Huge portions of today’s protests (see editorial, page 2) have been dominated by red flags of the Indian Communist Party (CPI). But if communists of the 1940s had been able to win a communist future, the misery leading to the 2020 protests would not exist. Where did India’s communist movement go wrong?
The question is of immediate concern. As workers across the globe continue to face lose-lose electoral choices like the 2020 U.S. presidential election there is a constant pressure to side with ‘lesser evil’ capitalists. A brief look at the history of the Indian Communist Party shows us the deadly error of seeking unity with any capitalists.
The 2020 farmers’ protest movement involves many older workers whose parents lived through the harrowing passage of the 1943-44 famine, a little-known holocaust wiping out three million Bengali workers and peasants engineered by British imperialism. Indian communists did not organize mass anger around the famine into a revolutionary movement for communism because, having been forced into war against the Nazis in 1940, even British imperialism, desperate to squeeze life from its colonies to the very end at the cost of Nazi-scale atrocity, was the “lesser evil” capitalist! How could this be?
Failure of the united front strategy
In 1935, the world communist movement, based in the Soviet Union, adopted a strategic shift away from revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat to a “United Front” against fascism. In effect, this position offered a deal to capitalists – “if you unite with us to defeat Hitler, we promise not to organize a sharp class struggle leading to revolution.”
For the record, all the big liberal democratic imperialists rejected this deal because they preferred the deal offered by Hitler and the fascists – “invest in our growing fascist economy and look the other way as we expand and we will smash the Soviet Union.”
As it turns out, the fascists were the ones smashed in the war, smashed by the remnants of Soviet communism. After the war the Soviet-led communist movement did not break with the search for ‘lesser-evil’ capitalists to unite with (The Chinese communists were a bit better on this for a time and in the early 1960s Progressive Labor Party was born from U.S. communists following Chinese leadership who split away from the Soviet-affiliated Communist Party USA).
Another bankrupt strategy
In the case of India, after the war ended and independence was won India’s communists pursued the bankrupt strategy of leading a “peaceful transition to socialism” which mired them in electoral politics.
Through the Cold War there was a split in the Indian ruling class: some elements were content to continue the semi-feudal arrangements of exploitation dating back to the era of British imperialism while another element was seeking to cut out British capitalists.
They saw a “comprador bourgeoisie” who continued to serve the interests of British imperialism and a “national bourgeoisie” that was more committed to keeping the profits squeezed from the labor of desi workers and peasants in the hands of Indian capitalists, with minimal land reforms to placate the masses. It is those land reforms that are under attack today.
The tens of millions of workers on the subcontinent who have cast votes for Communist Party candidates since the 1950s have been dragged into the doomed quest to find some “progressive” portion of the bourgeoisie with which to ally.
This strategy leads, always, back to the monstrous disregard for the lives of workers that has been at the core of the capitalist social order since its birth in the period of the Atlantic slave trade. Workers, and especially communists, must remain completely clear-eyed on this matter.
In this connection the old adage of the Scorpion and the Frog is worth keeping in mind:
A scorpion, which cannot swim, asks a frog to carry it across a river on the frog's back. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung by the scorpion, but the scorpion argues that if it did that, they would both drown. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion.
Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both.
The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I couldn't help it. It's in my nature
The working class of India, of the larger subcontinent, and of the world needs an armed struggle for communist revolution. There is no peaceful transition of power or a lesser evil set of bosses. The Progressive Labor Party strives to build a mass international communist party. Join us.
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Old communist movement fell for “lesser evil” politics
By 1951, the politics of the Communist Party of India (CPI) led them to make a fatal error in its analysis of splits within the Indian ruling class.
The CPI asserted that the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was led a "[g]overnment of landlords and princes and the reactionary big bourgeoisie collaborating with the British imperialists" (Wikipedia). Yet, they saw a national bourgeoisie that could play a progressive role in Indian politics. The strategy of the CPI became one of fighting for leadership of trade unions and mass organizations and winning public office with the aim of influencing the Congress Party and unifying with the national bourgeoisie for a stronger state-controlled economy. (The Congress Party is the same party that the pedophile and anti-Black racist Mahatma Gandhi belonged to.)
The arrangements protecting small farmers under attack today date from land reform policies that date to this era of higher communist influence. By 1953, the path of legal struggle over armed struggle had won out.
Soviet influence was toward legal orientation, Chinese influence was toward armed/peasant struggle orientation. In 1956, the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union settled on the “peaceful transition to socialism” as its main strategy. One right faction of the CPI saw Nehru as anti-imperialist and independent while the left faction of the CPI saw him as a defender of old feudal interests.