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Posted by Rahul Choudhary June 16, 2008 at 11:59 am in Displacement, Politics
Recently held Public Hearing for Rupsiabagar – Khasiabara Hydro Electric Project at Munsiyari District of Uttarakhand is an example of the establishment and corporate playing farce with the provisions of public hearing provided in the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 (EIA Notification). The EIA Notification provides for conducting Public Hearing in the project-affected areas for the projects which fall under the schedule of the EIA Notification. The Public Hearing is a platform where the persons who have any objection to the project can register the same, and the proceedings of the public hearing with objections of the public are sent to the Ministry of Environment & Forest to decide over granting Environmental Clearance to the project.
The Project proponent of Rupsiabagar – Khasiabara Hydro Electric Project, National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) scheduled the public hearing on 11.06.2008 when most of villagers are out to higher altitude of mountains to collect ‘Yarsagumba’ ( or cordyceps sinesis is a rare herb and grows above 3,500 meters of the Himalayas) knowing very well that most of the villagers will not be able to participate in the public hearing. The NTPC scheduled the public hearing at this time to complete the formality of conducting public hearing without any opposition. The way this public hearing was conducted shows that NTPC and the State Machinery did not want Public Hearing to be conducted in fair manner.
The number of families who will be losing land is almost 1362, according to the NTPC, which is generally careful not to reveal the true figures. It is true for other projects and will happen in this project also that the villagers who are dependant on agricultural land for livelihood are paid very less compensation for their land, and the money given is not sufficient to buy similar kind of land. The money given as compensation does not last long and the farmers end up becoming labourers on the construction site or working in small hotels or dabhas in Delhi and living a miserable life. The government has developed a great law for acquisition of land, where under Section 17 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, invoking urgency clause it can acquire the land without entertaining any objection, but at the same place there is no proper policy about the rehabilitation of the person affected by the project.
This situation is similar as stated by Karl Marx in Capital Vol-1, referring to legislations against the expropriated of France, Netherland and Holland, that “Thus where the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded by laws grotesquely terrible, into discipline necessary for wage system”.
The Public hearing held on 11.06.2008 was opposed by the local people on the grounds that:
* Almost all the villagers of 8-9 villages of the project area would go to collect ‘Yarsa Gumba’
* The other villagers were not informed about the project properly.
* No sufficient information about the public hearing.
* The executive summary of the project was not made available.
* The Environment Impact Assessment report of the project was available almost at the distance of 150 K.M from the project site, which was not possible for the villagers to access.
* The Procedure of conducting Public Hearing has not been followed as provided in the EIA Notification, 2006.
The Public Hearing was scheduled at 11 AM, and just at the start of public hearing the locals got hold of dais and asked from the panel members of the public hearing to postpone the hearing. There were villagers like one Gram pradhan and Block Head who wanted to continue the public hearing for the reasons that they will get petty contracts from the NTPC during the construction of project. For almost three hours the hearing was stalled and the panel of the Public Hearing decided to postpone it. However the NTPC gave the presentation highlighting the benefits of the project and very obviously missing out the impacts of the projects. No questions or objections were raised to the panel members as the public was told that this public hearing is postponed and it will be held again in October when the villagers are back. Only two-three persons who were expecting favour from the NTPC in terms of getting contracts spoke in support of the project, to which the NTPC personnel were not tired of clapping.
The very next day on June 12, 2008 it was reported in the newspaper like ‘Amar Ujala’ and ‘Rashtriya Sahara’ that the public hearing was postponed due to protest. But the NTPC did not allow the media to ruin their plan to show the public hearing of June 11 as the final hearing to get the Environmental Clearance. The very newspaper ‘Amar Ujala’ which reported that the Public Hearing was postponed published an advertisement in its 13th June edition, that the public hearing was held for the Rupsiabagar – Khasiabara Hydro Electric Project amidst protest. This is clearly an indication that the NTPC will submit this as a final Public Hearing, showing the Ministry of Environment & Forest that the project was supported by the locals.
To paraphrase Marx, capitalism flourishes only by breaking down all resistance. Evidently, this public hearing is also an example of a strong corporate-state-media nexus, which undermines public objections and opposition, looking for every means to breakdown the resistance of the maginalised people.
Posted by Radical Notes April 15, 2008 at 10:59 am in India, Politics
Gilbert Sebastian
On 19 December 2007, P. Govindan Kutty, the editor of Peoples’ March, an English magazine sympathetic to the Maoist movement was picked up by the Kerala police under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. Govindan Kutty was on a long hunger strike in the jail and was released on bail on 24 February 2008. However, the government’s real intention was seen through in the act of imposing a ban on the Peoples March through an order of the District Magistrate of Ernakulam by the time he was released.
Similarly, Prafulla Jha, president of PUCL in Chhattisgarh; Pittala Srisailam, editor of online television Musi TV and co-convener of Telangana Journalists Forum (TJF); and Lachit Bordoloi, secretary general of the human rights organisation, Manab Adhikar Sangram Samiti (MASS) and freelance journalist from Assam were arrested in the months of December 2007 and January 2008. All of them were journalists/human rights activists. Except Bordoloi, with alleged sympathies to the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the other three were supposed to be sympathetic to the Maoist movement. These arrests may be seen in conjunction with the statement on 20 December 2007 by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that “Leftwing extremism is probably the single biggest security challenge to the Indian State” and his vow to ‘eliminate this “virus”’. (See a report on these arrests, dated 22 March 2008 in Tehelka magazine). As someone had insightfully pointed out, it is the paradox of Indian democracy that criminals and mass murderers are lodged in parliament and assemblies while those who stand with the people are hunted out and put behind bars (Srinivas Chava).
Are we to believe that Peoples March was banned mainly to cover up the gross atrocities such as of a State-sponsored militia like the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh? Peoples March has been a rare source of information on the violence and mayhem unleashed by the ‘Salwa Judum’, the Indian State’s dirty war against its own people which according to an independent estimate has resulted in 548 murders, 99 rapes and 3000 incidents of burning houses. (Read, Shubranshu Choudhary 2007: “The state’s purification hunt”, Himal Southasian, vol. 20, no. 12, December, pp. 40-42). People’s March has been an extraordinary publication, the voice of the most important stream of Indian revolution, in its own words. As Prof. Manoranjan Mohanty puts it, “Democratic space for discussion on people’s struggles must be defended.”
The ban is a clear violation of Article 19a, the right to freedom of expression, a fundamental right. Where is the legitimacy of a ‘liberal’ State that does not adhere to the Constitution it swears by? In fact, the ideas in Peoples March are not communal, casteist, or creating any other undesirable division among sections of the population that a ban was warranted against it. (And in this respect, Peoples March has been unlike many other publications in India that are still not banned.) The ideas in Peoples March have been based on the universalistic notions of class struggle. Does it now sound like a joke that the preamble of the Indian Constitution itself says that India is a “sovereign socialist secular democratic republic”?
The ban order of the DM of Ernakulam charges that the ideas in Peoples March bring about “contempt and create disaffection against the Government of India”. Since the neo-liberal State in India is ostensibly anti-people, it is no wonder if this be the case. Espousing the cause of the peoples of Kashmir and the north-east of the country is seen as “hosting anti national contents” (the cited ground on which the web pages of People’s March were blocked earlier). Shouldn’t the government better realise that by banning the expression of certain ideas, they do not cease to be so long as the material bases for these ideas continue to be? That the mainstream media organisations in the country have been rather quiet on these arrests and the subsequent ban on People’s March, exposes their illiberal attitude and complicity. Addressing student dissenters, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself had cited Voltaire in a speech by him in JNU on 14 Nov. 2005: “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.” Where are liberal supporters of Voltaire now?
Posted by Radical Notes April 2, 2008 at 10:57 pm in Politics
Depicting Mao as the Author of the Biggest Political Genocide?
Gilbert Sebastian
Arundhati Roy’s article, “Listening to Grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial and Celebration” (Outlook 4 February 2008) might have, by now, lost its news-value but we hope, the concerns raised should have abiding interest.
Her analysis in a powerful style on the project of ‘union and progress’, the majoritarian quest for an expanded lebensraum (living space), we believe, is much closer to reality than the standard media reporting and academic analyses that seek to skirt a stark depiction of ‘the unthinkable’, trying to present “a more ‘balanced’ happier world” (58). The article was timely in the context of the emergence of Narendra Modi himself as the projected future fuehrer of the Hindutva movement in India.
It has not been really helpful analytically to say, “It’s an old human habit, genocide is.” (52). The increasing incidences of genocides in the era of imperialism (capitalism in its oligopolist stage) needs to be taken note of. The processes of identity formation - cultural construction and demonisation of ‘the Other’ as an object of hatred, perhaps has been an old habit, across different stages of development of human society.
In the case of the Hindutva movement in India, its relationship to neo-liberal globalisation needs to be recognised. Why have the greatest mass murders in India of recent times - the riots following the December 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid and the Gujarat carnage in early 2002 coincided with the neo-liberal reforms initiated since 1991? How the majoritarian Hindutva nationalism complements the project of accumulation of the Indian and global, swadeshi and videshi dominant classes is a question that needs closer scrutiny. A substantial segment of the dominant classes have recognised Hindutva as a viable integrationist principle for articulating the pan-Indian big nation chauvinism. They would take recourse to a Hindutva hardline when their crisis is at its deepest.
Apart from these little reflections based on Arundhati’s article, the most important point we would like to raise here is that having read the article by Arundhati, one is struck by a deep sense of remorse, not because of any inherent impulse at genocide denial but by her very foreclosure of political alternatives or the absence of mention of any collective human agency that could take us beyond the cynical state of the present to a hopeful future of possibilities.
Can we pin our hopes on the ‘left’? Not, of course, on the left that is the left-over of the Nandigram carnage - if we go by the implications of Arundhati’s analysis; and of course, not on a movement with “the ghost of Chairman Mao himself” as its “helmsman”. Obviously because according to her, he has been the author of the biggest of the political genocides in history that she has mentioned. They are: “Suharto in Indonesia (1 million), Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million)” (52). In a cavalier manner, she provides no further explanation of where she got these figures from, as though these were self-evident truths.
It was easier to find many skulls and skeletons in the Soviet Union after the great anti-fascist war. Moreover, the Stalinist line of crushing internal dissent is well-acknowledged. This has, however, not been the case in Maoist China and no one until recently said it so. Arundhati surpasses the figure of 30 million who according to Amartya Sen had perished in China during the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, the agricultural collectivisation drive that happened to coincide with a drought. This itself is a keenly debated claim. (Joan Hinton who was young and active in China during these years had told me in 1996 that she had come across cases of malnutrition and not deaths there during this period.) Whether particular social/political processes can be blamed on an individual leaderships also remains a question besides. Notably, when ‘the Chinese people stood up’, it was not their great achievements in poverty alleviation and agricultural growth within a brief span of time that attracted the attention of Amartya or Arundhati but a famine/genocide. Arundhati cannot be accused of ‘genocide denial’ but its very opposite - ‘genocide affirmation’. Can genocide affirmation have its politics as well? Placating liberal opinion? It may also be recalled that even as the excesses and deviations by the Communist Party of Kampuchea are infamous, the skulls displayed on visual media as having been the victims of Pol Pot’s atrocities had, on scientific examination, turned out to be not even Kampuchean skulls and did not correspond to the period of the alleged genocide.
Condescendingly does Arundhati grant some autonomy of agency to the Indian “footsoldiers” following Mao: “The ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers don’t know who he is. Or what he did.” (60). Mao Zedong taught us the greatest of the truths of Marxism, ‘It is right to rebel’. But can and should rebellion be equated to genocide? Millions of people look up to Mao as their guiding light for revolutions in countries under the yoke of both imperialism and pre-capitalist social relations. It, therefore, becomes a pressing need for all opponents of revolution to slur the image of Mao and if possible, demonise him. And they rest assure that the corporate Communist regime in China today is not going to bring out authentic historical facts to defend Mao.
In her well-known article on displacement through big dams, “The Greater Common Good”, Arundhati had likewise criticised Mao for initiating big dams. Although it is well accepted today that big dams are environmentally hazardous - and we do need to reject Mao in this respect - mainstream environmental consciousness on this count, as far as we know, was non-existent in Maoist China. It may be recalled that mainstream environmental consciousness even in the West had its origins only in early 1960s, probably, with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) which recounted the horrors of the use of pesticides. In any case, China’s record of rehabilitating the displaced people presents a happy contrast to the dubious distinction India has earned in this respect.
It is sad that Arundhati, with her pro-people orientation, should figure among the antagonists of Mao. A reading of Mao’s writing, ‘On Contradiction’ (to cite only one), itself can be an evidence of what he stood for. We would like to cite this one because this is against the very grain of identity-based antagonisms among sections of the masses promoted by those in positions of power and privilege that have even culminated in genocides. Mao Zedong’s golden words during the Cultural Revolution, ‘Never forget class struggle’ will continue to ring in our ears’.
Gilbert Sebastian can be reached at: gilbert.s@rediffmail.com
Posted by Dipankar Basu March 25, 2008 at 8:34 pm in Working Class, Marxism, Labour, Politics
Dipankar Basu, Sanhati
Abstract: This article attempts to throw some light on the following two questions: (1) How does the classical Marxist tradition conceptualize the relationship between the two stages of revolution: democratic and the socialist? (2) Does the democratic revolution lead to deepening and widening capitalism? Is capitalism necessary to develop the productive capacity of a society? The answer to the first question emerges from the idea of the “revolution of permanence” proposed by Marx in 1850, accepted, extended and enriched by Lenin as “uninterrupted revolution” and simultaneously developed by Trotsky as “permanent revolution”. This theoretical development was brilliantly put into practice by Lenin between the February and October revolutions in Russia in 1917. The answer to the second question emerges clearly from the debates on the national and colonial question in the Second Congress of the Third International in 1920. From this debate what emerges is the idea of the democratic revolution led by the proletariat as the start of the process of non-capitalist path of the development of the productive capacity of society, moving towards the future socialist revolution. Rather than deepening and widening capitalism, the democratic revolution under the proletariat leads society in the opposite direction, in a socialist, i.e., proletarian direction. Promoting capitalism is not necessary for the development of the productive capacity of a country.
This brief historical note has been occasioned by recent attempts to justify the championing of capitalism by a communist party – Communist Party of India (Marxist) – as the vehicle for its industrialization program in West Bengal, India. The justification, which argues for the necessity of capitalism by taking recourse to the distinction between the two stages of revolution, rests on an erroneous reading of international working class theory and practice. While it correctly posits the distinction between the two stages of social revolution, it does so mechanically, formally, and in a one-sided manner; the crucial and related question of the relationship between the two stages is not accorded the attention it deserves. That, in my opinion, is the primary source of error and leads to arguing for the necessity of “deepening and widening” capitalism as against initiating efforts to transcend it. Such a reformist position is of course not new within the international working class movement; in fact it is strikingly similar in several crucial respects to the Menshevik position in early twentieth century Russia as also to the stance of “social democracy” that developed from Bernstenian “revisionism” in late nineteenth century Germany. This position, moreover, is decidedly not part of the Leninist tradition - the Bolshevik tradition that developed in Russia - or any revolutionary tradition within Marxism; this should be immediately obvious from the enormous theoretical and political effort that Lenin put in combating its deleterious consequences for the historical project of the Russian proletariat.
The issue of the analytical distinction between the two stages of the world-historical revolution has been accepted within the international working class movement, at least of the Marxist variety, for about 150 years. With the publication of the Communist Manifesto, this issue was more or less settled among communists. In pre-revolutionary Russia, this distinction was accepted by all streams of Marxists: the Legal Marxists, the Economists and the Social-Democrats. This distinction was never the bone of contention in the fiery debates in pre-revolutionary Russia between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Neither was this distinction a major point of departure in pre-revolutionary China; nor is this distinction the point of debate within the Marxist left in India. Hence, merely positing this distinction anew, a century after it was accepted by the international working class movement, is hardly sufficient for the development of a Marxist theoretical position. Attention needs to be instead focused, in my opinion, on the more important issue of correctly conceptualizing the relationship between the two stages.
It is not merely a recognition of the distinction but the conceptualization of the relationship between the two that distinguishes the various streams of the Left; that is as much true today as it has been historically. I will demonstrate, by a careful reading of the historical development of Marxist theory and practice, that it is the conceptualization of this relationship that has distinguished the revolutionary from the reformist Marxist stream at crucial historical junctures: Marx and Engels from the other socialists during the middle of the 19th century; the Legal Marxists and the Economists from the early Social-Democrats (including the young Lenin) during the last decade of the 19th century in pre-revolutionary Russia; the Mensheviks from the Bolsheviks in later years leading up to and after the October revolution; Lenin (and Trotsky) from the other Bolsheviks between the February and October revolutions.
Before beginning the main story, two clarifications are in order. First, I would like to state more precisely the sense in which the word “revolution” is used, and second, I would like to indicate the two very different senses in which the phrase “social democrat” will be used throughout this paper. Revolution, in this paper, stands for social revolution, a phenomenon which has been defined by Theda Skocpol’s in the following way:
“Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below… What is unique to social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through intense socio-political conflicts in which class struggles play a key role.” (Skocpol, 1979)
As Foran (2005) has argued, there are three important characteristics of a social revolution (embedded in the above definition) that needs to be always kept in mind: rapid political change, deep and lasting structural transformation of the economy and active mass participation; whenever I refer to revolution, I will mean the explosive combination of these three elements.
The second point is a terminological clarification regarding the two diametrically opposed use of the phrase “social democrat” in this paper. Social-democrat, with the all important hyphen, will refer to the Marxist revolutionaries in Russia; that is precisely how they referred to themselves and I want to stick to that terminology as well. The hyphen between “social” and “democrat” denotes the indissoluble link between the dual historical tasks of the international proletariat, a theme we will return to constantly throughout this paper. Recall that the first Marxist political party in Russia was called the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP); though Lenin’s April Theses in 1917 had ended with the proposal to change the name of the RSDWP, it was only in 1918 that the party formally started using the term that Marx had preferred: communist.
Social democrat, without the hyphen, on the other hand will refer to representatives of the reformist trend in the international working class movement: Bernstein and his followers, the later Kautsky, the later Plekhanov and the Mensheviks in Russia certainly but also later day reformist socialists in Europe and Asia. Note, in passing, that social democracy has a long history, especially in Western Europe, and is marked by certain unmistakable characteristics which we can easily discern in our midst even today: legal opposition within a bourgeois parliamentary framework, willingness to ally with sundry bourgeois parties, undue and an over emphasis on the need for reforms within the system, indefinite postponement of decisive struggles, the attempt to “manage” the contradiction between labour and capital rather than to resolve it in the favour of labour, etc. The reformist and the revolutionary streams also differ markedly in their understanding of social revolution: for the reformists, revolution will emerge ready made from the womb of history by its ineluctable laws; the role of human intervention, though formally accepted, is relegated to a secondary position. For revolutionaries like Lenin and the Bolsheviks and Trotsky, on the other hand, revolution has to be first and foremost made by human intervention, mass political action riding on the tide of history.
Marx: From the Manifesto to the Communist League
In the Communist Manifesto published on the eve of a revolutionary wave in Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels had summarized the materialist understanding of historical development. The struggle between social classes was identified as the motor force of historical change, with the victorious class rapidly reorganizing the whole structure of material production accompanied by changes in the political, cultural and ideological spheres of social life. Generalizing from English and French history, Marx and Engels identified two stages in this world-historical movement: the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the proletarian-socialist revolution. The bourgeois revolution, led by the revolutionary bourgeoisie, in alliance with the oppressed peasantry, would overthrow the feudal order and usher in bourgeois capitalism. The development of capitalism would go hand in and with the growth and development (political, social, ideological and technological) of the proletariat, the grave digger of capitalism; in due time, when the productive forces of society had developed to support a higher form of social organization and when the proletariat had become mature and strong politically, it would usher in the socialist revolution and begin the process of the transcendence of class society.
Quite early on Marx had started realizing the limitations of the strict schema of the two stages of revolution (the bourgeois-democratic to be followed by the proletarian-socialist) that he had generalized from English and French history and that he, along with Engels, had so eloquently summarized in the Communist Manifesto. There are two historical reasons which, to our mind, prompted Marx to question this schema. First, the whole generalization referred to a historical period where the proletariat had not yet entered into political stage; if the proletariat were to enter the historical stage even before the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that would change the historical dynamics radically. Second, there might be historical reasons because of which the bourgeoisie of a particular country is “weak” and therefore incapable of and unwilling to lead the democratic revolution to completion; and so in this case, the strict schema presented in the Communist Manifesto would again need modification. With the advantage of hindsight we can see that the modifications that would need to be worked out would specifically relate to two issues: the relationship between the two revolutions and the class-leadership in the democratic stage of the revolution.
A close reading shows that even in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had taken care to allow possibilities of different trajectories, than the one they had sketched, in concrete circumstances. For instance, they had explicitly referred to the potential weakness of the German bourgeoisie and therefore hinted at the possibility of the proletariat having to take the responsibility of the democratic revolution. Once the German bourgeoisie had shown it’s true colors in 1848, whereby it regrouped with feudal elements to keep the proletariat in check and thereby aborted the democratic revolution, Marx had started his decisive move away from the schema of the Manifesto. While maintaining the analytical distinction between the two stages, he drew a much closer link between them. This more nuanced position was explicitly brought to the fore in his address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in London in 1850. Drawing lessons from the recent revolutionary upsurge in Europe and looking to the future, he drew attention of the international working class to the essential continuity between the two stages of the revolution, what Lenin would later characterize as the “indissoluble link” between the two revolutions.
“While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible … it is our interest and task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one.” (Marx, 1850)
The two most crucial, and intimately related, ideas that stand out in this speech are the utmost necessity of maintaining the independence of the proletariat vis-a-vis the liberal bourgeoisie and of realizing the continuity of the two revolutions in practice. Arguing for the creation, in all situations and at all costs, of an independent party of the proletariat, Marx had exhorted the proletariat at the same time to aim for the “revolution of permanence”.
“But they [i.e., the proletariat] must do the utmost for their final victory by clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible, and by not allowing themselves to be seduced for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois into refraining from the independent organization of the party of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The Revolution of Permanence.” (Marx, 1850)
This remarkable document, in essence, foreshadows much of what emerged as Bolshevism in late nineteenth century Russia. The tight and indissoluble link between the twin tasks of the proletariat (and hence the indissoluble link between the democratic and the socialist revolutions), the utmost importance of maintaining an independent political position of the proletariat, the utter necessity of avoiding tailism in practical politics, themes that were hammered out later by the Bolsheviks in the heat of the Russian revolution are already present in Marx’s speech to the Communist League. It is clear that Lenin’s idea of an “uninterrupted revolution”, a position he stressed in his debates with the reformists in Russia, and Trotsky’s idea of a “permanent revolution” are both derived from this speech of Marx.
Note however that the formulation of the necessity of the “leadership” of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution is still not explicitly developed by Marx. Revolutionary social-democrats in Russia, reflecting on and reacting to the specific context of the Russian revolution extended the classical Marxist framework by taking the idea of the class-independence of the proletariat, which is already there in Marx, one step further by arguing for its leadership position in the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
Legal Marxists and Economists: Early Debates in Russia
The origin of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) can be traced back to a relatively little known “conference” of nine men in Minsk in March 1898. Though none of the nine men played any leading role in the subsequent revolutionary history of Russia, the conference did come out with a “manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party” as a precursor of later-day party programmes. The manifesto unequivocally accepted Marx’s historical account of the two stages of the future social revolution (as worked out by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto): bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist revolution. More important and interesting from our viewpoint, the Minsk conference manifesto went on to argue that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying through the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the end and thus identified the young Russian proletariat as the historical agent on whose able shoulders fell the “dual task” of both revolutions: the democratic and the socialist.
When, therefore, the second Congress - the defining congress of the Russian revolution, the birthplace of Bolshevism as a political stream - of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) met in 1903 to debate on the party programme, it worked within the framework inaugurated by the conference of 1898. It started with the dual tasks of the Russian proletariat, i.e., the twin tasks of the democratic and the socialist revolution, as an axiom, as a point of departure, as a self-evident historical and political truth; there was no disagreement or debate on this point with the RSDWP. The real debate was on how to define the content of these revolutions and on how to define the relationship between the two; it was the issue of the relationship that was to rend the RSDWP into two factions, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. But before looking at that debate, we must spend some time studying the debates that preceded the second Congress, the debates of the young Lenin with the Legal Marxists and the Economists; a study of the early debates is interesting and useful because many of the positions of the Mensheviks were repetitions of either the Economists’ or the Legal Marxists’ discredited positions, positions against which the whole RSDWP had argued during these early years.
Before the RSDWP could consolidate the political-economic tasks of the proletariat concisely in a party programme, it had to successfully argue against three contemporary socialist trends within late-nineteenth century Russia: the Narodniks, the Legal Marxists and the Economists. The theoretical arguments against the Narodniks were largely, and successfully, carried home by Plekhanov, the Father of Russian Marxism; when Lenin did join the fray, he largely repeated Plekhanov’s arguments and marshaled empirical evidence in favour of the general Marxist point about the development of capitalism in Russia. From this he drew an important political conclusion that separated the Social-Democrats from the Narodniks forever: the proletariat and not the peasantry was to be the historical agent of social revolution in Russia. The development of capitalism in Russian agriculture was, according to Lenin, accelerating the class divisions among the peasantry; the peasantry, as a single, homogeneous social entity was rapidly disappearing and so basing a strategy of social revolution on this vanishing social entity was historic folly. The only stable social class that was emerging and strengthening itself with capitalism and whose interests were in contradiction to capitalism was the proletariat; hence, argued Lenin, the only feasible strategy of revolution could be one led by and in the long-term interests of the proletariat.
As to the other two trends, Legal Marxism and Economism, it was Lenin’s energetic intervention and crystal-clear prose that ripped apart their arguments and exposed their utter hollowness. As Lenin remarked several times later in his life, the debate with the Legal Marxists and the Economists foreshadowed the subsequent, fierce and often bitter, debates between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In both debates, as also his debates with the Narodniks, what distinguished Lenin’s position from his opponents was his consistent, unwavering and uncompromising class viewpoint, the viewpoint of the emerging Russian proletariat.
Lenin’s debate with the Legal Marxists and the Economists (rather than with the Narodniks) is more relevant for our current discussion because this debate related directly to the issue of the correct understanding of the relationship between the dual tasks of the proletariat. The tidy schema of revolution worked out by Marx and Engels in the Communist manifesto was a generalization from English and French history, as we have already remarked. It distinguished analytically between the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions and stressed the historical precedence of the former to the latter. We have already seen how Marx himself modified this schema in the concrete context of nineteenth century Germany; the Legal Marxists, on the other hand, stuck to this schema in a most doctrinaire fashion (foreshadowing the whole history of social democracy and reformism) and with disastrous consequences.
Accepting the Marxist distinction between the two revolutions and the historical precedence of one over the other led the Legal Marxists to argue for the reformist path to the transcendence of capitalism. One of it’s leading proponents, Peter Struve, chastised Russian socialists for concerning themselves with fanciful and unrealizable projects of “heaven storming”; he, instead, wanted them to patiently “learn in the school of capitalism”. The echo of that Legal Marxist injunction can still be heard, via Bernstein’s “revisionism” in late-nineteenth Germany, in social democratic circles in India today! This was, of course, an abandonment of the proletarian viewpoint, as Lenin pointed out. The mistake of the Legal Marxists lay precisely in an incorrect understanding of the relationship between the dual tasks of the proletariat. The democratic revolution was not an end in itself, as the Legal Marxists tended to implicitly suggest, but was inseparably tied with it’s twin, the socialist revolution. It is not that the Legal Marxists did not accept the necessity of the socialist revolution; being Marxists, they had to accept it as later-day social democrats did. But this acceptance came with the caveat that the period separating the two revolutions was so large that in essence one could very well forget about the socialist revolution at the moment and instead engage in activities to “learn in the school of capitalism”.
Though the Economists took a different lesson from the neat schema of the Communist Manifesto as compared to the Legal Marxists, they arrived at the same practical conclusions. For the Economists, it was important to draw a sharp distinction between the economic and the political spheres. In their opinion, workers were only concerned with economic issues, issues of wage and work, that directly effected their daily lives; they were not concerned with political issues, issues of political freedom and governance and power. The political sphere, according to the Economists, was the sole preserve of intellectuals; since, moreover, the current conditions called for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, socialist struggles, i.e., struggles for the capture of state power by the proletariat, were pushed into the indefinite future. Juxtaposing a sharp distinction between the economic and the political with their reading of the schema of the Communist Manifesto led the Economists to suggest that socialists should restrict themselves “to support[ing] the economic struggle of the proletariat and to participat[ing] in liberal opposition activity”. What was ruled out was an independent political party of the working class, which axiomatically ruled out revolutionary political activity.
In an early piece on this issue in 1898, Lenin made clear the correct Marxist understanding of the matter and distinguished the social-democrats sharply from the Legal Marxists and the Economists:
“The object of the practical activities of the Social-Democrats is, as is well known, to lead the class struggle of the proletariat and to organize that struggle in both its manifestations: socialist (the fight against the capitalist class aimed at destroying the class system and organizing socialist society), and democratic (the fight against absolutism aimed at winning political liberty in Russia and democratizing the political and social system of Russia). We said as is well known. And indeed, from the very moment they appeared as a separate social-revolutionary trend, the Russian Social-Democrats have always quite definitely indicated this object of their activities, have always emphasized the dual manifestation and content of the class struggle of the proletariat and have always insisted on the inseparable connection between their socialist and democratic tasks — a connection clearly expressed in the name they have adopted.” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 327)
The inseparability of the dual tasks of the proletariat derives, according to Lenin, from the following two facts: first, the proletariat can only emancipate itself fully, and thereby society, through political liberty. Hence, it supports the struggle for political liberty against absolutism and feudal oppression as its own struggle, as the political bed on which will grow the socialist struggle. This is the reason why the class conscious proletariat supports every revolutionary movement against the present social system, why it supports the struggle of progressive classes against reactionary classes and strata in general. Second, among all the classes and strata fighting for democracy, the proletariat is the only thoroughly consistent, unreserved, staunch and resolute supporter of democracy; it is the only class which is ready to take the fight for democracy to its end, to its natural culmination, to its full completion. Every other class, by its very position within the class structure of society, can only provide qualified support to the struggle for democracy; their democracy is half hearted, it always looks back, as Lenin put it. An understanding of the social-democratic party as “deriving its strength from the combination of socialist and democratic struggle into the single, indivisible class struggle of the … proletariat” remained the hallmark of Bolshevism right through the tumultuous days of the victorious October revolution.
It is this insistence on the uninterruptedness of the twin revolutions that found expression in the Bolshevik formulation of the proletariat as the leader of both the revolutions; and it is the recognition of this historical role of the proletariat that informed the refusal of the Bolsheviks to relinquish the leadership role to the bourgeoisie, to become its political “tail”. It is the same dogged insistence, so strikingly consistent, that led to the split with the Mensheviks in 1903.
Two interesting and important things emerge from these early debates. First, some of the ideas that were to dominate the subsequent debates of the Russian revolution, the ideas moreover that would separate the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks (the revolutionaries from the reformists) and would separate Lenin (and Trotsky) from the rest of the Bolsheviks between the February and the October revolutions, were introduced within the Russian working-class movement at this juncture. It is these ideas, among others, that would be refined, deepened, enriched and applied with uncanny consistency in the subsequent history of the Russian revolution. Second, that an eclectic, half-hearted, formal and mechanical acceptance of Marxism can be combined with utterly reformist politics came to the fore with rare clarity in Russian history for the first time during these early debates. As later events demonstrated, and continues to demonstrate to this day, formal acceptance of Marxism can often be combined with reformist politics.
A closer reading of international working class history demonstrates that acceptance of Marxism alongside reformist practice is already hidden as a possibility in the formulation of the “dual tasks” of the proletariat. It must be recalled the formulation of the “dual tasks” found its way into the programme of the RSDWP in the distinction between the minimum and the maximum programmes. The minimum programme referred to the set of measures that could be implemented within, and without challenging, a bourgeois democratic setup. Following the Communist Manifesto, these included abolition of private property in land, a progressive income tax, abolition of inheritance, free education for all and other such concrete measures of bourgeois reform. The maximum programme, on the other hand, enshrined revolutionary aspirations, the overthrow of capitalism and the beginning of socialist construction. The distinction between the minimum and maximum programmes thus provided space for reformist politics by a gradual and subtle decoupling of the two programmes and shifting the emphasis on the former.
“One of the unforeseen effects of this division [between the minimum and and maximum programmes] was to attract into social-democratic parties a large body of members who by conviction or temperament were more interested in the minimum than in the maximum programme; and in countries where some of the minimum demands had in fact been realized, and others seemed likely to be realized in the future, through the process of bourgeois democracy, the parties tended more and more to relegate the demands of the maximum programme to the category of remote theoretical aims concentrate party activities on the realization of the minimum programme.” (Carr, 1952, p. 17-18, emphasis added).
Lessons of 1905: Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
Though the dispute between what later came to be known as the Bolsheviks (“the majority”) and the Mensheviks (“the minority”) during the second congress of the RSDWP in 1903 seemed to rest on an issue of party statute, i.e., what should be the qualification for party membership, later events made clear that deeper issues of theory and practice were involved. As the bitter debates following the split in the party were to make clear, the schism in the RSDWP really rested on different ways of understanding the relationship between the dual tasks of the proletariat in concrete, practical terms. This followed quite clearly from the diametrically opposite political lessons the two streams drew from the failed revolution of 1905. The difference can be most clearly seen if we organize the discussion around the following two questions: (1) relationship of the two revolutions, and (2) the role of the peasantry.
The Mensheviks adhered to the cut-and-dried formula about the strict sequence of the two revolutions that they picked up in a doctrinaire fashion from the Communist Manifesto. For the Mensheviks, the bourgeois revolution had to come first and so far the Bolsheviks were in agreement with them. The doctrinaire understanding of the Mensheviks, their intellectual sterility, came to the fore when they went on, from this correct premise, to insist that it was “only through the bourgeois revolution that capitalism could receive its full development in Russia, and, until that development occurred, the Russian proletariat could not become strong enough to initiate and carry out the socialist revolution” (Carr, 1950, p.39). In other words, the two revolutions must be separated by an indefinite period of time during which capitalism needs to develop, flourish, and display its bourgeois magic.
In effect, therefore, the Mensheviks never fully agreed with Lenin’s 1898 formulation of the “indissoluble link” between the two revolutions; in fact their position was a regression even from the position worked out by the first Congress in 1898 in Minsk. That is why they could insist on allowing capitalism in Russia to receive it’s “fullest development” and only then initiating the struggle of the proletariat for socialism. The immediate and practical implication of the Menshevik understanding was what Lenin termed political “tailism”, i.e., allowing the proletariat as-a-class to become an appendage to, a follower of, the bourgeoisie in the democratic revolutionary struggle instead of forcibly usurping the leadership position for itself.
The Menshevik position followed from an incorrect class analysis of Russian society; their chief error was to neglect the emergence of the proletariat on the historical scene and to take the cue from the Marx of the Communist League to re-work the schema of the Manifesto. Thus, on the eve of the revolution, one of their leading spokesmen could say:
“If we take a look at the arena of the struggle in Russia then what do we see? Only two forces: the tsarist autocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie, which is now organized and possesses a huge specific weight. The working mass, however, is atomized and can do nothing; as an independent force we do not exist; and thus our task consists in supporting the second force, the liberal bourgeoisie, and encouraging it and in no case intimidating it by presenting our own independent political demands.” (quoted in Zinoviev, 1923).
This is precisely where Lenin differed sharply from Menshevik class analysis and politics; Lenin’s analysis of the the 1905 revolution started in fact with the recognition of the entrance of the Russian proletariat on the historical scene. From this fact he drew the conclusion that Marx had hinted at in his speech to the Central Committee of the Communist League in 1850: the bourgeoisie was neither willing nor capable of completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution. This was both because it was weak (lacking in independent development) and because it realized that completion of the democratic revolution carried within it the danger of the proletariat’s political ascendancy. Thus, completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, as a prelude to the consummation of the socialist revolution, fell on the shoulders of the Russian proletariat. The tight link between the two revolutions, a position that Lenin had already worked out in 1898, was reiterated once again:
“From the democratic revolution we shall begin immediately and within the measure of our strength – the strength of the conscious and organized proletariat – to make the transition to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half way” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 237)
According to Lenin’s analysis, two important conditions had to be satisfied for the Russian proletariat to complete its dual historical tasks: (1) successful alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, and (2) victorious socialist revolutions in European countries. It was on the crucial question of the alliance with the peasantry that Lenin differed sharply not only from the Mensheviks but also from Trotsky (who had otherwise worked out a position very similar to Lenin’s). For both the Mensheviks and Trotsky, the peasantry was a repository of reaction; while Trotsky arrived at this incorrect conclusion on the basis of his experience of the 1905 revolution, the Mensheviks adhered to this position out of their doctrinaire understanding of Marxism. Lenin, on the other hand, realized that though the peasantry was not revolutionary in the Narodnik sense but it’s force could still be harnessed for the revolution because at that juncture it was less interested in protecting private property than in confiscating the land-owners’ land, the dominant form of rural private property (Carr, 1950).
Thus, Lenin arrived at an elegant formulation of the role of the peasantry in the revolution. The proletariat, in alliance with the whole peasantry would complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution and overthrow feudalism, absolutism and the monarchy despite the vacillation, or even opposition, of the bourgeoisie. This would immediately lead to the next stage of the revolution, where the proletariat would have to split the peasantry along class lines, ally with the landless labourers and the poor peasantry against the rich peasants and start the transition towards socialism.
This second point, where the urban proletariat had to ally with the rural proletariat was an immensely important practical point. Between the February and October revolutions, where Lenin discerned precisely this transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the socialist stage taking place, the utmost importance of an independent organization of the rural proletariat was repeatedly indicated. For instance in the third of the Letters From Afar written on March 11(24) 1917, which discusses the issue of the proletarian militia, he says:
“The prime and most important task, and one that brooks no delay, is to set up organizations of this kind [i.e., Soviets of Workers’ Deputies] in all parts of Russia without exception, for all trades and strata of the proletarian and semi-proletarian population without exception…for the entire mass of the peasantry our Party … should especially recommend Soviets of wage-workers and Soviets of small tillers who do not sell grain, to be formed separately from the well-to-do peasants. Without this, it will be impossible … to conduct a truly proletarian policy in general…” (Lenin, 1917, in Zizek, p. 41)
In a footnote, he adds: “In rural districts a struggle will now develop for the small and, partly middle peasants. The landlords, leaning on the well-to-do peasants, will try to lead them into subordination to the bourgeoisie. Leaning on the rural wage-workers and rural poor, we must lead them into the closest alliance with the urban proletariat.” Note that in Lenin’s formulation, the idea of an “agrarian revolution” as the axis of the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not explicitly there; the experience of the Chinese revolution would be required to extend the classical Marxist framework further by explicitly theorizing the nature and complexities of the agrarian revolution in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation as part of what Mao called the new democratic revolution. This constant and critical engagement with received wisdom is the hallmark of a living revolutionary tradition.
Revolution at the Gates: Between February and October 1917, and Beyond
The February 1917 revolution in Russia caught all the socialists unawares; neither had they planned for it nor had they participated in it. This was true as much of the Mensheviks as of the Bolsheviks. The revolution had given rise to a situation of “dual power”: a Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie and the landlords and a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants (in the form of soldiers) in the form of the Soviets. The crucial question that again divided the revolutionaries from the reformists was a correct understanding of the relationship between the two.
For the Mensheviks, the problem was resolved in a rather straightforward manner. In keeping with their schematic reading of Marxism, they saw the task of the proletariat at the present moment to be one of supporting the bourgeoisie and helping it complete the democratic revolution; hence they argued for the Soviets supporting the Provisional Government, pushing for democratic reforms from behind rather than leading them, in short aiding in the “fullest development” of bourgeois capitalism till such time that it [capitalism] exhausted all it’s progressive possibilities and the proletariat became mature and strong enough to make the final bid for power. All the Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, accepted the Menshevik position in essence. It was left to the political genius of Lenin to break through this reformist consensus.
Exiled in Switzerland and getting news about Russian development only through the bourgeois press, Lenin had already started developing the essentials of revolutionary understanding about the transition from the first to the second stage of the revolution; his Letters From Afar give indications of the direction of his thinking. To the complete astonishment of his followers, the first public statement that Lenin made immediately after his arrival in the Finland station in Petrograd in April 1917 was to hail the proletarian-socialist revolution and not to dish out homilies for the bourgeois-democratic revolution! When he presented his April Theses within party circles the next day, outlining a program for the transition to a socialist stage of the revolution, he was completely isolated. Bogdanov is said to have constantly interrupted his speech with shouts of “Delirium, the delirium of a madman,” and not one Bolshevik other than Kollantai spoke in favour of his plans. When it was published in the Pravda, the editorial team distanced itself from the argument by attributing it to an individual and not to the Party.
Between the February and the October revolution, Lenin applied with ferocious consistency the theory that he had developed so painstakingly in his debates with the reformist Mensheviks. Formulations of the indissoluble link between the two stages of the revolution and the associated idea of the leadership of the proletariat (in alliance with the peasantry) in the democratic revolution, which he had argued for tirelessly over the years were now about to be realized in practice. The fact that the proletariat and the peasantry (in the form of soldiers) had established an independent, revolutionary site of political power in the form of the Soviets was the crucial signal to Lenin that the bourgeois-democratic revolution had been completed and that the transition to the next stage was underway. Since there could not be two powers in the State, only one of the two – proletarian or bourgeois – would survive in the ensuing struggle that he could foresee. The task of the proletariat, therefore, was to start preparing for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and transferring all power to the Soviets, and not to stand up in support of the bourgeoisie, as the Mensheviks argued. Waiting for the “fullest development” of capitalism, as reformist doctrine suggested, was tantamount to ensuring that the Soviets got crushed by force like the Paris Commune in 1871.
Note that in Lenin’s insistence on the completion of the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution there is no place for the discourse of productive forces or the development of capitalism. It was not that capitalism had flourished and the productive forces had developed adequately in Russia between February and October 1917 to warrant the call for a socialist revolution; that was obviously not the case as the Bolsheviks were acutely aware. It was rather the case that the establishment of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry was envisioned as an alternative path of development, a non-capitalist framework of social relations for the development of the productive forces. It is of course not true that the democratic revolution establishes socialism; its social and economic content remains bourgeois, but with the proletariat at the helm of affairs, a transition towards socialism is initiated, the movement is imparted an unmistakable socialist, i.e., proletarian orientation.
In the context of imperialism, questions about the character of the two revolutions, about the role of communists in them and about the question of the attitude towards capitalism in the colonial and semi-colonial countries had been discussed threadbare in the Second Congress of the Communist International in July 1920. Even though there were disagreements between Lenin, the official rapporteur on the “national and colonial question”, and M. N. Roy, who presented his own theses on the question, they came out with one striking agreement: where the working class was victorious and able to establish its political hegemony, it could lead the country (essentially the peasant masses) onto the path of socialism without the intervening capitalist stage of development. Presenting his report to the Congress on July 26, Lenin summarized this point of agreement as follows:
“… are we to consider as correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of economic development is inevitable for backward nations now on the road to emancipation and among whom a certain advance towards progress is to be seen since the war? We replied in the negative. If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet governments come to their aid with all the means at their disposal – in that event it will be mistaken to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through the capitalist stage of development… the Communist International should advance the proposition, with appropriate theoretical grounding, that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage.” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 244, emphasis added).
The essence of the democratic revolution under the leadership of the proletariat is the inauguration of a non-capitalist path of economic and social development. As Lenin points in the same report that we have just quoted from, forms of socialist organization, i.e. Soviets, can and should be formed not only in a proletarian context but also in a context marked by “peasant feudal and semi-feudal relations”. It is obvious that these institutions would impart the socialist orientation to the whole movement, would form the seeds of the future socialist society, seeds moreover nurtured, supported, defended and deepened in a still predominantly bourgeois society. To insist, as some have done recently, that the task of the proletariat during the democratic stage of the world historical revolution is to work for deepening capitalism, instead of forging a non-capitalist path of development through Soviet forms of organization, is to turn 150 years of international revolutionary working class theory and practice on its head.
Conclusion
The Menshevik position about the “fullest development” of capitalism being a necessary condition for the launching of the socialist struggle finds echoes in India today with the insistence on the development of the “most thorough-going and broad-based” capitalism being the precondition for initiating the socialist struggle. While it is hardly surprising that such a position finds political expression in inveterate “tailism”, what really is rather more difficult to believe is the accompanying ahistorical rhetoric of “different” capitalisms. It almost seems to have been asserted that we can choose among the different varieties of capitalisms being offered by history, limited only by our powers of imagination. Which one do you want comrade, history seems to have asked? Well, the social democrats answered, we want the one which is technologically progressive (leads to the fullest development of the productive forces) and also looks after the welfare of the workers and peasantry (through social reforms and huge expenditures in health and education and nutrition). Does the march of history and the development of the structural contradictions of global capitalism at the beginning of the twenty first century afford us the this luxury, this luxury to choose between capitalisms, between good and bad capitalisms? One is reminded of how Marx had chastised Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy for wanting capitalism without it’s socio-economic ills. The social democrats in India seem hell bent on committing the same mistake all over again.
References
Carr, E. H. The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Volume One. The Macmillan Company. 1950.
———— The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Volume Two. The Macmillan Company. 1952.
Foran, J. Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions. Cambridge University Press. 2005
Lenin, V. I. Collected Works. Fourth Edition, Progress Publishers. 1965 (various volumes).
Marx, K. Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. March 1850, in On Revolution, The Karl Marx Library, edited and translated by Saul K. Padover. McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1971.
Skocpol, T. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge University Press. 1979.
Zinoviev, G. History of the Bolshevik Party. New Park Publications. 1974 [1923].
Zizek, S. (editor), Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, V. I. Lenin. Verso. 2002.
Posted by Pratyush Chandra July 6, 2007 at 10:22 am in Marxism, Politics
A few months back, a comrade associated with a communist organisation in India circulated a question - “Are there no possibilities of outside-party movements now?” This question is already internationally debated, prominently within a large section of radicals, who have either been part of the party based movements or have struggled fervently against what could be called the party’s tendency to “substitute” the spirit of self-emancipatory struggles through its organisational conservatism and control. However, this question has been reframed in various ways, especially as, “Is there any possibility of party movements now?” The issue has become all the more relevant in the context of recent revolutionary upsurges in Latin America, given the rising scepticism among the traditional left and jubilation among the non-party/post-party left.
Recent arguments and endeavours for building a unified revolutionary party in Venezuela to spearhead the Bolivarian transformation beyond the present stage have once again brought to focus the issues of party, party structure and its relationship to movements. In India, where the ‘communist movement’ despite its splintering has been a decisive force both within state politics and radical politics, the question has become significant with mushrooming of diverse varieties of movements independent of party influences. Also, I believe, this question of party and beyond party has always been a central concern in socialist and working class movements the world over (many times as discussions over the dialectic of spontaneity and organisation).
I
Any “yes-no” answer to the above-mentioned question is bound to be refuted by counter-examples. In fact, a crucial part of the answer to that question lies in understanding movement, party and party building as processes, in their fluidity, not as fixtures imposing themselves on the spontaneity of the masses. If a party is organically linked to a movement, then it perpetually recreates itself in the moments of that movement. A revolutionary party is nothing more than an organisation of the militants of a revolutionary movement. You can have a group-structure (well-organised or loose) prior to any movement, but until and unless it refounds itself within the movement, it generally polices the popular energy.
There are innumerable examples of movements throughout the world that can claim to be partyless or above/beyond parties - prominent among them are the Venezuelan, Argentine and Zapatistas in Mexico, anti-globalisation movements etc. However, there are numerous groups, even traditional party structures operating within most of these movements - but none of them individually can claim these movements to be ‘theirs’. What is a movement which is not more than a party? But in the very “organisation” of all these movements, we find a continuous party building process or rather processes going on in the attempts to give definite expressions to the goals and visions of the movements.
So, in my opinion, to put it rather schematically, what we witness in the formative processes of a movement is that groups or group-structures (it is immaterial whether they call themselves parties or not), with their own prior movemental experiences come into contact with mass spontaneity - where they are either reborn as groups of “militants” trying to give expression to the movemental needs and goals or they come as predefined structures shaping the movement according to their own fixed needs and goals (for example, to win elections etc).
When I say they “come”, it does not mean that these groups are not there. But their there-ness is defined by the consolidation and institutionalisation of their prior experiences, gains and failures. During these latter processes, these groups either congeal as having interests which are now accommodated within the system or they are ready to unlearn and relearn during the course of new struggles of the oppressed and the exploited. In the first case, they are there as part of the hegemony or as its agencies (conscious or subconscious), and in the second case, they are “reborn” as groups or parties of militants, of organic intellectuals - intellectuals organically linked to the working class, as Gramsci would put.
On this perpetual making and remaking of the organisation and party within and with relation to movements, Marx made a very interesting observation in his letter to Friedrich Bolte (November 23, 1871), where he recapitulates the role and problems of the First International:
“The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point… [O]ut of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.”
It is important to remember and grasp the dialectics of Marx’s dual assertion about the need of a communist party, on the one hand, and what, as Engels asserted in his 1888 preface of the English edition of the Communist Manifesto, “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself”. The latter was already there in the General Rules of the First International (”That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”). In his Critique of Gotha Programme too, while criticising the Lasalleans, Marx says, “The international activity of the working classes does not in any way depend on the existence of the International Working Men’s Association.” Marx clearly rejects here any substitutionist tendency, which has been rampant within the workers and peasants’ movements in India and elsewhere, as the ‘vanguard’ organisations attempt to “possess” movements. A striking example is the following quote from the party programme of the largest constituent of the parliamentary left in India:
“The people’s democratic front cannot successfully be built and the revolution cannot attain victory except under the leadership of the working class and its political party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist).”
In the above-quoted letter to Bolte, Marx made a very illuminating remark on the function of sectism within the working class movement, which can be a lesson for all of us today:
“The International was founded in order to replace the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real organisation of the working class for struggle. …The Internationalists could not have maintained themselves if the course of history had not already smashed up the sectarian system. The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers’ movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are (historically) justified, the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary. Nevertheless what history has shown everywhere was repeated within the International. The antiquated makes an attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form.”
As the most recent and clear example of “the antiquated” making an “attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form” are, what Michael Lebowitz calls, the “glum faces” in reaction to Chavez’s call for a unified party in Venezuela. To resist the replacement of “the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real organisation of the working class for struggle” at the time when the working class has attained maturity is “essentially reactionary”.
In India, too, at the grassroots level the labouring classes have time and again come together and demonstrated their will and energy to move beyond the systemic logic, but the presence of the “antiquated” becomes a hurdle in transforming this solidarity into a decisive challenge to the system. This hurdle is perpetuated by schematically subordinating the working class consciousness (dubbed “economistic”) to the “politics” of parties. The party becomes an organisation above class rather than “the organisation of what already exists within the class” (Mario Tronti), in other words, as the organisation of class capacity. Hence the issue of class seizure and control of production apparatuses and means of production as a challenge to capitalist hegemony transforming the social relations is relegated to a secondary level, while the issue of ensuring formal political consolidation and stability in a competitive setup becomes the end of party politics. The issue of posing class alternatives to capitalist regime of accumulation is sidelined in the process of the “accumulation of power”.
However, this “antiquated” cannot be fought by wishing away the notion of “party”, it can only be done by viewing party building as a process with all its contradictions and as a continuous class struggle, including against internalised hegemonies - against labour aristocrats and party bureaucrats.
II
In West Bengal (in fact, everywhere in India) the working class and the poor peasantry have outgrown the traditional left. This is not something new and to be lamented upon. It always happens that organisations develop according to the contemporary needs of the class struggle, and are bound to be institutionalised, and even coopted, becoming hurdles for further battles, not able to channel their forces for new exigencies of class dynamics and struggle. This happens so because in the process of a struggle, a major segment devoted to the needs of this struggle is caught-up in the networks it has established for their fulfillment. It is unable to detach itself from the fruits of the struggle, therefore losing its vitality and is overwhelmed by the existential needs.
In the name of consolidation of movemental gains, what is developed is a kind of ideologisation, a fetish - organisation for organisation’s sake. This leads to the organisation’s and its leadership’s cooption in the hegemonic setup (obviously not just in the formal apparatuses) which in turn due to struggles has to concede some space to new needs and aspirations. In fact, this is how capitalism reproduces itself politically. And this is how societal hegemonies gain agencies within radical organisations, and are organisationally internalised - developing aristocracies and bureaucracies.
Two important points regarding the recent agitations in West Bengal can be fruitful for us in understanding the above-mentioned dynamics:
1) As prominent Marxist-Feminist historian Tanika Sarkar says, “an amazing measure of peasant self-confidence and self-esteem that we saw at Singur and at Nandigram” is a result of whatever limited land reforms the Left Front (LF) initiated and is in the “very long and rich tradition of the Left politics and culture”.
2) The price of state power that helped sustain this was the cooption of the LF in the hegemonic policy regime, which is neoliberal for now. So the vested interests that developed during these struggles and cooption led to a situation where “[b]eyond registration of sharecroppers and some land redistribution, no other forms of agrarian restructuring were imagined.” Also, “industries were allowed to die away, leaving about 50,000 dead factories and the virtual collapse of the jute industry”, as competition and the flight of capital were not challenged (which probably in the federal setup of India could not be challenged) by questioning the nature of production relations.
However, there is no fatalism in the above view - the radical vitality of an organisation/party is contingent upon the sharpening of struggle between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies within an organisation, which in turn is embedded within the overall class struggle, i.e., it all depends on class balance and struggle within an organisation.
Posted by Radical Notes March 29, 2007 at 9:44 am in Reservations, India, Politics
Rahul Varman
[Today (March 29), the Supreme Court of India “stayed the implementation of the 27 per cent quota for Other Backward Classes in elite educational institutions like IITs and IIMs for 2007-08…. A Bench comprising Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice L.S. Panda … said the State is empowered to enact affirmative action to help the backward classes, but it should not be unduly adverse to those who are left out. The Bench further said “reservation cannot be permanent and appear to perpetrate backwardness. If the seats in the central educational institutions were increased without reservation it would have gone to the general category.” Indicting the Government for enacting such a law, the Bench said “nowhere in the world Castes queue to be branded as backward. Nowhere is there a competition to become backward. With this Act, the subject of the equality is unduly put under strain.” On the contention of the Centre that it had taken the 1931 census as basis for fixing 27% quota for OBCs, the bench said what may have been the data in 1931 census cannot be a determinative factor now. The concept of creamy layer is not prima-facie relevant as contented by the Centre. “The Bench further said there is no explanation as to why there is no firm data for determining backwardness.” As a result unequals are treated as equals”. - The Hindu. In the interest of debates on this issue of caste reservations which has crucially determined the tenor of Indian politics, Radical Notes will be publishing a series of articles and reactions on the issue, in the context of the judgement. We are reproducing here an article by a faculty member of one of the elite institutions where the SC has stayed the implementation of 27% backward caste reservations, India Institute of Technology (Kanpur). The article was written and circulated during the last year’s anti-reservation agitation. - Editors]
I teach at one of the IITs, and off late my students, colleagues, friends and relatives have been sending me mails, organising meetings, writing petitions, initiating e-tirades, etc. against the recent MHRD announcement and generally taking it for granted that I’ll join them in their protests. Each time they are taken by surprise when I decline their offer, try to mumble something as to why I do not agree with them, or sometimes simply keep quiet if I have the advantage of an impersonal medium like the email. But increasingly it has been hard to shrug the whole issue away - every time I open my mail box, or as I walk along the corridor, and even as I bid farewell to my students of the outgoing batch, the sentiment against reservations seem to be thick in the air intermixed with the feeling of unease when one does not make the ‘right’ noises. And therefore I’ll try to articulate at some length as to why I disagree with the ‘anti-reservationists’, (the issue is too complicated for a mere agree/ disagree vote); in spite of having little sympathy with MHRD and their ‘motivated’ methods.
Let me begin with an incident which occurred when I had just joined IITK way back in 1994. We were staying in the guest house then and some census officials knocked on our door one afternoon to make enquiries for filling up a questionnaire. On being asked about my caste my wife expressed her unawareness. When a brief consultation with each other trying to ‘categorise’ my surname did not yield any answer, the main person resolved the issue in an ingenious way. After confirming that I was a faculty member, he told his associate in quiet confidence, “likh do, Brahman honge”. The point that I want to stress here is that it is not suddenly that either Mr. Arjun Singh today, or 16 years earlier Mr. B P Mandal, suddenly injected the caste divisions into our society (or, for that matter, in the elite educational institutes) as is being alleged by those against the reservations. The caste divide very much exists everywhere in our society and especially so in any of these elite institutes; my claim would be borne out by the names on the doors along the corridors in the faculty corridors or during the roll call in any of the class rooms. Only thing is that those who are on the right side of the divide can choose to ignore it. This will also be borne out by various kinds of statistics if we bother to look at them.
Some say that instead of caste we should talk about the economic deprivation and by bringing caste reservations we’ll only bring in more divisiveness. I do not understand this argument; it is like saying that we should not address the gender oppression as an issue primarily concerning women, as men also have been sometimes oppressed; or that racial discrimination is not about the blacks and Hispanics in the US, as whites also are sometimes on the receiving end. Further, as if acknowledgement of this form of discrimination(s), instead of being a logical step towards affirmative action, would actually promote them. Coming back to reservations in the present context, it is true that a lot of men and upper castes are also oppressed, but here we are talking about a specific systemic historical subjugation of a massive magnitude, at present perhaps involving more than half a billion people. Reservations may not be answer to this problem but the issue cannot be addressed by bringing in every other kind of discrimination also while attempting to address this issue. Caste problem can be solved only by addressing caste issues; similarly if there are other discriminations that exist in the society (and of course they do) they need to be identified and addressed too, not substituting one form of redressal for the other. Further if the social and economic equity spreads it will not harden the caste identity but loosen it as I’ll argue further through the experience of the southern states later.
Of course the most important argument of those protesting is that it is against the ‘merit’, that it is going to keep the ‘meritorious’ students out and bring in lesser students due to reservations, which in turn will ‘lower’ the standards and destroy the excellence of such institutes, which has been so assiduously and precariously cultivated as a part of the post colonial nation building project. Now this argument is at various levels and we can examine various parts of it one by one.
The first part of the above argument is that reservations will bring students who lack merit and hence will lower the standards of the elite institutions; hence they should be kept away from such reservations. The point is that what does this merit really mean? In any exam where lakhs appear and only thousands get selected, it is not that rest are ‘bad’ but only that there are very limited opportunities. But does it mean that if we go down in the performance list of the exams, others are incapable of undergoing the training and we as an institution are incapable of teaching them in whatever it takes to make them a good professional? Remember we are talking of half a billion people when we say ‘backwards’. Can’t we find handful out of them who have the ‘capability’ to undergo the required training? To me the argument does not sound very different from the ancient times where by their birth a large number were excluded from learning Sanskrit or entering the temples. It is very much like Dronacharya refusing admission to Eklavya. Moreover, we do not seem to even recognise the odds that the children from disadvantaged face; my friend who is from a village 100 kms from Kanpur tells me that his village has just one school where hundreds study across classes with one 18 year old teacher for all the classes put together! And the point is that, even in this school, dalit children are not even allowed to drink from the public pot kept for the rest of the children. In contrast, is it merit when we see that overwhelming majority of those who clear the JEE and CAT are able to do so, only after spending huge resources, money and time, as will be borne out from the newspapers inserts everyday and hoardings at every corner in vast urban parts of the country? What this shows is the singular lack of opportunities and the desperation of educated youth to find a berth in the elite institutions that will catapult them into a different social and economic orbit. Now the point is that these berths are being reserved in one way so far, the question is are we ready to alter that process?
If something sets the elite institutions apart it is the enormous resources that they attract, both human as well as material. And I do not see what stops such individuals who enter even after reservations from becoming good professionals given proper nurturing and resources. As far as failing of students in such institutes is concerned we’ll find that students of all categories make such a list as the overwhelming reason for that is either lack of motivation and/ or the social context and not the lack of ability. Many students after clearing JEE, CAT, etc. lose the motivation to do well - they stop going to classes and studying and look for other expressions in life and simply feel alienated with the academics. The second reason is that many students simply find it hard to adjust to a westernised - elite culture of these institutions, especially those who come from rural or small town background. Since they are not able to find the right kind of supporting network of friends and peers they are not able to perform as a lot of learning in such institutions is collective. Many of the reserved category students have to further bear the stigma of coming through ‘quota’, of not being good enough and hence they get into a shell and are more likely to find themselves alienated, which finally reflects on their performance. If this is so, then what is required is more supporting systems within institutions and not stopping them at the gates.
As a teacher I have also seen cases where within a semester or two some of the so called ‘poor students’ are completely transformed. They have been able to adjust to the requirements of the system and flourish, may be with the help of a supporting friend, or a patient teacher, or through an activity where they could express themselves, or a combination of the above. Moreover if these institutes are not only abut learning inside the class as we never tire telling the fresh students, but about becoming a complete professional as so many alumni will vouch for, and transforming a teenager into a professional who is in touch with her surroundings, then of course this diversity can do wonders to the overall learning inside and outside the class rooms. I have learnt so much from those of my students who are different from my protected middle class upbringing - a village in eastern UP, a small town in Bihar, a construction site in Kerala, and so on. Though I understand nothing about the medical education, but I am sure if a student can bring his experience of a Chattisgarh village, it can contribute hugely to the real education in the class.
One can at this point ask a further question, is merit all about passing exams? After all, are the exams a means or an end? If the exams are means to look for ability to make better engineers, doctors and managers, then can there be better methods to look for such ability? After all in my first engineering class I was told that a good engineer is the one who can produce the best out of the least resources and similarly, management is supposed to find one’s way in an uncertain situation - or allocate scarce resources in the most optimal way possible. If that is so, whatever I have seen of our deprived masses (of which overwhelming majority belongs to the backward, dalit castes or adivasis), they have the astonishing capacity to make something productive from almost next to nothing! For the last few years I have been studying small industry clusters, like Moradabad brass, Varanasi silk and Kanpur leather. Put together (all the clusters in the country), they are exporting more than the IT sector and their cumulative employment will be several times of the whole of IT industry. In all these clusters they operate with miniscule resources - small investment, no electricity, forget about air-conditioning, non existent roads, lack of water, and little formal education. These clusters are primarily constituted of these so called backward/ dalit castes and are truly a tribute to the genius that our society is. But in spite of centuries of excellence these communities have hardly produced any formal ‘engineers’, ‘doctors’ and ‘managers’, and conversely these elite institutions have not developed any linkages with such industries and their people.
This brings me to a further question, what do ‘meritorious’ students from these institutions do when they pass out? I recall what Srilata Swaminathan, the noted activist, had said at the beginning of her talk at IIMA in the early 1990s (I at the time was a student there), “I am told that this is the cream of the country, and what do you do, sell soaps and toothpastes (ITC, HLL, etc. were the most coveted recruiters those days)?”. There was hushed silence in a room full of students and faculty. I remember in the mid-90s my sense of disbelief, when I was the placement coordinator for my department, the HR manager of one of the big three Indian IT companies told me, “as long as somebody can recognise a keyboard we take him” in response to my query about what they sought in a potential employee. Remember this company over the years has employed thousands of IIT-IIM engineers - managers. As a child I remember the famous surgeon in my home town, who would first cut up a patient and then renegotiate the price with the relatives, before proceeding with the surgery! Or everywhere around me I find ‘meritorious’ doctors employed in public hospitals, drawing comfortable salaries and doing roaring private practice! You are not even required to turn up in the village health centre even once if you have a rural posting. If the majority of our people usually have to do with the village quack, they would not mind a ’slightly less meritorious doctor’ coming to take care of them, instead of finding solace in the fact that super-specialised doctors are ensuring that the elite of our country have no wrinkles, and such like grave ailments. I recall when some students from IITK, almost all of them belonging to the North from UP to MP to Orissa, went to participate in post Tsunami relief work in Tamil Nadu. After they came back the overwhelming feeling was this difference from the North that “things are different over there and they work!” My relatives and acquaintances prefer to go down south when they are seriously unwell and not to Delhi or Lucknow. Remember this is the same place which has implemented the ‘quota’ much before Mandal and much beyond it too. I hear of far less caste strife in Tamil Nadu than in UP where caste based reservations have been implemented for such a long time - it does not seem to have furthered the caste based identities in South into a full fledged war like Bihar and UP. Point is ‘merit’ is not about stopping somebody at the gates or throwing them out of these seats of learning, but in creating robust institutions which can cultivate and nurture the talent with all the complexities of a vast and disparate society that we are.
Let’s put the creamy layer argument also in perspective now. Point is that such elite education which has so many barriers - expensive and time consuming coaching, expensive education, elite culture, etc. is under the present order going to be a preserve only of a select few. All we are saying is whether it is going to be the preserve of a few higher castes or some of the other castes can also find an entry. Even if it is backward IAS’s daughter, so be it, finally many others are also IAS’s wards, so how does it make a difference? As has been rightly said by the critiques, it’s a populist measure for the votes. etc. But so is every single policy of the govt. and so it will be in a ‘vote bank democracy’ - either for the votes directly, or for generating resources for the next election. When an Ambani or an Enron is granted abominable concessions, why don’t we come on streets and say, “it is for money for the next elections.”
The difficulty perhaps is that we are only against certain kinds of reservation. When an Ambani becomes a CEO, when a Gandhi becomes a minister, we do not say it is against merit, when a professor whose son is not able to qualify JEE, is still able to send her child abroad for higher studies, we do not say it is reservation, when only Valmikis do all the cleaning work at IITK we do not say it is reservation, the point that we need to ponder is that why is it that we are only against certain kind of reservation and for certain kind of merit?
Finally for those of us who think that the present reservation exercise is ornamental and they would like to do something more basic and lasting, I recommend a reading of the Mandal report - they will find that the report goes to some length to capture the socio-economic indicators in understanding and classifying ‘backwards’. Moreover reservation is a small part of their recommendation which includes things like special coaching for the disadvantaged to basic issues like land reforms. The difficulty is that in all these years, only the naxalite movement seem to have taken up some of the radical suggestions of the Mandal Commission! Meanwhile I have a question for those whose problem is the hasty implementation, that “how can we implement MHRD’s recommendations so suddenly?” After all, the report has been available for debate, discussion, modification and implementation for all these 16 years! Why is it that we have suddenly woken up to bother about primary - secondary education as well as the economic upliftment of the masses, only when the government has started acting in its own bumbling ways? As far as I know, no academic body or business institutions like CII has debated these issues and no committees have been setup to examine the Mandal report all this while. Finally, history is catching up in its own imperfect ways. We need to ponder whether these institutions are meant only for supplying cheap labour for the American corporations. If they have to be more than that, the time has come for us to be self critical and look beyond the knee jerk response to the present quagmire.
The author is Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial & Management Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
Posted by Radical Notes March 28, 2007 at 10:42 am in National Self-Determination, Sri Lanka, Politics
Liberation of the Entire People of Sri Lanka is Possible only by Mass Uprisings
New Democracy 24, March 2007
Theoretical Organ of the New Democratic Party, Sri Lanka
[What follows is a summary paper of a recent discussion among Sinhala and Tamil Marxist Leninist activists. The discussion was aimed at carrying forward the struggle against social oppression, for the liberation of the country from imperialism and hegemony, and the resolution of the national question through solidarity among the nationalities, based on the principle of the right to self-determination. Readers are invited to make their critical observations on this paper so that the ideas contained therein could be dealt with more thoroughly and expanded upon.]
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) made in 2002 between the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe and the LTTE have been in effect until 2006. Armed conflicts, Claymore anti-personnel mine attacks, explosions, murders, kidnappings, disappearances, and arrests that occurred over the past year have rendered them ineffective
The national question and alien forces
In the pretext of supporting the war against terrorism and helping with the peace efforts, forces of imperialism and hegemony are determining the day-to-day conduct of the affairs of this country. Through that the US, the countries of the European Union, Japan and India are exercising hegemony. The economy of this country has been enslaved by India through the one-sided Free Trade Agreement between India and Sri Lanka which only benefits India and through Indian investments in Sri Lanka. Besides, Sri Lanka receives military support from the US, Pakistan and Israel. The CIA, FBI, RAW, Mossad and other such foreign intelligence services are carrying out their espionage activities unhindered.
It is as a result of the stand taken by Sinhala chauvinism and the errors of the Tamil nationalists that there is increased domination by foreign forces; and today the national question has become the main problem and has been left in the hands of foreign forces. As a result of Sinhala domination and its oppressive approach, the Tamil, Muslim and Hill Country Tamil nationalities and national minorities like the Burghers, Malays and the Attho (earlier known as the Veddha) have been subject to untold suffering, cruelty and oppression. The struggles of the oppressed Tamil people have become centred around the LTTE, whose armed activities have been on the rise.
Meanwhile, under the imperialist globalisation programme, neo-liberal economic schemes are being implemented in the agricultural sector as well. While the people are continuing to oppose them in view of their effects, the ruling classes are continuing with them. The programme of globalisation has killed the life cells of a national economy based on self sufficiency. The oppressed peasants, workers and the middle classes are badly affected. It is doubtful under the worsening climate of liberalisation and privatisation whether any of the resources of the country will be left behind for the generations to come.
Dissatisfaction and resistance among the people
Under these circumstances, any reasonable person will protest about the way the ruling classes are governing this country. The people as a whole have reached a state where they are willing to accept that the present anti-people form of government should be replaced by a form of government that gives prominence to the interests of the people.
The constitution, the presidential system of government, and the parliamentary system have failed to protect, among other things, the welfare of the people of Sri Lanka, their honour and self respect, their wealth, and their democratic and human rights. The police, the armed forces and the judiciary seem to be concerned with serving the ruling classes and protecting their interests, and defending the Sinhala hegemony of the upper classes. Meanwhile the workers, peasants, and the employed middle classes are getting ready to take a stand against the exploiting classes and face the challenges.
The current Sri Lankan situation demands the transfer of powers in the hands of the ruling classes to the true representatives of the people. Major changes are required in state power. The people are becoming like dried leaves and a single spark to set the woods alight. They have lost faith in the ruling classes. The old system of government and administration of the ruling classes have reached their limit of incompetence. The ruling classes have forfeited their eligibility to continue to rule the people. Under these conditions, the people of Sri Lanka are affected in many ways, directly and indirectly. Even the comfortably off middle classes and people with considerable wealth are beginning to feel insecure.
A new approach to struggle
Thus, not only the ordinary masses, but also those living in some comfort are compelled to seek changes through alternative political activity. Such alternative politics has to be revolutionary politics.
The characteristic of the ruling classes of Sri Lanka is that of a client of imperialism. On the political and social planes, the policies of the state uphold violence and war as their main approach. There are differences between the methods of struggle against such ruling classes and those against earlier political establishments. There are differences between the strategy and tactics of governance by the old exploiting reactionary classes and those of the present ruling classes based on banditry and terror. One who takes note of these differences cannot be satisfied about the adequacy of the current approaches to struggle.
Hence it is necessary to transform completely the old approaches of the people, to undertake new initiatives and to carry forward new forms of struggle in new directions. Trade union activities of workers and peasants, strikes, electoral political meetings, processions and demonstrations have only provoked harsh responses accompanied by violence, and yielded counterproductive results.
Thus several struggles that are distinct from those of the past need to be carried out, outside the scope of the parliamentary electoral arena and the confines of trade unions, unlike the struggles carried out within and outside the electoral arena, and in ways different from that of traditional propaganda. It is also a historical necessity to function in ways unlike that of NGOs that are confined to a specified framework.
Through elections and the importance given to them, the ruling classes have become more and more privileged. Meantime, even the most ordinary rights of the ruled classes are denied to them.
The armed struggle of the JVP in 1971 and 1988 and the armed struggle for the right to self determination of the Tamil people have led to a feeling of disgust among the people so that they do not want such struggles to emerge. The imperialists and the reactionary ruling class forces have succeeded in this. However, the oppressed people have no choice or alternative but to impair the existing system of government and the ruling classes through the correct form of struggle and establish a meaningful democratic government. To achieve that, new forms of mass struggle with fresh meaning should be launched. It is in that way that great mass struggles and uprisings take place across the globe.
Lessons from earlier struggles
Owing to the errors of the leadership, the hatral of 12th August 1953, despite popular participation on a massive scale, could not be developed into a mass uprising. Various strikes, including the July 1980 strike, resistance campaigns by the people, and mass demonstrations have, owing to the activities of bogus left forces and mischievous NGOs, and contrary to expectations, helped the ruling classes. The exploited and ruled classes have continued to be affected. We need to advance by learning from these experiences.
It cannot be denied that people have won some rights and that some significant political changes have been achieved through mass movements and resistance campaigns. But the leadership was captive to the predominance of anti-people forces. These struggles were, in general, used to achieve the political goals of the UNP and the SLFP, and used until the leadership was granted its opportunity.
A new mass uprising becomes necessary
Today, a political climate prevails in which the people stand face to face against the ruling classes, their political enemy. That confrontation requires no less than a fundamental social change and to that end urgently demands a new popular uprising under the appropriate radical change in political leadership. The maturing of this condition and the achievement of a victorious situation depends on the entire Sri Lankan people.
At the mention of mass uprising and mass struggle, some jump to protest that they will be ruthlessly suppressed by the terrorist ruling classes, chauvinists and fascists, and will only pave the way to further reinforcement of state power to unprecedented levels. They would also claim that the people will be subject to suffering. People who argue in this fashion do not see popular uprising as a correct path of struggle to protect the people.
Those who accept popular uprising as the path for struggle need to pay attention to the new meaning, the new form and the new workings of the popular uprising for social change. It is necessary to prepare an alternative economic defence, action and reaction, and a culture that emphasises the case for the struggle so that the popular uprising is invincible. A mass struggle carried forward with maximum popular participation could contain one or several aspects concerning the welfare of the people. Lazybones and ones who refuse to endorse popular uprisings think that such an uprising will lead to the killing of unarmed people and that it is difficult for a popular uprising to take place. Such people have no faith in the power of the people.
If it is possible for the ruling classes to militarily suppress and decimate a mass uprising, it means that the uprising is not a correct mass uprising. A mass uprising comprises a continuous sequence of mass struggles. In such a correct mass uprising, there are preparatory measures for the steps leading to social change. They have features such as strategy and tactics. Mass struggles are, simultaneously, acts of training the people and struggles generating confidence among them.
Uprisings should be carried forward with care
Any mass uprising carried forward in a state of unpreparedness is suicidal. Mass uprisings cannot be created compulsively. Mass struggles cannot be transformed into a mass uprising merely through an announcement, or appeals through leaflets and posters. Mass uprisings cannot be specified a time, place and event. When the necessary objective conditions are there and contradictions sharpen, the emergence of a mass uprising is inevitable. As much as one cannot compulsively create a mass uprising, a mass uprising once started cannot be stopped either. It will run its course until it reaches its target. After which, the uprising should be sustained to retain its victory.
Thus, we need to be alert to the prospects of such a mass uprising. We should also develop the political and organisational preparedness that could withstand that environment, and the emotional and intellectual standards that correspond to it. Such preparedness will be able to mobilise accordingly the spontaneous feelings of the people and guide them.
When such preparedness does not exist, the enemies of the people can make use of mass struggles to their advantage and render the struggles ineffective and obstruct social transformation, which is the goal of the struggles. In the history of Sri Lanka, most mass struggles have been used merely to bring the UNP and the SLFP to power in turn. NGOs have incorporated mass struggles into their programmes. That too is to help the ruling classes.
The political goal of mass uprisings
It is important to ensure that mass struggles and their purposes concern the interests of the people and are in the hands of the people rather than belong to the leaders. A struggle is meaningless in the absence of the goal of social transformation,
The people of this country have been affected by the rule of both major parties, which can neither fulfil the aspirations of the people nor be reformed into parties for the people. To create other parties in their place is not an alternative either. People should be made to realise that mass activities that are confined to elections and economic demands are of no benefit. Although it may seem that they can be confined to resolving certain problems that are in the open and to winning certain demands, reality is otherwise. There should be agreement and interest in resolving the fundamental issues.
The national oppression against the Tamil people and imperialist oppression both direct and indirect are not the same. Thus they may be viewed on different planes. But the programme of imperialist hegemony against the two nationalities is fundamentally the same. While there is a situation in which imperialist hegemony is opposed separately from the respective planes, what is opposed and what is to be won are common to both. The struggles of the two nationalities need to be confederated. They should be coordinated and carried out against the common enemy, the terrorist ruling classes locally and imperialism internationally. In the same way, the mass activities to press for economic demands of the workers in the plantation and state sector should be confederated with the struggles of the fisher folk and the peasants.
Also mass activities against the Upper Kotmale hydro power scheme, the Noraicholai and Sampur thermal power schemes, and the proposals for the Weerawila Airport and the super highway could be combined against the main enemy, namely the ruling classes and imperialism.
The confederation of struggles
It will be useless to confine mass struggles to specific demands on specific planes, without basing them on social transformation. They need to be combined. Confederation does not mean reducing the importance of any struggle or altering its aim. While each struggle is carried forward on its plane with vigour and intensity, there is need for coordination between the mass struggles and between the leaderships. The basis of confederation could be independence-consensus-dedication. If there is no coordination between struggles, it will be easy for the ruling class to set one struggle against another. It is well known that the chauvinistic ruling classes of Sri Lanka have succeeded in presenting the Tamil people’s struggle for self-determination as one against the Sinhalese and Muslim people. To defeat them, it is necessary to develop cooperation among the struggles, a common line against the common enemy and a common programme. Also, like uniting all forces that could be united in a given mass struggle, there is need for need to confederate different struggles and their leaderships.
To say that there is need for unity in mass struggles does not mean unity with those involved in the activities of the parties of the ruling classes, bogus leftists, opportunists and NGOs. It means that there cannot be unity with forces that are explicitly or implicitly anti-people. It should be understood that when, in the context of the national question, we say that broad-based unity is needed in the struggle against chauvinism, we do not mean unity with those working hand-in-hand with the chauvinistic oppressors. To ensure success of a struggle, one should ensure participation by the vast majority of the masses, maximum possible friendly forces and the smallest possible number of enemies.
Unity, confederation and struggle
Likewise, winning the support of those outside a given struggle by joining in the activities of their struggle will be most effective. Matters should be handled in a way that the support of those outside is not just moral support but one with commitment. For example, when the support of the Sinhalese to the struggle of the Tamil people takes the form of mutual linking of common struggles, it becomes strong and enduring.
The strongest power against the ruling classes is the power of the people. That power can be built only through mass struggles. Besides, it is the right thing to do to affirm the support of those not associated with the struggle by linking up with their struggles.
There is need for unity within specific struggles and between struggles. That unity should be based on confederation and be democratic. Confederation cannot only be a concept; it should also concern practice and organisational structure.
