take the amount tantamount to 8 flats [ in different combination] . So in one such flat complex the amount invested would be around 70 to 75 lacs of Rupees [advanced in stages] and would fetch around Rs 4 Crores, [4,00,00,000]. Subtract the cost taken out by the original landowner, the promoter is left with an amount of Rs 2.00 crores. The party would get a typical amount of Rs 50 Lacs to the party and its organizations. The gross profit is around Rs 1.5 crores. But the promoter did not have that much of money he gets the money from the Black market and the rate is excruciatingly high. In this typical case the promoter had to pay in fact around Rs 0.50 croresas interest to the financier or the chain of financiers who always remain underground and unidentified. The promoter would be left with Rs 1.00 Crores. But this amount will not come in one shot and will actually fetch Rs 1 Crore per such flat complex. Out of this Rs 60 to 70 lacs would be kept for the next promoting assignment so that this time the total interest burden is a little less. Thus a promoter can fetch home an amount of Rs 30 lacs to Rs 50 lacs per such complex at its best. The local CPM party may not take the whole amount in cash, local “suppliers” who are almost always CPM handpicked would steal in terms of quality and quantity and make money, from which they in turn have to pay the CPM party. The bottom line is that the promoter makes a maximum of Rs 50 lacs that is his ROI is 50/75 or 66.67%, but the party actually gets the same amount through various combinations. This is why all these promoters join the party to get enlisted because in that case they might have to shell a little less and they might take that extra amount home. A typical flat complex would take one year to complete [ there are many other elements of cost like paying for the rehabilitation of the owners during the interim period and paying relocation fee for the tenants, registration fee, payment to the police – in most of the times the local party takes care of that- but all these prices are already included in the price of the 8 flats out of the 16 flats]. The net profit for the promoter is merely 3 lacs to 4 lacs per month, if the back to back pipe line of orders is intact.
A typical neighbourhood would have ten to fifteen such buildings being built up under the purview of one local committee. So the local committee would have a steady stream of Rs 40 to Rs 50 lacs of rupees coming to the party every month. Such a spill will go on for at least 5 years. 60% of this amount goes to the zonal and district committees. Each Zone would have a typical of 6 to 7 local committees [e.g Jadavpur-Tollygunge] [ Dhakuria Zone has just 2 local committees, that is one metric suggesting which is a strong hold][ And there are other zones with less local committees but where the promoting income is huge as they are being promoted by big developing houses or promoters, a portion of that income goes directly to the district committees]. This means each local committee would have around Rs 15 lacs coming to their coffers from which around Rs 2 to 3 lacs are kept aside for taking care of party programs and propaganda, around 6 to 7 lacs are kept as savings for bigger needs and the rest Rs 6 to 7 lacs are distributed. The salary or levy for the wholetimers are very less and does not go beyond Rs 50,000/- but the local committee members take the share. The provider is the LCS or the local committee secretary who would take the bulk and would go up to anything ranging around Rs 1 lac to 1.2 lacs per month. On the other hand a Kolkata district committee does have a huge number of [ more than 20 now] zonal committees. The distribution mechanism there follows different rules though.
Anyway, we are profiling a LCS. He gets no less than Rs 60 to 70,000 Rs per month and typically his name would feature, as shamelessly as it could be, in the BPL list! He would definitely have a motor bike for his use and other two wheelers for their family members, his kids would study in English medium schools, if they are grown up they would definitely study engineering in some private engineering college or management institution which would charge anything between 10 to 12 lacs per annum and it would be funded indirectly from this “fund”. He would have a very nice flat with marbles and nice gadgets. He is a wholteimer. The other members of the local committee and the zonal committees would be presiding over auto rickshaw unions, local small and medium enterprises both from the workers’ front and from the advisory body of the management side, would lead PPP enterprises like transport enterprises , bazaar committees [ if they are members of bazaar committees their daily market comes free] and schools and nursing homes and all kinds of “service” enterprises. Added to that there are thousands of different avenues like allotment of plot for commercial purposes [ this income is much bigger than what we talked about]. All commercial enterprises and shops and retail chains have to pay a certain amount to the party. The illegal and/or un-social enterprises like alcohol shops, restaurants pay much more. Any such functionary have many avenues of income. Most of these incomes go out to maintain the huge crime empire. The individual crime business entrepreneurs have a very high cost factor and risk in legal battles and pay out. The party has a smooth crime business and corrupt business trajectory. This is a “class for itself” fully conscious of its relationships with the “people”, “other classes” and other business activities. If there is one single connection of these party functionaries with their written programme, that is the industry generated through fear psychosis that in case of a perceptible economic blockade, how would they feed themselves, make money, sustain the party and create a class of “grass root business professionals” of this corruption industry. Now that they know, they may be out of government power after 2011, they are busy organizing their future empire that they can round underground and yet automatically.
And yet, such a person is typically in the BPL list, such a LCS will get all medical cost paid by the party for him and his family in the best government institution and if necessary to be sent South for costlier treatment. The education of their kids are taken care of, by this time their sons and daughters have started working in IT industries or in some other industries being pushed in through reciprocate favour . So the next generation is taken care of and the leaders can easily enjoy a semi-retired safe life. Who would care of politics and theory! This is the pragmatic life style that formed the revisionist party family. If there is one professionally managed system within this party and the other left allies that is the smooth locomotion of money from the huge corruption industry, the essential and necessary condition is that there should not be any political opposition and a complete compliance or falling in line and of course above all the party needs to be in the government. That is their weakest link as well as the point of strength and come 2011 that is going to evaporate…. The fear now has come true but from a completely unattended corner- the fear of the Original Right eating up the fake Right which is the avowed LEFT. RIGHT now does not want to give way to fakism, they want to take up in its real face. The strength is the Danger, the opportunity is the Threat!
Profile – 2:
A provincial minister and now the richest person in the entire district! He has lost his wife, his child, all alone and has the most palatial building along with many other Real estate properties All he does is to conspire against some other leader who might come up within his party ranks. He extracts money from every individual construction site and every enterprise that is going on. Every little business even every street hawker and rickshawpuller or informal worker had to pay a certain amount to the party through various channels, these money go to the lower functionaries. This minister has his private army, private police, private intelligence network of individuals and functionaries within public institutions, to maintain. He has to pay his “lobby business”, lobbying with other competitors within his party, sometimes going against them, sometimes befriending them and that takes a cost. They have their own source and own fiefdom, this person has his own. Crime business of the individual criminals or criminal cartels is very small and insignificant and ineffective. Corruption business is far more effective and organized. It is a full time job and so this person is a “party wholetimer”, hardly attends his office in the government executive, but keeps himself very busy in these activities of collection and distribution. He is now a fashion statement in terms of attires and go-abouts, his age however betrays his get-about and is used to all kinds of small vices and indulgences one can possibly have in human life-time. He is a good collector, very much similar to the British times when a District Magistrate was a collector too. He collects for the party programs and garners resources. That is the prime duty. He does not have a political secretary these days or a crew of theoretical sycophants, he does not need one. There is no need of political discourse, everything will be automatic.. however this man faces ignominious defeat and is trying to get a safe “party berth” without running the risk of fighting the election and face a certain defeat. The property he has acquired would have taken care of 3 of his next generations without having to do anything, but sadly he does not have any successors.. yet he has to roll along… that is the automatic force of corruption business, one cannot retire and live the life of an aloof-ascetic, one has to carry it along.
Profile- 3:
Central Committee member of CPM trying vainly to get into the PB, obviously got scuttled because unable to express himself clearly in any language and not at all in any other language. This man is a convicted criminal of multiple mass murders, convicted for life and yet paroled for life for unknown reasons. He was implicated in a mass murder before the CPM came to power in 1967 and then implicated in another mass murder of KARANDA where 13 CPM cadres who decided to leave the party and joined CPIML was burnt alive because of the change of affiliation. He uses filthy words in every opportune moment. He was known as a peasant leader and is instrumental in reducing the number of rice seed varieties in Bengal from 350 to only less than 30.
Profile-4:
The industry minister who was supposed to be a firebrand leader from Burdwan is the key person in bringing the multi-nationals offering them lands for a song and with all kinds of subsidies is a person who is also paroled for life though convicted for life and is now a minister. This person has suspected relationships with the different Chambers of Commerce.
Profile-5:
Famous minister and is the commander of the armed lumpen forces which undertakes occupation campaigns and is directly implicated in mass murders. He moves around in the government vehicles stashed with modern weaponry. He flies to Delhi and makes the Pilot carry his handbag in the cabin. He addresses the entire party cadres of his district and the peasants with the diminutive “tu” [ please note almost all CPM leaders do so, and this act is never considered as a political crime any more and rather an in-thing]. This person is the owner of the biggest wealth in South of Bengal.
Profile-6
Discredited “King” of Haldia PetroChemical- the principal reason for Nandigram. Commander of the CPM Armada called “Harmads”. So discredited that has very less reason to come up elected any more.
Profile- 7
Second ranking leader of the Organized white collar employees like Bank, insurance, IT, etc. He simultaneously is a Central Committee leader and the Managing Director of government run production houses as well as the leader of the Unions in the same company- a unique trait in world standards. Foul mouth, vindictive, implicated in many mass murders and has promulgated all possible anti-worker laws. Instrumental in making the Government run production houses bankrupt and giving them over to private interests, with huge retrenchment of workers. One of the tycoons in unregistered wealth, thoroughly discredited in elections and trying to shy away from elections any further!
There are thousands of profiles like these in every layer of the CPM hierarchy, we are showing only one each on the upper most and the lowest level. All of them have two things in common- Super rich through stashing of unaccounted wealth and all implicated in one or the other mass murders.
These two common traits define the mindset of the CPM cadres and leaders- this is needed to form a new social and economic class with definite relations in extraction of wealth – the same methodology spelt out by Marx- brute force aided by the bourgeois STATE machinery and the accumulation of unaccounted wealth acquired through the brutest means possible.
Disservice to the people, prime service to the drones
CPM has actually dis-organized the informal sector, best in the world. Why dis-organized? They have organized them, yes and almost fully. Transport workers, construction workers, porters, support workers all of them had to be members of some Union bodies run by CPM. They would need to do so, or else they would not get any job with some promoters, could not run a rickshaw or be a support staff in the transport sector, or would be suspended from job for uncertain periods and worst of all would be put away in jail in the name of suspected thief or robbers, or even terrorists. They are bound to pay levies to the party functionaries where they have to depend on the direction of the local leader if they can survive at all. They are summarily and periodically taken off the job as they have been perceptibly unable to please the owner of the vehicle or the means of production. This is disorganization, they have been organized not to serve the interests of fellow workers but to serve the Capitalists. This trade union organizations are actually cartels of labour as resources. This is the latest example of the fear psychosis that had been with them of economic blockade, therefore the party has to amass wealth and CAPITAL from within Bengal.
For 35 long years CPM had been following simply one clause of their program, and that is the modus operandi to stay in power through whatever means possible and keep on amassing Capital for their daily needs and for the future of the party functionaries. Corruption is a necessity of survival for CPM.
Making of a corrupt mindset
In order to be corrupt, every party functionary to sympathiser needs to be groomed corrupt. Each one of these would don various stones in their fingers, would frequent all possible obscurantist and superstitious rituals. Dowry marriage and other money centred and wealth centred criminal acts against women and other less powerful family members or members of the kin has increased manifold in West Bengal mainly among CPM families. West Bengal tops the list in crime against women and even honour killing has started. Kangaroo Courts are now rampant in the villages; all of them are led by the local committees of CPM and/or the ruling Left party. Corruption is perfected by making every CPM functionary as corrupt in some or the other way. The Public Distribution System is a corrupt activity that is linked with the mid-day meal system in the schools and the food distribution in Jails and that for the BPL card holders. The food contractors, the hoarders in every village market, the wholesalers have to pay a hefty lot to keep their business going. All these corruptions are simply Rent as super-profit for the party functionaries. CPM party offices are outhouses for controlling these operations .
Sectors popping out of service into the net of profiteering
The service sector in Bengal runs solely on the Aid money from the international agencies. Not one single operation in urban and rural service is funded from internal resources of the state government, every of these are linked with some or the other international funding agency projects. The public health sector, the education sector is now not working at all. Lofty edifices are built up with government funds, the centres do not have any machinery in working condition. Medicaments are absent that should have been available free. Doctors do not visit, and still get their regular paycheck. The objective is simple. The edifices are built and will be given over to private interests in the near future if the public consciousness stales down the line. PPP is nothing but subsidizing a lumpen class of private “entrepreneurs” who would lap off all the benefits and pay outs from the government. The buildings are made for them, so the private parties do not have to pay the huge Real Estate cost, and then for every element of service the public has to pay- the profit would go to the private entrepreneur.
No one is observing that the public transportation cost has gone up manifold as a hierarchy of different types of public transportation is imposed on to the public. The imbecile nincompoop middle class as it is are feeling so ego-nurtured that now they are travelling not with the common proletariat, is not observing that they are paying many times more in every journey. Kolkata on an average is a city that really charges more in public transportation than any other city. The government is paying nothing from its coffers, it is making private parties buy expensive busses and allowing them to charge any amount they like, but then why should we bother? Yes, we should because this money is coming from bank loans at subsidized rate under JNNURM – this is a foreign aid agency fund run by the Central government and the state government loans out a small amount. Ultimately it is the people who regardless of whether he avails that opportunity or not, ends up paying through indirect taxation.
Education is a commodity now and does not any more falls under a service to be provided by the government. “Education for all” is a nice epithet for shouting and writing in slogans and to be simply belied by the LEFT. In fact West Bengal is a state where education is costliest and worst in quality, making students take off to other provinces and denuding the small savings the middle class once had. A group of party activists whose academic results and accomplishments were horrendous has now become educators in the once famous industry. After the partition Bengal benefited from the influx of very good dedicated and ideologue teachers produced the best student community in the state, abroad and in the Bengali diaspora emigrated in foreign countries. We are trailing almost every other state in primary education [34th among 35 states and UTs and special zones] and 23rd out of 28 states in secondary education and very low in higher education. We are condescending because there is no international fund.
In all these aspects of human production and service there is one thing in common, Public fund needs to come from outside through the imperialist agencies- the same agencies which we would love to oppose on the face and would actually depend on them for our daily going. That is revisionism an institution of a façade performance and eating from the same hand with faking protests.
The Politburo member of CPM says that all Capital is sacrosanct as long as that comes through the hand of their own functionaries. He said Capitalists are bad but Capital of the Capitalists is OK.
Revisionism of Indian LEFT :- Send a Fear nuclear bomb, affect everyone and then cover it up with an over engulfing money laundering corruption- in the end pave the way for Imperialism.
International experience of CPM:
When it was a normal thing to declare allegiance to any international standard, CPM resisted even at the cost of being touted as a Nationalist Communist Party. The Soviet camp had its communist parties in every country and those parties were heavily funded and supported through free publications. In India it was the CPI. The party had a good business through the publication division in every major Indian cities, and then money rolled down in the name of cultural propaganda. But very funnily CPM never went to the Soviet bloc fully[ neither opposed it openly], and resisted through all means to flock towards the Chinese camp. The revolutionary communist movement flourished through Chinese mental and ideological support. The Chinese government led by Chairman Mao, specifically offered help to CPIML, which Comrade Charu Mazumdar humbly declined. This heightened the position of Charu Mazumdar to Chairman Mao. He kept all information about CM and till the death of Chairman Mao, the CPC were intently following CPIML activities. After 1978, things changed. CPC turned directions and started supporting CPM instead . CPM was the party that got formally recognized by CPC after they had turned right. Hence forth in all communications CPIMarxists followed, eulogized, advertised the Chinese “positive” journey. They followed the working methodology of CPC – only to that extent that Chinese government invited foreign investments. But there is one country which stood firmly on its straddle due to the line of Chairman Mao and after attaining Socialism and then capitulating and here is CPM who tried following that within the bourgeois framework. No cognizance was given to the difference in framework and this never came into debate within the party ranks. Things were very open and clear. CPM never bothered about analysis, fact, theory or anything other than money matters. All that interested them about Chinese experience is that if China can grow big in terms of money and even against US hegemony then why not CPM. In order to do so, China had to heavily depend of US markets and overseas Chinese investments in US and elsewhere, CPM could not afford that luxury, so they depended directly on US CAPITAL through whatever means keeping of course alive the drama of rhetoric. The only thing that CPM learnt from CPC is the concept that “it does not matter if the cat is Red or Black, as long as it can catch mice” – CPM transplanted this theory in the bourgeois framework. What helped them maintain their false attire- is the rhetoric, in which of course the Chinese were lukewarm though! – the link was money!
A tragic and apologetic development policy was faked by CPM too. As against Chairman Mao’s famous “Ten major relationships” where Chairman Mao posited the root of Industrial development to the full and optimum growth and saturation in agricultural development, CPM borrowed it from the neo-conservative masters of USA – the protagonists of green revolution, to break the back of agriculture, open the agricultural resilience to imperialist loots and then develop the industrial infrastructure on borrowed money and earn a certificate from the imperialists as a good obedient boy! Money would come that would create the party leaders at various levels as moneyed mafia.
If there is any reason to have spent so many pages in their program clamouring against US imperialism is simply to push them to an extent to make them pay a little more through government channels and through various channels of aid. In every natural disaster the CPM government spent all their efforts to advertise them and eke out more aids from the International Aid agencies. In case of Bhopal all they are clamouring about is about US paying more as recuperation through agencies in which they might have their finger in the pie. They would spare no opportunity to attract US money through public or private channels and keep up the pressure of countering rhetoric and when failed would put up a hue and cry, much short of course of a raucous. They shout hoarse against Bhopal and would invite the Dow chemicals to have their nuclear waste and chemical waste hub in Haripur and Nayachar. This is what is known as Revisionist dialectics.
More than a Capitalist in Agriculture
There is a class of intellectuals who never comprehensively read Marx and who touts themselves as Marxists- some do it with a motive of denigrating Marx and Marxism and some are simply bemused followers who take their “wisdom” from half-wit nincompoops and crooks considering them as orthodox representatives of Marx. CPM is a combination of these two groups.
Marx warned right from the beginning that Capitalists are indifferent to the tools and resources and therefore production as long as that brings in Money and forms Capital [ One such classic example is “ Does not matter if the cat is Red or black as long as it can catch mice”]. A Capitalist regards Land to be one of the many resources and tools of making money, it does not have any special or specific significance. Marx had to take the whole of the third volume of “Surplus Value” on Rent from agricultural, even in the Critique to the Gotha Program Marx started his speech countering Lassalle that “labour” is not the source but Nature is. Labour transforms that Nature to produce socially necessary commodities and the Capitalist advances Capital to hire the labour power of the labourer and the fruit of the labour in terms of owning the rights and the market of the commodity. In conscilience with this there are many instances where Marx gave special treatment to LAND, agriculture and the most important is the Production .
Haunted Revisionism
If Communism did and continued to haunt the Capitalists throughout the world, in India, revisionism had always been haunted by a perceived threat of loss of levy accumulation. Which was once used as a weapon in demagoguery later turned out to be something in which they themselves believed sincerely- that they would be out of power and then the middle class would stop the tap of continuous levies and then how would the leaders carry on their daily life?
The revisionists took the party life as their career, the difference with other bourgeois parties is that in those parties being a full time party activist had never been mandatory and they can openly involve in any business activities-, legal, illegal, criminal or corruption. The CPM needed their leaders to spend their full time in “managing” party affairs and yet never to get involved in political theory, studies, pedagogy and imparting politics to the cadres beneath. The entire time to be spent in party offices would be the time that a normal do-nothing government functionary in a backward Indian province would spend, i.e. from 10:30 to 11:00 AM every day till about 2:00 to 2:30 PM in the day on the first half and then from around 5:00 PM to 10:00AM in the evening. During, this time the party functionaries and especially the secretaries of the various local committees and zonal committees secretaries would take care of garnering resources from various mass organizations under his tutelage and then the regular levies from their supporters and the regular money from every running business in the neighbourhood as a protection money and then of course those big monies that come either from medium and large enterprises and then from every new construction site or new foundations. This money would then be distributed in different and right proportions to the party cadres, leaders and up the ladder in the hierarchy of the party, a good portion stashed away for running the regular propaganda programs and pay the quotidian bills. Anything in addition may be appropriated by the leaders for their own use, to which the party would turn a blind eye as a prize for their resource garnering. The problem started when these functionaries wanted to compare their lifestyles with corporate executives. First they wanted and then they needed to have their party offices and then their homes air conditioned and fully equipped with necessary gadgets, then they needed to have automobiles – [two and four wheelers] and provide their next generation the best private education throughout their life and provide for their career and business, so that they can earn the best in the society. Whatever they preach in their lives to the people will definitely not be followed in their own lives. The mad rush of these “proletarian leaders” to attain safe bourgeois anti-proletarian berths would be their right. [Ministers, functionaries and leaders expect all government facilities to be provided to them au-gratis, if there is any kind of treatment meted out to them that comes same as that is generally given out to the general public, then that is a grave crime against which the highest authority from the governmental level would jump into action- the perpetrator will be prosecuted totally [flouting all legal norms] throughout his life time. These leaders are even as fussy in the minorest details as counting who and where how many salutes they accumulate every passing day from every personnel they come across- much rigorously than even the worst feudal potentate ever in the world civilization]. All these require money – huge in amount and yet this cannot be declared, very unlike the leaders of bourgeois parties. So most of this money has to come unaccounted!
Embezzling government money and/or diverting it is a regular feature, but that might leave some marks in undesired quarters. Corrupt money does not have those strings attached although other kind of strings and expectations are attached to it, which however can easily be managed only when power is with them. Therefore Power is something that the party needed to guard through whatever means – and that power is not revolutionary power. Revolutionary power of any kind has a massive weight of accountability and/or expectation from the people below and the devolution is the only criterion for its existence. Devolution is, never had been and will never be in the agenda of revisionists. Revisionism is by definition appropriation of power through im-personification in some one else’s name that means revisionism is plain usurping power. Power within the bourgeois framework is the only way out because usurping is allowed here- one has to simply re-structure the method and norms of appropriation.
What would happen if they are not in power? – That is the big question revisionism always concerned itself. It rose to power rather fast and were never prepared or even strategize for a fall off power. This is the crises of Indian revisionism all throughout. Let us examine their mode of rise to power.
Revisionism has to follow the same trajectory in making a wedge within the bourgeois structure, as what revolution would do. Revolution would blast open the solid structure of the bourgeoisie and smash the bourgeois state into smithereens, while revisionism would simply pry in a wedge and be a part of the structure itself. But in doing so, revisionism would look for very similar historical moments to cash in as would revolution. They would look for such opportunities, utilize them, lead them for different destinies and then make the bourgeois structure stronger through incorporation. But they would hardly start them or kindle them. It had always been in the history of human movements where people and revolutionaries organize and start the spark and then somehow fail to hold the mantle and the leadership and capitulate it to the revisionists. The journey of revision starts therefrom. Two such moments in Indian history was Telengana and Tebhaga.
Telengana and Tebhaga revisited through comparison
A comparison of these two moments of popular mass upsurges are essential because through this comparison we would investigate the present revisionist collective mind set whereby all the reactionary sentiments of a feudal tainted middle class were inherited smoothly into this revisionist psyche but not one revolutionary trait was ever.
In terms of slogans, agenda, activism, direct assault and final objective in the minds of every participant was much more revolutionary as it directly targeted the question of power, fought against the state and brought in the final objective of revolution and an alternative power structure in every nook. Taking up arms, and getting into the revolutionary mass movements was never a question of preparation. The villagers who took part never had to think on the stages of forming an army from a guerrilla force from a militia. Steps never came to be a point of debate… it was direct… they had to pick up arms and collected the highest technologically available weapon. Women were in the forefront in these armed conflicts. As per the then available form of guerrilla fight they formed ranks and lines of attack and resistance and did not follow the present formation of a spread out zone of firing line. [Obviously this plunged them in a battle of attrition from the beginning; we should not also forget that at that age the enemy also were only conversant with a front line type of armed action].
Having said all that it had very noteworthy defects. India was then just getting its formal independence and the big national picture of power was more potent than any other demand for the class or partial issues otherwise. The movement did not come up through the excruciating and long drawn process of developing the class consciousness of the participants, not through the gradual or stepwise climbing up of the consciousness of the people through various sectoral movements, mass movements, turning economic demands into political movements and then into the consciousness of the class-for-itself for power seizure toward forming a different socialist society. Only in this step, Telengana, though not a grand failure, was definitely a big vacuum. Had it graduated up through this pain-staking process, a discourse in the political process, forms of struggle, methods of tactic, and means of organization would have engulfed all the actors that is the participants. A revolutionary collective consciousness would have developed that would have guaranteed against any collaboration and capitulation of the leadership resulting in a total decimation of the movement. Later on we found that wherever the entire proletariat went through this rigmarole did not dilute despite any flickering by the leadership [Bhojpur for example]. Telengana plunged rather politically un-prepared and (despite) military optimally equipped into the struggle of snatching the power from a bourgeois superior although nascent mammoth – the state of India. The defeat was inevitable, and the fall of revolutionary legacy and the rise of the revisionist rationale for all out capitulation was inevitable as well. This was a classic capitulation in the history of people’s upsurges throughout the world, where the leadership capitulated and made the entire party and the movement prostrate to the enemy and declaring them as ideological friend and leader [Congress party was declared to the party of the National bourgeoisie who would now lead the country toward progressive development and take the mantle of anti-imperialist struggle- nowhere the capitulation to the enemy were equalled to considering declaring the leader as the enemy of the future movement]. Whatever epitaph were attributed to the enemy turned actually more reactionary in the scale, e.g. the epitaph of national bourgeois was given to the crassest compradore bourgeoisie and the same bootlickers were entrusted with the leadership role to lead the Indian people against Imperialism and Neo-colonialism.. the proletarian confidence of the Communist party was at such a Nadir that they could easily declare the greatest broker and pimp as the saviour. This is how Revisionism was born through not only belittling but blasting off of the independent assertion and initiative of the proletariat.
Record performances in electoral struggles in the wane of this capitulation completed the last leg of the euphoric journey to the Right institutionalism by creating the cloud-haven that the LEFT can rather easily and rather fast take over the power of the country through parliamentary path, through institutional means and within the bourgeois framework and that the so-believed necessity of smashing the STATE and its framework is simply an Utopia or at best a sloganeering. The LEFT has to become the ablest manager of the RIGHT edifice.
The by-products were all too awe-attracting fireworks with no significant lethal venom to the system. The only form of struggles thus gained as knowledge artefacts from the struggle were either institutionalised parliamentary corruption or the battle of attrition, nothing in-between. All other intermediate forms of struggle were basically appendages merely to embellish the two extreme modes of operation.
Telengana did not sharpen the class distinction through threadbare class analysis in the countryside. The anti-feudal essence got its only expression through an anti-feudal-STATE struggle. Viz the Nizamshahi. The fight against the local potentates and the local landlords and sahukars were fought with local stride without any policy guideline. The disdain on Mao-Tse_tung thought by the top leadership and the mis-comprehension by the active leadership of the second ranking leadership on the ground did not restructure the peasantry on political classifications. The whole of peasantry was considered as one single entity and even the other classes were simply called upon to support the movement without their own contribution [ eigen-contribution] and sharpen the class contradiction. This lack of class comprehension took the whole movement into the dungeon of revisionist on one hand and anarchist on the opposite, vortex] The rural proletariat were never brought in the leadership role. The adivasis, Gonds, Girijans were called upon as a block to follow and furnish the movement and the analysis angle was pushed away in the back-burner. The entire expedition and experience in whatever form of future form was thus destined to doom- a seed that would have nothing inside the shell but for a glittering outer-cover.
TEBHAGA, on the other hand, was like a classic text case. It erupted from the question of the portion of crop to be parted between the peasants and the landowners. In Telengana the slogan was “Land to the tiller, power to the people” in which the first half was never given much importance and in TEBHAGA the “land to the tiller”portion got transmuted into “Land to the ploughbearer”. On one hand this was due to the capitulating revisionist leadership of the Communist party who already had experienced and graduated through the collaboration in case of Telengana. On the other hand, the lowest of the low – the landless and the poor peasantry could not assert themselves as leaders or class-for-itself by trampling over the middle peasantry – who were till then most vocal and active against the Jamindari and the imperialists. The relative accessibility of the middle peasantry or the lease-taker landless but semi-resourceful peasantry, who ploughed, took risk, managed and toiled in the field were more powerful in the entire chain of the agricultural labour-process. The landless peasantry who simply had no resources but his/her labour power could only join in with their lives and increased the numbers. And that they did, in massive numbers, in epic proportions but still looked upon the middle gentry within a village for the necessary leadership. This last point was however the missing link and the key that was absent in TELENGANA. There was a class distinction when the rich peasantry were isolated from the other sections and the landless peasantry could realize their organization and their massivity. Mao-Tse-Tung thought of analysis of rural classes and bringing the lower peasantry to leadership came up as a budding possibility. This was more valuable for future movements than the contribution of TELENGANA.
The demands and the avowed objective of TEBHAGA was never realized, so was also not TELENGANA’s but in terms of leaving behind effective clues for the future TEBHAGA really triumphed over. NAXALBARI could only germinate from the conscious leadership of TEBHAGA times who failed and could not digest the failure. The rise of Charu Majumdar, Amulya Sen, and numerous district level disgruntled leadership within CPM, to take up the mantle and forming NAXALITE nationwide-upheaval was not a surprise anymore.. it was also a logical inevitability.
Where TEBHAGA triumphed over TELENGANA is on the question of class analysis in the rural theatre. This was the political backdrop.
Where does the CPM feature here?
Nowhere actually, not in the political scheme other than manipulating the situation to garner monetary resource and ripening the conditions for their usurping bourgeois power sending ever increasing reassuring signals to the comprador bourgeois that they could be the best managers to reign on these unruly and unhappy mass. That far and no further.
CPM resisted class analysis within the rural production theatre, they did not bother about “Production” [ in the same connotation as Marx would have wanted us to think in his Grundrisse]. To them Production is that can fetch money in the commodity market and can sustain the hierarchical institution of their party behemoth. Anything that can bring in money and can bring in fast, regardless of its effect in the long term or that with the producers, is sacrosanct and the only resource accumulation they are interested in, in the name of carrying “day-to-day-practical politics” in the ground. Theories are to therefore be lumped, discredited, dis-practiced so as to obliterate them from our collective cognizance. Developing class consciousness had to be just used in vacuous re-iteration in public displays and intense care taken to work against that. Organizations are to be formed only to amass as much as money as possible and saved for dire straits. Leaders are to be made to make this street garnering efficacy more smooth and within control.
No wonder, what could be the ideal class composition of the CPM leadership on the grass root levels. That class composition is the unity of the lumpenized-informal-motley group of extreme selfish, criminal-although-timid, blood drones from different classes suitably congealed into a class that is the cadre-class. The dictatorship in all walks of life of this unified-lumpen class is the appropriate class-identity. That imposed a long standing hegemony of CPM in Bengal and in a little lesser extent in KERALA.
The intricate complexity of the feudal classes and the middle classes and castes in the northern India and especially the Hindi heartland is too complicated to put on such an all engulfing overall clothing. This combination of CPM did not have much takers in the other parts of the country therefore.
When Money and not necessarily Capital is the only concern, then the politics {if some one chooses that epitaph} becomes a criminal tactics of the lowest type of criminal who does not even practice on his skills and tools but uses various means to extract simply money with absolutely no endeavour in developing any social skill of any value system. Produces do not have any physical significance, commodities only matter not from the productive consumption point of consideration[ category defined by Marx] but of the consumptive production or rather accumulative consumptive production, whatever that is.
Marx later on focussed on the means of production as veritable production- that was the time when a Capitalist would still maintain its own somewhat romantic value for making money. There would have been a specific genre of very higher up section among the industrial bourgeoisie who would develop various products world wide and THUS would make money. To them BUSINESS in general meant being aware and conversant on various Business processes in manufacturing and in service with work flow chain. To a downgraded lumpen bourgeois this does not have any physical significance at all. So we can not even lump our CPM in the disdainful category of Marx where he considered Capitalists to be indifferent to agricultural production or production in manufacturing as long as it is used as a commodity to form CAPITAL. CPM people are even worse, they are not even bothered if any produce goes through the intermittent stage of being a commodity in garnering money, they would simply garner money in any form, be that through being a commodity or otherwise. If simply corveé system or black-mailing or running roughshod bring in money faster and in greater volume then so be it. No system is therefore necessary and no specific process is to be fine-tuned to amass money, there is no knowledge artefact necessary in this mechanism. This is the basis of operation of the lumpen section of any class, and when we are dealing with the lumpen section of eclectically picked up individuals gelled into a trans-fixed temporary class. When the class is temporary, how can one expect a fixed methodology or a specific tactical path?
But let us note ourselves that all this is being built up on a solid base of class reality which exists, which has solidified and is being active, though in a broader flux, but very logically and consorted-ly. Revisionism here is always being haunted by the existence of Revolutionism. The haunting is now complete from both directions: - One the perceived notion of a drying out of money resource, and the Second the existence of the class consciousness among the producers and that of Revolutionism. This is the perennial crises that do not allow the Revisionist turned ultra-fascists as they are very low in terms of self-confidence. A perennial fear of denudation of the support base and the simultaneous fear of the Masters finding some weak points and leaving them haunts the Revisionists. They can never organize and/or pull together, muster all of their strength to being an effective strike force. Revisionists are always losers, defeatists, defensive and lukewarm in every political and/or military campaign.
Money has always been the only motive force for the CPM. In the recent scams that have come up in the surface, the leaders of the party have been allotted free landed properties [in the names of their wives and children], they have managed the top bureaucrats by allotting prized properties and then the children have been provided top notch directorial berths in various companies so that when and if out of power, they have a smooth life. The most interesting anecdote is Mr Jyoti Basu – the doyen lived plush all alone in the most prized home but that property was not given out to him as his property, the leaders of the party have now managed to pocket prized lands in all big property areas [ e.g Rajarhat, Baruipur, Barasat and of course in Salt Lake] There is still the conditionality that this type of allotted lands will not be provided to them if they already have lands in the names, so now they have landed properties in the names of their wives and children.
There are two very big differences these CPM leaders have with a normal capitalist. A Capitalist accumulates Capital through business process, be it production, speculation or renting. Capital, as we know is only Capital when it remains in circulation and reproduces itself through circulation. Capital that is the difference is being formed, and the bourgeois economics or the speculative Capital economy is said to be strengthened in every such circulation and formation. Capital that is taken out of this circulation is a loss to Capitalistic process of formation. Capitalists however take out a big portion for their lifestyle spending and yet after a while sell it off in the market bringing it back to circulation. CPM leaders or these revisionist managers of comprador Capitalism, are a different lot, They have never transformed Money into Capital. They accumulate money through non-market corrupt means and then stash it away as their pile, from which they are interested to gain interest and live on that. This kind of interest gaining is not purely a process of Capitalism, as it is simply a portion that is taken out and spent for life-style purpose. Among Capitalists, as per Marx’s definition, we find dealing in productive Consumptions [the more useful ones] and others dealing in consumptive productions, yet productions of some sort they deal with. Our Revisionist co-travellers do not take that route at all, they are interested in Consumption-induced-stockpiling. This is no savings as in case of savings the Capital is invested in the interest market or the speculative market thus allowing formation in some way within the economy. This is pure stock-piling of the feudal/landlord way. The difference of landlord-Capitalist in the landlord-path-of-Capitalist development and the CPM way is that CPM way may be described as a Monetary way or a simple a-Capitalist [not anti-Capitalist]-path of landlordism, where money from any operations would be extracted out, accumulated and transformed [ not invested] in real estate or landed property from which they will extricate out a continuous flow of income or intermittent big incomes through occasional re-entrance in the real estate market. In any other commodity market the circulation and the turnover is the measuring metric of its development and thereby the leading feature, in this kind of usage [by the revisionists] the salient feature is less and less intrusions are more and more revenue earning. Value or valorisation has got an entirely different trajectory in this kind of Real Estate “market”. This does not increase or develop the Capitalist market in any way, and therefore can only thrive and survive in an institutionally established corrupt economy- corrupt because the process takes out money and therefore wealth from the Capital market, corrupt again because the value in the circulation that is differentially gained is not because the commodity has gained in some way through some development, but a depreciating commodity asks for more and more money down the line[ assuming there is a smooth monotonic increment and no crashes] – the demand is again perception-ary and inflating therefore. These kinds of locomotion of the market accumulation is not smooth, it cannot be and would face un-cautioned crashes. During those crashes the commodity would loose value, as it is ever depreciating, more and more money needed to be put in to the commodity to keep up a surfacing or surviving value. Capital therefore is sucked in, in a continuous and yet irregular rate. Revisionist practice thereby spells doom in a Capital-hungry-structurally-skewed-economy like India. Right reactionaries had other way of messing up the general economic scenario, but they follow the logical development or logical doom of Capital locomotion and therefore have learnt the tricks and art of the famous cyclical locomotion, their style of management is in tune with that of the ups and downs of the Capital economic market. The revisionists mess up the Capitalist system through siphoning off the blood stream and making in anaemic right from the outset. Rightists only take recourse to corruption,[ tax evading and living on special privileges are a part of Capitalist formation process], scandals and embezzling when they find either that their perception of growth is being impeded and therefore the confidence of the market in the process of Capital garnering from the individual donors would be threatened, OR when they find that the existence of the particular commodity market is at stake, if they can switch over to other particular commodities, they will swim through or being threatened from all angles they would take corruption as the last resort. Revisionists, on the other hand muster money only through corrupt means because the normal business process is inimical to them. They want to show that they are good managers, but knowing fully well that they are not, they would like to show the Capitalists their face that they can take care of the corruption part and would be good in managing corruption. With the increasing moribundness of Capital, corruption is playing increasingly active role in the day to day life of Capital- the revisionists want to show their élan in that berth- Hey! Rightists and Capitalists! We come handy here, we can hold back the ogling eyes of the people and we can make things smooth for y’all! The more and more corruption element seeps in the Capital process, the less and less regenerative power would it have left with and therefore the Capitalist development of that nation-state would be increasing threatened or increasingly skewed in a structural fashion. Capital would have to depend more and more on to the less and less people and therefore the base of Capital is weakened. A few hundred billionaires is grossly insufficient to bob up the economy to one and a half billion population who earn less than Rs 20 a day and has less than Rs 2 for disposing in non-essential commodity markets. Revisionists therefore would like to and would not be able to pile up enough wealth to carry on without the production agenda for more than a decade or so. The huge crash will be because the money that was stashed away were never calle in to operate in the economy when the economy needed it most and would be available in plenty when it has lost its sheen. The collapse of Housing market in US is a logical phenomenon of the collapse of the sub-market some three years earlier, but this time it is more heinous simply because housing would have a tendency to go out of the commodity market in slow pace, unless of course [and that is going to happen for sure] foreign nationals bring in their cash money, buy up cheap houses and bob up the economy to an extent. This though politically dangerous and socially anarchy-inviting, is possible only in a wealth-stuffed nation-state like US and not in India. Real estates as a market commodity is too risky than any other conceivable commodities. Real estate can not be transformed easily through other technological processes, added to that is the fast depreciation of real estate, it is a dangerous proposition if the forecast does not click. Huge sky-scrappers are lying unused and would not fetch any money progressively. These commodities are therefore held up in hands of brokers in anticipation of better days[ already more than 10 years have passed and there is no sign of recovery], the money that is already caught up, is out of circulation, is ticking interests and who knows when and how would someone pay for it, and yet in the books it is a “receivable”, kept there to attract secondary investment from some unknown quarters. The book and the reality moves farther and farther apart, creating a completely inevitable chaotic debacle. Revisionist corrupt practice and handling of Capitalism is an increasing pain in the festering of the bruise and the puss is growing at an increasing rate. During tight regime and obvious restructuring Capital would at first try to accommodate revisionist practice and try to fathom their resource garnering capacities, this will be increasingly impossible because it is the same pool from which both Rightist Capital and Revisionism feeds in. After some time the inevitable will occur, revisionism will be shown the pink slip and the highway- that is going to be the demise of the LEFT’s grand managerial stint with Comprador Capital. Within simply another two to three year’s time we will observe this destiny of the INDIAN parliamentary revisionist LEFT.,
Revisionists have burnt out their survival track in another big way. A total disdain toward knowledge and study have made these revisionist so nincompoop and naïve, and that the media hype of “pragmatism” has bought the mindset of revisionists in so effective an way, that they have forgotten to research the particularities of Capital, commodity, production and process. Revisionism is different from a Rightist Capitalist in the way that revisionism falls for a fast generalization or the abstraction of the particularities. Every commodity, is simply a commodity and does not have any special regenerative quality innate in it- that is how revisionism has always seen Capitalism. The salient smartness of Capital as observed by Marx has given Capitalism the famous capacity of jumping from one commodity or one industry to the other particular and has given it thereby the survival capacity against all odds, even though moribund in the general way, in whichever endeavour they undertake and at a faster ever pace, the scope and space for jumping off from one sinking boat to the other, is huge because the sheer number of particular commodities and industries and markets thereof are immense. A Capitalist can easily take his Capital from one particular to the other and survive, a revisionist cannot, because he has not understood, nor practiced business in general and is unable to manage the abstraction on his own.
Production and production of particular commodities is therefore and has always been a general way out for the Capitalists in their survival methodology. That is why Capitalism never fully leaves the production path. Speculation is there to make fast money but production is the general back-structure that props a Capitalist up. Even when it is easy to get more and more Capital through renting a Capitalist does not exhaust all its resource in garnering through Rent. This is one fact a revisionist mindset of fast-n-corrupt money making fail to appreciate and thereby dig its own grave.
The same mindset had spelt doom for the revisionists in case of agriculture. Revisionists’ lack of appreciation of natural science, knowledge and investigation, has rendered agriculture as just one sector among all others to gain some fast buck and forget. That only went cross-purposes with their avowed base and social base but also the poor appreciation of the potential of the agricultural production, its system, its periodicity, its effect and sustainability in addition to the knowledge of the ownership knowledge, has forced them learn nothing and fall behind in the wisdom in the sector of people and production management. They could have made immense improvements through a little bit intense and serious regard in the agricultural sector, they used land as simple one among other resources and did not regard to the particularities of production. The glossing over of particularities gave them the idea that land is just another commodity like others and that land with production capabilities as a commodity and/or also that land with its particular production capabilities, has created a mindset that land can easily be substituted for anything else. Thus land can be easily given out, killing its nature, production capabilities, future returns and thus can be made barren if more money is obtained as commission or cut money.
“A barren land is as good or as bad as a fertile land”, as long as it fetches the right money upfront! Compare this with “Red is as good or as bad as long as the cat can catch mice”! Naiveté is criminal not due to its ignorance, but simply because it is contrived, conspired and has ulterior agenda, that is hidden to hide its nefarious objective. The international revisionism of the Deng variety and the Indian variety – The CPM, considers short term value as the only value and therefore the value at the end of the consumer chain- the use value is of no importance, all that matters is the immediate value at any point in time – the exchange value of the immediate market. This attitude does not only disregard the entire life-cycle of the commodity, and therefore does not heed the seriousness of a social revolutionary; it also scuttles the full realization of a product and commodity and therefore the full track of capital, its optimal usage remains unknown, a serious Rightist Capitalist would not go in that track, to them investigation is as important as that of any serious social scientist. Capital would not leave any point uncovered in its myriad of particular track to move from one moment to the other, this gives Capitalism the biggest ever spread and hegemony over all other production relation. Revisionists are not interested in anything other than their immediate realization of making money. China has made big leaps in its stock market without the base among its people and without comprehensive laws of IPO, and yet simply because of its volume it is remarkable, but it is leaving behind many aspects in realization of the speculative Capital even.
He entire activity of the CPM style Capitalism has not developed the Eastern market as a good commodity market, as a matter of fact it has fallen far behind the booming West and even North in terms of petty-trade. We knew, that it will fall progressively behind in industry, in agriculture, in service sectors, but we also observe that in petty trading it is abysmally low. Despite the excellent geo-political positioning of North Bengal and Siliguri in special it has not made any mark in trade and transit. The reason is, the mindset of not development of the particularities but the attitude of making fast money and accumulate pent up wealth like a hoarder.
What we have found unique in the entire world theatre is the startling phenomenon that despite subsequent bumper crops in food grains and in cash crops Bengal is falling behind agricultural index, health index, and other indexes that deal with rural theatre- this is unique, unique because the support infrastructure for agriculture is systematically done away with, simply to get the product cheap in the market at a distress sell value from the production ground. In order that the middle level hoarders can make good money and be interested in consolidating the entire agricultural commodity market and that they can immediately pass on the commission and cut-money to the party functionaries, and that they do not have to negotiate on a sellers’ market favouring the producers, CPM had blown off the important cold storages, downgraded the rice storages and rice mills, dis-invested in district collection points [mandis] and has forcefully made the agricultural sector under-productive and less remunerative. Land will therefore be left at lurch by producers and will be handed over to the industrialists for a song! All these will fetch enormous kick-backs to the CPM functionaries at different level. Once the agricultural sector loses its resilience and self-sufficiency, aids have to be flown in and the entire amount could be expropriated by the party ranks and the people would be even more dependent for their day to day survival to the party functionaries. Droughts and floods and natural disasters are prayed for by the CPM functionaries, even when they are almost certain to go, they are not leaving any effort to declare districts as drought affected and bagging the aid from Central government and international agencies and have done nothing to distribute it among the deserved victims.
The service sector is now doing nothing and waiting for monies from different international projects to come and then no one takes any account of what happens to those funds after that! Whatever it is money amassing is the only motive! This is not serving the long term interest or the survival interest of the Capital even, and no wonder that any some point down the Captains of Capital would see through it and lump them.
Marx said very clearly- Capital is much more than money as it is a complete social relation. Without the relations Capitals cannot grow and capital without growth is the downgrade of Capitalism- that is what Revisionism wanted to achieve – try to find a non-growth Capital path for money amassing and are now facing its nemesis- the Capital itself!
The other extremity- Romantic criminal mindset – the anarcho-militaristic mindset!
From peoples’ upsurge to armed insurgents: a Walk backwards:
The Indian Maoists, as they call themselves, have declared protracted war against the STATE of India. Well, how far this stance is amenable to Marxist Leninist principles is an open question for debate. But the understanding on the basis of which this declaration is made is loud and clear. They are in for organizing insurrection against the STATE. The second premise point is the understanding that a single spark in terms of a strong base area and multiple guerrilla zones would ignite a country wide upsurge and that would usher the revolution.
The point of departure or that of entrance in the discourse starts from this point. As per Leninist norms “insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning-point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. That is the third point. And these three conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism.- Lenin Vol 26p 22 -27”.
- the hint is clear, the people’s revolutionary upsurge should be the precursor, the leadership of the class should be essentially directing the upsurge and then and then only can an insurrection is prescribed. What the Maoists here are doing is a complete turn-around- putting the cart before the horse. An insurrection has never triggered peoples’ upsurge. In fact even in the case of Cuba, the forces of Che and Fidel actually successfully organized a campaign of insurrection when the whole nation and the peasants were involved in an upsurge in their own way. History does not corroborate a reversal. This track is untenable not simply it never happened in history but also because the reversed method by the Maoists is not logically coherent. A revolution is done by the people, the leadership is given by the class and the party guides them from political point of view- One should not forget that Chairman Mao’s line had stressed more of people’s massive participation then even Comrade Lenin’s.
- Mao’s special contribution or point of special insertion starts from the document of “Hunan report”- a kind of vivid reportage of peoples’ upsurge as the basic outlay for all other campaigns. The most important points of the report are :-
o The specific and unique mode of peasants’ upsurge
o The language peasants used, the behaviour, the communication, the mode of organization and reaction etc.
o The fact that the people rose up with their own home made weapons and confronted the local reactionaries
o The fact that the primary organization was provided spontaneously but not sporadically or not through some accident.
- The second contribution or point of special insertion of Mao thoughts or Mao’s contribution in Marxism and Leninism is how Chairman Mao could integrate the so-called riff-raff forces of peasants with the most sophisticated deserters of Chinese Army and the armies of the Chinese independent war-lords. The concept of Army that Mao brought in was not fancying a massive peasant force as a military army and then declaring them as peoples’ revolutionary army.
- Believing in slogans and statements of Mao a-contextually and not examining those through historical studies and research gave these Maoists of India the romanticism that for every situation Mao talked about the army as the only backbone of the political organization.
- A little research in the revolutionary campaigns throughout the world revolutionary movements, it comes out clear that in all underdeveloped and peasant-dominated societies a general attraction for taking up arms and a general sympathy for the armed opposition to the authorities is quite a natural phenomenon, but it is as powerful or as weak to that extent only. A society that is based on the urban development and industrially organized society would not fancy sporadic or point-based armed oppositions as a viable opposition to the STATE. The specific reason of sparse organization in a peasant dominated society or in a nation-state-society with multiple modes of production and variegated stages of development and livelihood and that too a society with so humongous varieties and differences in socio-cultural behavioural pattern backed with so many types of economic patterns, modes of production, production-cycles, naturally obtained socio-economic behaviour of livelihood, consumption and regeneration, would necessarily contain disorganization and variation in protest and resistance patterns. . Yes, it is very likely that when one point flares up in a very higher form of struggle other points may still fall behind in the most laid back phase, but that same point precludes the assertion that one single spark in any of these points would help the entire country flare up- this is doubly reinforced when such points are the most backward and relegated points involved in the most backward modes of production.
- The successful implementation of Naxalbari as a first egging of an icon for Indian revolution took place in a village which had all races of landless and poor peasants connected to agriculture and yet very close to the tea plantation workers, so that was a classic copybook example of peoples’ natural and organic unity against the feudal repression aided by the STATE laws and power. The egging point of Maoists are the most backward points which have immense hideaway values from terrain consideration and no economic or social connotation. This was a typical line of a group of romantic revolutionaries who formed Maoist Communist Centre way back in 1967 and did not follow the Naxalbari path, and later fell out with the revolutionary communist party of CPI(ML). Right from that day this group of romantic revolutionaries were dreaming of a military corridor where they can freely move in and out of the Jungle terrain with sophisticated arms – which clearly undermines the importance of the leadership of the peasants’ guerrilla. As it is in any semi-colonial half baked country like India the Tribal people and the Jungle inhabitants who had been left out of the normal mainstream economy had inclination for arms as the very first expression of protest. But this inclination can not be the expression of a leader community or leader class so separated from the mainstream mode of production and therefore protest. Centuries after centuries have proved that very higher forms of rebellion by these forlorn people have not really left effective marks in the mainstream politics.
- It is quite common that who looks up to whom is a very important strategic consideration in protest algebra and it is always proven by history that the eruption in the mainstream has much more effect in tagging along all other forms of marginal societies, having said that we must not forget that the sustenance of these upsurges for a longer period of time takes place in the forlorn nooks of the country to simply dig down and let the STATE repression pass over and then flare up again in opportune moments. But the single spark does not take place in forlorn places. One should not confuse this with Lenin’s prescription of the weakest link to snap first. The weakest link snaps first in revolutionary movements but the weakest link is weak because of too many internecine interests and contradictions within the ruling umbrella. A mainstream area of peasant activities is actually more of a weakest link than a forlorn and tough terrain area. The weakest link theory talks about the political and social control of the ruling class, they can be weak because of too many contradictory interests playing simultaneously and making the grip of the rulers weak. Besieging such a weak link becomes politically, socially and culturally impossible by the rulers but besieging a forlorn area for years and force it languish in utter neglect is no big deal for them. India has proved that with the entire North East and the Jungle Mahal as well. Starting from the Indian National Army days of liberating Andamans and Manipur did not open up the Indian mainstream door at all. Same was the destiny for all huge armed upsurges and mass struggles in the Jungle Mahal of Central India from the Mughal days. And yet a single spark in Bihar, or West Bengal helped India shudder in the imperial days and later also after 1967. Weakest link does not mean the weakest military link, it means the political and social link in hegemony. Bihar, erstwhile Bengal had always been more weak in the imperialist rule giving rise to Tebhaga kind of massive mass struggles that actually championed Left politics in India.
- Military interpretation of political phenomenon is a so typical of romanticism that is proved even internationally. The case of Kampuchea and that of Romania and Albania bears the truth. A simple peasant take over of power actually created bigger pot holes that were later filled up with Rightist filth moving toward obnoxious societies far from revolutionary attitude and centres of lumpen activities – the same is true for the longest standing protracted war torn society of Afghanistan and the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. It is perennially in war and will be for a very long time. War is the only social act in those areas with sophisticated weaponry the only common commodity that sells and brings in social position.
- Looking Mao thoughts from the militaristic angle, is a danger and is so anti-Mao thought. The “four firsts” theory of Lin Pi Ao actually summarised the entire Marxist Leninist Maoist methodology where the very first point was to put people in the first position over arms. The second was to put politics first over the regular organizational activities while carrying on the regular chore of organization in shape and in schedule. The Third was to put ideology first over politics and the last was to put Practice over bookish knowledge. Maoists thought they copied Chinese model to implement in India and in copying again they did a shoddy job, while Mao’s fundamental teaching was to search truth from the facts and not from books. Maoists fancied weapons and in distributing and possessing weapons they had a hierarchy that went along their party hierarchy- this is something so very out-of-line with Mao’s military teachings. Maoists extracted out the epitaph “People has nothing without army” and yet implemented the adage without context. Mao’s prescription of army as an essential backbone of party and the people is during the war time. Maoists do not ask themselves where had been the so called Army during Hunan period?
- Maoists have declared that guerrilla army is the MAIN form of organization and guerrilla war is the MAIN form of Campaign. IS this in-line with Mao’s teachings? Mao very clearly proscribed any kind of stability or permanence to the guerrilla army, he always prescribed [and so did Charu Mazumdar] guerrilla forces formed out of the landless and poor peasants who are incessantly connected to the production of crops in the fields. Production was the first condition by Mao and Charu Mazumdar and yet it is the least in Maoist practice. They have extricated out the tribals and the Adivasis from their regular production chore and dressed them in military attire to form regular guerrilla army and now given them permanence into Mobile war campaigns with sophisticated arms. The natural pipeline of production is snapped and an ascetic guerrilla life in the hideaways became their only occupation. Taking a productive force out of the line of production had been so definitely rejected by all Marxist leaders including Mao and Charu Mazumdar and yet Maoists take that to be their “higher form of class struggle” – a struggle outside the ambit of production is now adorned as a class struggle- that is the basis of romanticism and that is politically criminal!
- This romantic positing has led them into a world far from the regular life-struggle of the producing masses and that actually has led them chose only one form of struggle as their whims go. Forms of struggle are not chosen by the communists, they burn their hands through all possible forms of struggle that the people go through in their quotidian life struggle. Communists go along with them, walk with the people, interact and intervene and on the way teach them the pitfalls and the special points toward taking it to the next higher stage of movement and thus the higher form of struggle toward a full fledged mass upsurge. Romanticism allows to subtract [ not abstraction] from the regular life and fancy something based on imagination and unfounded constructs and then imposes them on to the existing life. Life takes a backseat and romantic construct takes the driver seat. This is anarchism –plain and simple! It is a-social and therefore socially criminal, it uses tools and gets dependent on tools and not on the progressively developing conception of the revolutionary masses.
- A higher form of struggle taken out of context finetuned and then pushed on to the reality as per the wish of the so-dreamed “vanguard”, becomes the shackle on the people in their movement of advancement toward a collective consciousness- that is the imposition of a few on to the collective and the masses in general and the class in leadership- that is the oligarchy of the left hue!
In the aftermath of Enlightenment, the steamroller of REASON and Reality only provable by repeatable observation, took the steam off of Imagination as a veritable element of creation and creativity. Imagination and therefore Arts had to be brought and had to be brought in through a people’s movement. After the chain of bursts of scientific analysis and technological innovations and deductive logic only termed as Science, came the dreary desert of dreams for unforeseen New. Science generated in the lowest form of mapping to previous experiences e.g depicting sub-atomic space similar to the solar cosmos. Human epistemology was a mere repetition as newer un-experienced depictions were considered idiosyncratic. After many revolutions in the cultural arena and in social field we had to wait for the age of “uncertainty” toward quantum science and relativity. But this moment could only be brought about after a century long epistemological struggle for reinstating Imagination and Dreams in the realm of human knowledge and endeavour. We are now very certain that dream pre-curses realistic inventions and even sheds lights on the path of discoveries. Romantics became revolutionary, and indeed we could bring about many social changes and cultural upheavals which could have been impossible with the dreary and dry spirit of Enlightenment. Nevertheless, we should be a little cautious in dealing with imagination in the engineering of REALITY. Above all and after all considerations and reality change needs to base upon the conditions first, constraints in navigation second and optimality of resource utilization third. Just as an example the heavy dead weight of the concept of atomic world has cost the world hundreds of trillion dollars in simply maintaining machines trying to find one maverick and fugitive particle for more than half a century now, this when we have started to think the building blocks of matter are constructed in a totally different way, we understand things mathematically, in abstract that may not have any realistic existence and we really do not care too much. This example has shown how mal-appropriation of resource and their utilization has impeded collective human development. Romantics has really come to a great help in offering us alternatives and ways and means to think through many avenues right from the beginning or rather proactively and before the crises hits. And yet romantics not attenuated by reality or conditions take us for a hike- a runaway hike. Revolution is realistic, and probably the only realistic future solution for crises. Revolution that means change is the only test even for the stability and conviction for any hypothesis. Revolutions in epistemology can be ushered along-with social revolutions [ preceding or succeeding]. Scientific revolutions or revolutions in collective thought process has not been founded strongly to take any realistic change, without a complete social upheaval in social terms. Revolution – or for that matter social revolution is the only realistic task one can think of embarking upon for a long term and long lasting solution. No revolution can take place without the thorough perusal and treatment of the conditions. Epistemology is nothing without the ontological threadbare studies and thereafter having concrete solutions to the conditions faced, not constructing conditions or basing on earlier references. Constructs are useful in devising methodologies but cannot be imposed on conditions a-contextually that is independent of space, time and perspective. The perspective is the condition, the impediments in any crafted path are the constraints, the resource is the input [both in terms of quality and quantity] and the thought process or epistemology is added exogenously that is enriched by references. The link between all these can only be found through concrete practice of change and then the wisdom of putting things in place for a packaged solution can be obtained. That is Mao-thought or Maoism and that is a special and “particular” in present day conditions under the “general” of Marxism-Leninism. To think that “Maoism is enough as it contains the essence of Marxism & Leninism” is crass metaphysics. Comrade Charu Mazumdar’s introduction to “Three writings of Chairman Mao” is grossly misread and mal construed. He never said that Mao’s Red book and Three essays or five philosophical essays is all that needs to be studied, he said for a revolutionary can challenge many erudite civil society intellectuals armed with this weapon, because in going ahead of social revolution ideology comes first and that guides the political research. Substitutionism as a bane was first pointed out by Comrade Trotsky, whatever be the debates with his line of thought, we must not forget that Chairman Mao said that till the time he was incorporated in the Central Committee of CPC he only read two articles of Trotsky and all his Marxism reading came later. Mao was not a Trotskyite and what he hinted at is that he started his referential knowledge from an unusual and un-orthodox point, he had to learn his Marxism and Leninism from the grounds of revolutionary practice, and that the reality track corroborated the teachings of Marxism and Leninism. Marxism Leninism and Mao thought [ or I do not have much of a problem accepting Maoism] is an integrated whole where the three “ism”s coalesce into one and yet are important in ordinality terms---Leninism as a special of Marxism and Maoism as a special and particular of Leninism. Epistemology is disciplined and is a discipline in itself, any overstepping or step jumping leads to metaphysics. Metaphysics is not used pejoratively here, but it is dreamland that needs to be tuned up for implementation. All imaginations and dreams need to be leashed in to bring it down to work on the real ground- and that is praxis – that is the process of dream engineering and reality re-engineering. Maoism precludes revolutionaries to copy cat paths and methods in different contexts, it also disapproves of sticking to the same strategy, method and forms of struggle pre-ordained for all times in the future till any real change takes place. The Indian Maoists consider that once using of parliamentary elections were boycotted the boycott strategy would stay on for ever and yet they compromise on the ground by tacitly and indirectly supporting one or the other bourgeois parties in the crises periods- that is the less-than-revolutionary act resulted out of romantic assessments of concrete situations. On Theory this “shutting off” fails them to discern that taking part in elections is not equivalent to parliamentary form of struggle, and that the latter even is far away from parliamentary cretinism and that elections in Indian reality is that political moment where people from the most vanguard to the most rear guard and even not the guard but the passive sympathiser catapults into some kind of political activism [in various degrees, of course]. They fail to cognize that the mis-comprehension of this simple reality puts them away from this countrywide political activism of the people and is no way related to a detailed programme of what they would do within the parliament if and if at all and when elected, they fail to comprehend that leaving the people in this struggle to be played around by the different denominations of the ruling class actually makes their position as dreamy eyed revolutionary phantoms running around in the Jungles and created myths around them. Revolution and revolutionary activism is the kind of activity that is so inimical to myth creations and mystifications. Myths create heroes and heroes create myth in turn, not revolutions and as Comrade Stalin advised the visiting Indian communist leaders in the then USSR in 1951 “You have had many heroes in your country, stop producing heroes any more, make the entire people heroes, as only people would make revolutions not heroes”. Romantics in social activism is creation of a myriad of heroes, born to be martyred, remembered in statues and monuments and never changing the status quo. Revolution on the other hand by definition and by default kills hero-worship and heroism. The moment a people rises, go all the heroes into the oblivion of history pages merely present as references, till such time we need heroes to arouse the people and when people arises the heroes go for RIP.
Revolution starts with the demise of Romantics, to be resurrected again to bring forth a new Revolution in the future- this is the classic example of Negation of Negation – the interregnum needs Romantics, Heroes, Myths and Icons. Insurrection is upheaval from within and has to base upon an upsurge of the people .. it has to wait for the most opportune moment and has to move for a decided collective overall change when the old system has exhausted all elixir to showcase. Maoism – the Indian variety is insurrection without the back-propping of peoples’ upsurge. Maoism – the Indian variety does not constrain itself by the necessity of being led by the entire working class [or at least a strong majority of it] and that is where it runs away from the track of obtaining a social change, and ends up being a prodigal son to the bourgeois system & STATE ,
Where is the Class ? and why do we need the Class in a peasant upsurge?
Indian Maoists have concentrated their activities in the Jungle terrains. This they have done simply to get a military mileage and from mere military considerations. It is like putting the heads together over a piece of Indian map, figuring out the Jungle terrains, moving up there with a bunch of dedicated revolutionaries armed to the teeth with bought out sophisticated arms and then befriending the hapless aboriginal people and the left-out non-cultivating hunter-gatherer tribal people and filling them up with romantic concepts of empowerment through arms and making a base area. This strategy was so inimical to Mao thoughts. It started from Kaksa-Budbud-Ausgram, three hideaway countryside points in Burdwan district [way back in 1969]. Then these three points were forest areas and yet did not have any natural forest corridor kind of linkages, yet they championed this “corridor” against the model of Naxalbari-Gopiballavpur-Birbhum and Srikakulam in Andhra. The latter set was developed by CPIML under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar. All these areas were thickly populated and was fully under cultivation. Kanai Chatterjee the then leader of Maoist Communist Centre – a group that never joined CPIML and kept its independent identity intact- superseded the legendary peasant leader named Amulya Sen of Hoogly district [an ace peasant organizer from the Tebhaga days] and propounded his theory of building up military base areas in the impenetrable tracts. Before that when the spark of Naxalbari flared up, they wanted to show a different example in Dihi Sonarpur in a derelict corner of South 24 Parganas flanked by the river Bidyadhari that could take one at that time to the then mightly Matla and deep into Sundarbans- so that was their strategy- putting military considerations above than the political and movemental ones. Sonarpur was started with some militant comrades belonging to the grand mother party CPI, the movement gathered ground in terms of mobilization but were later hijacked by the militant economism and lumpen economism of CPIM – CPIM leaders became champion and rode on to the power of West Bengal, the peasants were betrayed and left out like disposable items. Maoist Communist Centre touted this example as an alternative to Naxalbari uprising, its failure marked an end into their path of mass struggles. They waited long till they managed to buy some long range rifles and amassed money and cadres in the Jungles. That was their entrance into “guerrilla warfare”. Kaksa hit a wall, Ausgram was left alone and later the geography and demography changed and it became flat land for rice cultivation and the “exemplary movement” failed. What lingered on is the concept of building up base areas in the remotest corners based on terrains. It was almost from 1974 a person named Amiya Kundu went to the Lalgarh area and started living with the peasants. He however belonged to the PWG when there were hardly a handful of cadres owing allegiance to PWG. Many years later when PWG merged with PU to form new-PWG, Amiya already had a strong base, but he found that even MCC [ at that time MCC was at loggerheads with PWG] had already a base among the adivasi students especially among government sponsored Adivasi student hostels. That was the baby steps were semi-educated Adivasi students were dragged into the ideology of armed insurrection. Not many leaders of MCC were in jail during the emergency period, the focus of the ruling power was not on them. The journey of MCC cadres from then to now in Lalgarh was a saga of painstaking perseverance, tenacity, heroism and meticulous planning. The acceptance of the MCC cadres and the building up of local tribal lads as political cadres is really laudable of awesome proportions. The general disdain of the mainstream people [normal paddy producing peasants] toward the entire Adivasis aggravated the reaction of the tribal lower middle peasants and also the literate lot among them. The “left” of the CPM hue established their position among the middle class outside primary and secondary school teachers- most of them were corrupt to the core and did not have any compunction to exploit the tribals from all consideration. The so-touted “land reform” movement of CPM led government did not have much effect there as those lands did not have much paddy cultivation- the crop pattern and the resources being different no facilities really reached them. That created the necessary cleavage with the LEFT parties and the people there although the people voted en masse the LEFT candidates in anticipation of good times. Failed expectations are something very dangerous in countries like India. The most dangerous being the caste disdain – as a normal practice the Adivasis do not trust the plain-landers – they call them DIKU- outsider. With the ever increasing mental separation between the plain landers and the Adivasis and the added invectives these so-called “friends” of the LEFT used to hurl on them [always addressing all of the tribals with the derogatory “tu” etc. The only graduate a female student among the shabar tribe committed suicide because of the abuses hurled by the professor- a LEFT front local leader] , the literate section of the tribals flocked towards the gun totting revolutionaries. The female young flocked too, as they found rape by the DIKUs the police and the powerful members of the different government authorities became a very normal phenomenon. The young lads were implicated in all kinds of false cases and the girls regularly raped, the old people left out to beg, additionally there was this chronic lack of basic necessities in the far away JungleMahal. Food that they lived on would not be touched by the so-called civilized world. Taking up the gun was a welcome way out, with the guns on their shoulders the fugitives amassed lot of respect not only from their own people but also the awe and fear among the mainstream plainlanders lured them to a long and protracted fugitive lifestyle- that is the guerrilla army, an army born out of utter most neglect by every normal Indian and of course out of lack of basic necessities. This criterion is quite romantic and arouses sympathy but not adequate for a revolutionary preparation. The production relation is extreme and excruciating but does not command a huge resource in the economic life of the quotidian. Peasants are the mainstay of production in West Bengal and Indian countryside. When the points in which movements by CPIML flared up were all flourishing rice bowls and other cash crop cultivation Lalgarh was a left-out. The total value of the resources this area dealt with did not muster enough strength to call the shots. Guns became their only resort- dependence on which increased by the day. The nearby cities in the entire Jharkhand area and the tribal areas of West Bengal Orissa, Madhyapradesh till Nagpur [ the middle belt of India] developed on rampant resource exploitation of mineral and lumpen urban culture came up in very fast rates all hegemonised by the illegal mining mafia, illegal suppliers and middlemen and transport dons. The politicians and tribal leaders joined the rat race of making fast bucks through all possible corrupt means. The people on the other hand were once again betrayed – this time by their own leadership. Frustration and despondency was the only normal phenomenon. All these resulted to a core dependency on arms and buying of sophisticated arms became the only way out – sponsored by the money culled from forest contractors, illegal miners, brokers, labour contractors, local businessmen and offering them protection in turn. The revolutionary movement lost its spirit in the rat race of arms and more arms and more and more and more of it. The sign of respect was a slinging gun and the only way a decent life with some rice and clothes to cover was to join the guerrilla army. The army flared up in numbers, politics and political consciousness took a back seat and were relegated even backwards by the day. The concept of the leadership of a class was not on the agenda. Gun started to rule and politics followed it.
But where is the production and the productive force and what is the standard of the production relation? Can a sector with low standard of productive force and less developed production relation command the leadership in case of Indian countryside? One may opine that to be an open question from the exact implementation point of view, but if history has to be given any credence this is quite untenable from the leadership in a revolution on a nation wide scale. Indian Maoists actually treaded the way in opposite sense- it moved from more fertile areas of cultivation to Jungles progressively and got besieged there. That is the triumph of the ruling class. Indian rulers have long acclimatized themselves in living and thriving through chronic crises and turmoil. They can justify their worthless existence only through creating terrible law and order situations that would take away the gaze of the common people from their burgeoning daily problems. They got an apple on their lap – a wonderful get-away and breathing space, the region is now in deep civil war with hapless tribals fighting with sophisticated arms against a modern war machine called STATE of India. The state justifies their existence in the name of curbing “terrorism”. In this whole equation class consciousness, upsurge by the people, mass struggles of production and production relation find no berth. The elixir of revolutionary prairie fire is lost, got localised in the woods into gradual denudation.
We might as well compare some experiences of the CPIML way and that of the MCC way – the MCC way is now being followed by the Indian Maoists.
The city of Kolkata during 1970 had some very important special pockets of urban revolutionary upsurge. The call was to go to the villages and integrate with the peasants and organize peasant masses into upsurge. The Sinthee Baranagar area had two sten guns and about 5 automatic rifles all snatched from the police. The Behala Suburb had 25 such snatched guns, Jadavpur area had 8 snatched away guns. The entire north of Kolkata that was the hotbed of Naxalite youth upsurge retained one sten gun and two rifles to take on the police, paramilitary and the army. The entire Tollygunge area – the most thickly populated area in the then Kolkata had snatched around three automatic rifles and many two and one barrel guns snatched from private wealthy individuals. They could retain only one automatic rifle. Jadavpur area retained one and Behala had to be contained with two rifles. The rest were taken to the villages to arm the guerrilla army by the peasants. Jadavpur area later snatched a couple of police rifles and those two were given out to the rural part. Almost every pocket of the then Naxalite activities had some guns snatched and they were summarily taken away to be given out to the peasant guerrillas. Buying arms were banned with strictest surveillance. All these areas issued challenges to the military and in reality took on the military in the street fights when the paramilitary forces and the local police failed. Cadres fought the army with local made weapons called pipe-guns, hand made cannons, hand bombs, improvised grenades and mortar shells. That was the approach, suicidal as it may sound today, the ideology was to take on the STATE through home made weapons and arouse the people in mass action. MCC took a different stance right from the beginning. Charu Mazumdar’s line was criticized by Kanai Chatterjee and then by maverick intellectuals like Sumanta Bannerjee to be naïve and irresponsible. Comrade Charu Mazumdar stuck to his point stressing the importance and need of the people rising up instead of some heroic middle class cadres doing the job for them. That was an ideological question. Counting the death and martyrdom of cadres could not have been a discerning criterion. The dependence of revolutionary activism on sophisticated arms were ruled out in favour of political exigency. MCC differed and that difference are depicted in today’s actions… Very interestingly Comrade Charu Mazumdar and Comrade Kanai Chatterjee never treaded the same line and analysis in any of their prescriptions and now we find the Indian Maoists joined them in a romantic eclectic unity and touting them as united icons. The only base and backdrop they are showing is the military confrontation and interestingly even in that the two leaders differed totally. You take out political considerations and you lump together all military tactics without political content and taken a-contextually, you get Indian Maoist methodology. After all this the Maoists have fixated this path being the only path- an exact opposite to what Naxalites of seventies claimed.
Funnily enough, MCC fell out with CPIML stating that there would be a different path to Indian revolution distinct from Naxalbari, as it was lead by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, and now that is why they did not join CPIML nor did they join the same campaigns in the same pockets. Today when Naxalites are professing various forms of struggle then these Indian Maoists –successors of MCC are positing only one path – that of Naxalbari- of course they are describing the Naxalbari path differently from what the other Naxalites laid out and still describe today.
A huge posse of arms of various technologies and the money spent in acquiring and maintaining them have barred these guerrillas get into day to day rural production system.
During the seventies upsurge, young activists rushed to the production areas, villages to learn production, revolution and organization and internalise rural peasant lifestyle, guerrillas were recruited from the landless and poor peasantry and then they were called upon to attack the enemy through home made artefacts they use for production and then snatch the weapons of the enemies to arm themselves. Arming of units was a gradual process of class struggle taken from one height to the higher. Here in case of Indian Maoists we find peasants taken out of their regular production activities and sent back to creating isolated groups in the Jungles and relegate them to a non-productive Robin Hood style of ascetic and military life. This is where Indian Maoists are treading a path different from Chairman Mao’s prescriptions against a standing guerrilla army, outside the ambit of production relation.
Dressing the guerrillas – another Romantic snapping the integrated link line with production.
Till 1978, that is till the Deng’s followers took over China, even the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation army – the standing army of a nation state did not have any dress distinction among its ranks, in fact Chairman Mao was not in favour of keeping a separate standing army and wanted PLA to take part in regular production activities. The Indian Maoists even in their present stage have clear cut distinction of dresses with respect to their positions and even the weapons they carry, differ. They have fancied a group of new recruits as peoples’ militia and have not armed them in the same way as they have armed their “standing guerrilla army” resulting in very important losses among the peoples’ militia. Actually to the enemy that is the Indian STATE they do not make any distinction in dealing with the militia or the Maoist army, but Maoists keep that distinction just to show that there are steps in rising into becoming veritable fighters in the standing army. Their leaders enjoy high protection and still don latest Ak-47s and INSAS rifles and their lower cadres who work as sentinels have to be content with old fashioned guns, where from the military point of view these sentinels should have long range rifles and the leaders should be happy with handy pistols or revolvers. Maoism is just an advertisement to our Indian Maoists who preserve all privileges of a ranked hierarchy – that is the symptom of the ideology that is in vogue among them and that shows that given an opportunity what they would do if and when they come out in the open to take part in mainstream politics. They would use their weapons to garner votes on gun point; they would take and preserve all privileges and facilities of any bourgeois hierarchy when they would be called upon to share power. The leaders and the trusted guerrillas have military attires [incidentally the enemy troupes or the STATE crack forces have done away with any specific dress for themselves], these role reversals in case of dresses has got an ideological underpinning – that is now put on the questioning table.
Camrade Charu Mazumdar propounded the line of annihilation of the most notorious landlords whose elimination would have to follow his social, political and cultural isolation and even after that the landlord does not mend its way, then only a higher level party committee would deliberate and investigate with the people and get a strong public opinion and then execute the landlord. Later on there were some over-doing when it was mistakenly used as a campaign. Yet, Comrade Charu always directed to transgress the form with higher forms of class struggle viz. crop seizure followed by crop preservation and then democratic distribution of crop in the village etc. One higher form after the other was his methodology. The Maoists have been carrying on annihilation [secretive elimination] now counting up to more than 2000 and all in the name of eliminating the “ears & eyes” of the police. Most of these belong to the same class as the Maoists and their follower people are. The question of class is relegated way back. This one act has actually become a hindrance in building up of a mass struggle. Even when they have in front of them the example of the Nandigram upsurge that later on went into the hands of the rightists where no such annihilation was necessary and yet the CPM cadres were mopped out of the area, the Maoists kept on maintaining their method. The class unity could not be built up and mass upsurges could not bob up the surface effecting any prairie fire that they dreamt on the West Bengal theatre.
The question of class in choosing their immediate enemies had never taken any shape where the notorious money lenders, middlemen, hoarders and other mafias have been touched. Not one hated mafia don of the Jungle area and the mining area ever was even threatened. Some CPM functionaries of ill-fame was ousted of the area though, but their political and military influence was challenged and yet could not be reduced. Winning over of the class collaborators and making them redundant is a very important political task of revolutionaries; well it was never tried upon. Individuality of the enemies were looked upon with more seriousness than their class position. The whole of Naxalite movement during the 70’s in the entire West Bengal did not count up to more than 400 notorious landlords eliminated, within two years the Jungle Mahal of West Medinipur district cross the 2000 mark. Worst is the present scenario where prisoners are decapitated and in doing so they are selecting victims on the basis of caste- the Arvind Jadav squad of Bihar eliminated Lucas Tete a tribal policeman and saved Ajay Jadav –another senior police prisoner simply because Ajay belonged to the same caste[Jadav] as Arvind. This has created a rift among the Maoist satraps on the caste fault line. Even the Christian tribals are now singled out and are getting a back hand jab from the Maoist commanders who mostly have hailed from Jadav and Koiri communities. These obnoxious tendencies that were hitherto absent among the revolutionaries are sneaking in. In Bihar the political mafia leaders of the mainstream politics like Lallu Jadav are found to be using some Maoist commanders and their battalions for their own political use. All this was destined to happen because of the lack of the element of peoples’ upsurge as a necessary condition for insurrection.
Marxism, Leninism and even Maoism teaches us to “study” the existing peoples’ movements and then analyse it and the vanguard of the advanced class tries to integrate that movement with the demands and movement of the producing classes, tries to create political environments so that the advanced producing classes who are leading the day to day struggles in the main bastion of Capital and as a final touch the communist revolutionaries guide the movement through political orientation toward seizure of the power on behalf of the maximum majority. This objective presupposes that the movement and therefore the day to day movement of the people has to pre-exist before the communist party can lead them. Organizing the most politically backward conscious section of the people toward political mass movements is also a task of the communist party, but that is a long preparatory stage and can never be in the stage where guerrilla warfare becomes the principal form of struggle. In order that armed activity or guerrilla warfare and more so war against the STATE, to become the principal form one must have almost the whole of the nation-state or at least the main centres and the controlling centres risen up in massive peoples’ upsurge. Mao’s teaching additionally taught us that in the most opportune moment when a section of the STATE’s armed forces joins the rebels then it is the task of the communist party to lead and integrate their movements with those of the producing community. As a stark example let me state the glorious example of the quit India movement of 1942 versus the 1946 upsurge of the RIN and RIA and the working class and the Telengana. Communist party wanted to talk to Mr M.K.Gandhi about the not so propitious a time at 1942 simply because at that time although the huge mass of middle class and also the peasants to a very sizable section rose in protest movements, that movement could not integrate the demands of the landless and poor peasants and the workers and the armed forces , but around 1946 we found the peasants of Telengana, Tebhaga, the middle class on the issues of the trial of the Indian National Army, the workers of Western and Southern India, the armed contingents of dejected Indian forces within the British military and the students and youth and almost all classes rose up to upsurge Congress was lackadaisical in supporting any of these movements and in fact opposed them. The nation would have easily stopped the year long communal internecine fight and consciousness that led to the partition. The failure of that all round upsurge frustrated the civil society and the producing classes and social issues took over the political issues and we found ourselves a divided country. Communist Party could not take a decisive role as it was trying to bring to the table of unity the two reactionary groups Congress and Muslim League into some kind of an eclectic unity by surrendering the line of independent assertion of the fighting proletariat.
Let us examine this example with the strategy of the Indian Maoists now. First of all, the classes of the toiling masses are not seen rising up in upsurges anywhere in the country as a nation wide phenomenon. The organized working classes and the other working classes are not coming up in nation wide upsurges, the armed forces are in fact busy killing their compatriots at the behest of the rulers, the peasants have come up in Singur and Nandigram and very recently in Aligarh and in Punjab but led by the reactionary forces and even after all these the Maoists are in some Romantic land where the principal form of struggle is guerrilla warfare. This romanticism is no more ultra-leftism or any kind of revolutionary, in fact it is a group revolutionary activity of the conspiratorial type and exactly in this point Lenin and Mao differed in the path of choosing a conspiratorial militaristic path as a revolutionary one. In Indian scenario this specific form of “ultra-leftism” is nothing but crass Rightist conspiracy to frustrate the peoples’ initiative under the onslaught of a super-military powered nation-state.
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