Revolutionary terror has shifted far to the east – to the regions of the Punjab and Bengal. [1] There the slow political awakening of the 300 million strong nation creates a favourable atmosphere for it. There too the state regime seems even more absolute in its despotism over society, even more “accidental” and alien; for the military and police apparatus of East India was imported from Britain together with printed cotton and office ledgers. And so the Indian intelligentsia, becoming acquainted with the ideas of Locke, Bentham and Mill [2] at the school bench, and in its ideological evolution overtaking the political development of its country, is predisposed to seek the forces it still lacks in the bottom of alchemic retorts.
From The Crisis of Terrorism and its Party,
Pravda (Vienna) No. 3, 27th March 1909
Thus his assertion [3] that the proletariat remains isolated in Britain whereas in Russia it is leading the peasant masses behind it, is a generalization naked in point of form, one-sided, and therefore false. The British proletariat is far from being isolated, for after all Britain is a world state. British industry and the position of British capitalism depend wholly upon the colonies and, in consequence, the struggle of the British proletariat likewise depends on the struggle of the colonial popular masses. The tasks which the British proletariat sets itself in its struggle against British capitalism must likewise take their orientation in harmony with the interests and moods of the Indian peasantry. British proletarians cannot attain their final victory until the peoples of India rise and until the British proletariat provides this uprising with a goal and a programme; and in India victory is out of the question without the aid and the leadership of the British proletariat. Here you have the revolutionary collaboration between the proletariat and the peasantry within the confines of the British Empire.
From On the Policy of the KAPD, speech to the Executive Committee
of the Communist International, 24th November 1920
India is the classic colonial country as Britain is the classic metropolis. All the viciousness of the ruling classes, every form of oppression that capitalism has applied against the backward peoples of the East is most completely and frightfully summed up in the history of the gigantic colony on which the British imperialists have settled themselves like leeches to drink its blood for the past century and a half. The British bourgeoisie has diligently fostered every remnant of barbarism, every institution of the Middle Ages which could be of service in the oppression of man by man. It forced its feudal agents to adapt themselves to colonial capitalist exploitation to become its links, its organs, its convoys to the masses. The British imperialists boast of their railroads, their canals and industrial enterprises in India in which they have invested close to four billion gold dollars. Apologists for imperialism triumphantly compare present day India with what it was prior to colonial occupation. But who can doubt for a moment that a gifted nation of 320,000,000 people would develop immeasurably quicker and more successfully were it freed from the burden of systematic and organized plunder? It is enough to recall the four billion gold dollars which represent the British investment in India to imagine what Britain extracts from India in the course of only some five or six years.
Allowing India carefully weighed doses of technique and culture, exactly enough to facilitate the exploitation of the riches of the country, the Shylock of the Thames could not however prevent the ideas of economic and national independence and freedom from penetrating more and more widely into the masses.
Just as in the older bourgeois countries, the various racial stocks that exist in India can only be fused into a nation by means of a binding political revolution. But in contradistinction to the older countries, this revolution in India is a colonial revolution directed against foreign oppressors. Besides this, it is the revolution of a historically belated nation in which the relations of feudal serfdom, caste divisions and even slavery exist alongside of the class antagonisms of the bourgeoisie and proletariat which have grown greatly in the last period.
The colonial character of the Indian revolution against one of the most powerful oppressors masks to a certain extent the internal social antagonisms of the country, particularly to the eyes of those to whom such masking is advantageous. In reality the necessity of throwing off the system of imperialist oppression “ with all its roots intertwined with the old Indian exploitation, demands the greatest revolutionary effort on the part of the Indian masses and by that itself assures a gigantic swing of the class struggle. British imperialism will not abandon its positions voluntarily; while dropping its tail before America, it will direct the remains of its energy and its resources against insurgent India.
What an instructive historical lesson it is that the Indian revolution, even in its present stage, when it has not yet broken loose from the treacherous leadership of the national bourgeoisie, is being crushed by the “socialist” government of MacDonald. [4] The bloody repressions of these scoundrels of the Second International who promise to introduce socialism peacefully in their own home countries represent so far that small deposit which British imperialism brings in today on its future accounting in India. The sweet social democratic deliberations about reconciling the interests of bourgeois Britain with democratic India are a necessary supplement to the bloody repressions of MacDonald, who is of course ready, between executions, for the thousand-and-first commission of reconciliation.
The British bourgeoisie understands too well that the loss of India would not only mean the crash of its sufficiently rotted world power but also a social collapse in its own metropolis. It is a struggle of life and death. All forces will be set in motion. This means that the revolution will have to mobilize irresistibile energy. The many-millioned mass has already begun to stir. They showed their half-blind force to such an extent that the national bourgeoisie was compelled to come out of its passivity and master the movement in order to break the edge of the revolutionary sword. Gandhi’s passive resistance [5] is the tactical knot that combines the naivete and self-denying blindness of the disunited and petty bourgeois masses with the treacherous manoeuvres of the liberal bourgeoisie. The fact that the chairman of the Indian Legislative Assembly, that is, the official organ of the machinations with imperialism, gave up his post to head the movement for the boycott of British goods, is of a deeply symbolic character. “We will prove to you,” say the national bourgeoisie to the gentlemen on the Thames, “that we are indispensable for you, that without us you will not calm the masses; but for this we will present you with our own bill.”
By way of reply, MacDonald puts Gandhi in jail. It is possible that the lackey goes further than the master intends, being conscientious beyond reason in order to justify his faith. It is possible that the Conservatives, serious and experienced imperialists, would not at the present stage go so far with repressions. But on the other hand the national leaders of the passive opposition are themselves in need of repression as support for their considerably shaken reputations. MacDonald does them this service. While shooting down workers and peasants, he arrests Gandhi with an abundance of forewarning such as the Russian provisional government used to arrest the Kornilovs and Denikins. [6]
If India is a component element in the internal rule of the British bourgeoisie, then on the other hand, the imperialist rule of British capital over India is a component element of the internal order of India. The question cannot at all be reduced to one of the mere expulsion of some tens of thousands of foreign exploiters. They cannot be separated from the internal oppressors and the harder the internal oppressors and the harder the pressure of the masses will become the less will the latter want to separate. just as in Russia the liquidation of Tsarism together with its indebtedness to world firiance capital became possible only because to the peasantry the abolition of the monarchy grew out of the abolition of the landowning magnates, to the same degree also in India the struggle with imperialist oppressions grows out of the countless masses of the oppressed and semi-pauperized peasantry, out of the necessity of liquidating the feudal landlords, their agents and intermediaries, the chinovniks [7] and sharks.
The Indian peasant wants a “just” distribution of land. That is the basis of democratism. And this is at the same time the social basis of the democratic revolution as a whole.
At the first stages of their struggle the ignorant, inexperienced and disunited peasantry which, in single villages, opposes the individual representatives of the hated regime, always resorts to passive resistance. It does not pay rent, does not pay taxes, it escapes to the woods, or deserts from military service, etc. The Tolstoyan formulae [8] of passive resistance were in a sense the first stages of the revolutionary awakening of the peasant masses. Gandhi does the same in regard to the masses of the Indian people. The more “sincere” he is personally, the more useful he is for the owners as an instrument for the disciplining of the masses. The support of the bourgeoisie for peaceful resistance to imperialism is only a preliminary condition for its bloody resistance to the revolutionary masses.
From passive forms of struggle, the peasantry has more than once in history passed over to the severest and bloodiest wars against their direct enemies: the land owners, the authorities and the loan sharks. The Middle Ages were full of such peasant wars in Europe; but they are also full of merciless suppression of peasant wars. Passive resistance of the peasantry as well as its bloody uprisings can be turned into a revolution only under the leadership of the urban class which thus becomes the leader of the revolutionary nation and after the victory – the bearers of the revolutionary power. In the present epoch such a class can be only the proletariat, even in the Orient.
It is true that the Indian proletariat occupy a smaller numerical place in the composition of the population than even the Russian proletariat on the eve of 1905 and 1917. This comparatively small size of the proletariat was the main argument of all the philistines, all the Martinovs, all the Mensheviks [9] against the perspective of the permanent revolution. They considered fantastic the very thought that the Russian proletariat, thrusting the bourgeois aside, would take hold of the agrarian revolution of the peasantry, would give it a bold swing, and rise on its wave to the revolutionary dictatorship. Therefore they considered realistic the hope that the liberal bourgeoisie, leaning on the masses of the city and village, would complete the democratic revolution. But it turned out that their social statistics of the population are far from measuring the economic or the political role of single classes. The October revolution, by experience has proved this once and for all and very convincingly.
If today the Indian proletariat is numerically weaker than the Russian this in itself does not at all pre-determine the smaller swing of its revolutionary possibilities, just as the numerical weakness of the Russian proletariat compared to the American and British was no hindrance to the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. On the contrary all those social peculiarities which made possible and unavoidable the October revolution are present in India in a still sharper form. In this country of poor peasants, the hegemony of the city has no less clear a character than in tsarist Russia. The concentration of industrial, commercial and banking power in the hands of the big bourgeoisie, primarily the foreign bourgeoisie, on the one hand; a swift growth of a sharply-defined proletariat, on the other, excludes the possibility of an independent role of the petty bourgeoisie of the city and to an extent the intellectuals and transforms by this the political mechanics of the revolution into a struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie for the leadership of the peasant masses. So far there is “only” one condition missing: a Bolshevik Party. And that is where the problem lies now.
We were witnesses to the way the leadership of Stalin and Bukharin [10] carried out the Menshevik conception of the democratic revolution in China. Armed with a powerful apparatus this leadership had the opportunity of applying the Menshevik formulae in deeds and by that alone was compelled to carry them to a conclusion. In order best to secure the leading role of the bourgeoisie in the bourgeois revolution (this is the basic idea of Russian Menshevism) the Stalinist bureaucracy transformed the young Communist Party of China into a subordinate section of the national bourgeois party. In connection with that, according to the terms officially arrived at between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek [11] (through the intermediary of the present People’s Commissar of Education, Bubnov [12]), the Communists had no right to occupy more than one third of the posts within the Kuomintang. The Party of the proletariat this way entered the revolution as an official captive of the bourgeoisie with the blessings of the CI. The result is known: the Stalinist bureaucracy slew the Chinese revolution. History has never known a political crime equal in extent to this one. For India, just as for all countries of the Orient in general, Stalin advanced in 1924 simultaneously with the reactionary idea of socialism in one country, the no less reactionary idea of “dual composition worker and peasant parties”. This was another formula for the same rejection of independent policy and of an independent party of the proletariat. The unfortunate Roy [13] has ever since that time become the apostle of the super-class and supra-class “people’s” or “democratic” party. The history of Marxism, the development of the nineteenth century, the experience of the three Russian revolutions, everything passed for these gentlemen without leaving a trace. They have not yet understood that the “worker-peasant party” is conceivable only in the form of a Kuomintang, that is in the form of a bourgeois party leading behind itself the workers and peasants in order later on to betray and crush them. History has not yet invented another type of a supra-class, or intra-class party. After all, not in vain was Roy the agent of Stalin in China, the prophet of the struggle against “Trotskyism”, the executor of the Martinovist “bloc of four classes”, in order to become the ritualistic scapegoat for the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy, after the inevitable defeat of the Chinese revolution. Six years passed in India in weakening and demoralizing experiments with the realization of the Stalinist prescription for the two-class worker-peasant parties. The results are at hand: impotent, provincial “worker-peasant parties”, which waver, limp along or simply melt away and are reduced to nothing precisely at a moment when they are supposed to act, that is, at a moment of revolutionary tide. But there is no proletarian party. It must still be created in the fire of events and at that it will be first necessary to remove the garbage piled up by the leading bureaucracy. Such is the situation! Beginning with 1924, the leadership of the Comintern has done everything that could be done to render impotent the Indian proletariat, to weaken the will of the vanguard, and to clip its wings.
While Roy and the other Stalinist pupils were wasting precious years in order to elaborate a democratic programme for a supra-class party, the national bourgeoisie used this dawdling to the maximum in order to seize the trade unions. If not politically, then in the trade unions, the Kuiomintang has been accomplished in India, true, with the difference that the creators have in the meantime become frightened by their own handiwork, and have jumped aside heaping slander on the “executors”.
This time the centrists jumped, as is known, to the “Left”, but matters did not improve by this. The official position of the Comintern on the questions of the Indian revolution is such a tangled ball of yarn which is apparently intended especially to derail the proletarian vanguard and bring it to despair. At any rate, half of it goes on because the leadership strives constantly and wilfully to conceal its mistakes of yesterday. The second half of the tangle must be credited to the hapless nature of centrism.
We have in mind at present not the programme of the Comintern which ascribes to the colonial bourgeoisie a revolutionary role, completely approving the constructions of Brandler and Roy who still continue to wear the Martinov-Stalin cloak. We also do not speak of the innumerable editions of the Stalinist Questions of Leninism where, in all the languages of the world, the discourse on the dual composition worker and peasant parties continues. No. We limit ourselves to the present, to today’s latest posing of the question which is in conformity with the Third Period mistakes of the Comintern in the Orient.
The central slogan of the Stalinists for India, as well as for China, still remains the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants. Nobody knows, nobody explains, because nobody understands what this formula signifies at present, in the year 1930, after the experience of the past fifteen years. In what way is the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants supposed to be distinguished from the dictatorship of the Kuomintang which massacred the workers and peasants? The Manuilskys and Kuusinens [14] will perhaps answer that they now talk about the dictatorship of three classes (workers, peasants and the city petty bourgeoisie) and not four as it was in China where Stalin had so happily attracted to the bloc his ally, Chiang Kai-shek.
If so, we reply, then make an effort to explain to us why you reject the national bourgeoisie in India, that is that ally for the rejection of whom in China you expelled Bolsheviks from the Communist Party and then imprisoned them? China is a semi-colonial country. In China, there is no powerful caste of feudal lords and feudal agents. But India is a classic colonial country with a mighty heritage of the feudal caste regime. If the revolutionary role of the Chinese bourgeoisie was deduced by Stalin and Martinov from the presence in China of foreign oppression and feudal remnants, then for India each of these reasons should hold with doubled force. This means that the Indian bourgeoisie, according to the exact basis of the programme of the Comintern, has immeasurably more rights to demand its inclusion in the Stalinist bloc than the Chinese bourgeoisie with its unforgettable Chiang Kai-shek and the “true” Wang Ching-wei. [15] And if this is not so, if in spite of the oppression of British imperialism and the whole heritage of the Middle Ages, the Indian bourgeoisie is capable only of a counter-revolutionary and not a revolutionary role – then condemn mercilessly your treacherous policy in China and correct immediately your programme in which this policy has left cowardly but sinister traces!
But this does not exhaust the question. If in India you construct a bloc without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie, then who will lead it? The Manuilskys and Kuusinens will perhaps answer with their characteristically gentle ardour: “The proletariat, of course!” Good, we answer, it is quite complimentary. But if the Indian revolution will develop on a basis of a union of workers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie; if this union will be directed not only against imperialism, feudalism, but also against the national bourgeoisie which is bound up with them in all basic questions; if at the head of this union will stand the proletariat, if this union comes to victory only by sweeping away the enemies through armed uprising and in this way raises the proletariat to the role of the real all-national leader – then the question arises: in whose hands will the power be after the victory if not in the hands of the proletariat? What is the significance in such a case of the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants in distinction to the dictatorship of the proletariat leading the peasantry? In other words: in what way will the hypothetical dictatorship of the workers and peasants be distinguished in its type from the actual dictatorship which the October revolution established?
There is no reply to this question. There can be no reply to it. By this course of historical development the “democratic dictatorship” has become not only an empty fiction but a treacherous trap for the proletariat.
That slogan is correct which admits the possibility of two diametrically opposed explanations: in the sense of the dictatorship of the Kuomintang and in the sense of the October dictatorship! There can be nothing in between these two. In China, the Stalinists explained the democratic dictatorship twice, at first as a dictatorship of the Kuomintang of the Right, and afterwards of the Left. But how do they explain it in India? They are silent. They are compelled to keep silent for fear of opening the eyes of their supporters to their crimes. This conspiracy of silence is actually a conspiracy against the Indian revolution. And all the present extremely Left or ultra-Left noise does not improve the situation one iota for the victories of the revolution are not secured by noise and clatter but by political clarity.
But what has been said does not yet unwind the tangled yarn. No. Here is precisely where new threads are twisted into it. Giving the revolution an abstract democratic character and permitting it to pass to the dictatorship of the proletariat only after some sort of a mystical or mystifying “democratic dictatorship” is established, our strategists at the same time reject the central political slogan of every revolutionary democratic movement, which is precisely the slogan of the Constituent Assembly. Why? On what basis? It is absolutely incomprehensible. The democratic revolution signifies equality to the peasant – above all equality in the distribution of land. On this is based the equality of rights. The Constituent Assembly, where the representatives of the whole people formally draw the balance with the past and the classes actually draw the balance with each other, is the natural and inevitable combination of the democratic tasks of the revolution not only in the consciousness of the awakening masses of the peasantry but also in the consciousness of the working class itself. We have spoken of this more fully with regard to China and we do not see here the necessity of repetition. Let us only add that the provincial multi-formity of India, the variegated governmental forms, and their no less variegated bond with the feudal caste relations, saturates the slogan of the Constituent Assembly in India with a particularly deep revolutionary democratic content.
The theoretician of the Indian revolution in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at present is Safarov [16], who with the price of a happy capitulation transferred his injurious activities to the camp of centrism. In a programmatic article in the Bolshevik about the forces and tasks of the revolution in India, Safarov carefully circles around the question of the Constituent Assembly just like an experienced rat circles around a piece of cheese on a hook – this sociologist does not by any means want to fall into the Trotskyist trap a second time. Disposing of the problem without much ceremony he counterposes to the Constituent Assembly such a perspective: “The development of a new revolutionary ascent on the basis (!) of struggle for the proletarian hegemony leads to the conclusion (whom? how? why? – ed.) that the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in India can be achieved only in the Soviet form” (Bolshevik, 1930, No.5, p.100).
Amazing lines! Martinov multiplied by Safarov. Martinov we know and about Safarov Lenin said not without tenderness: “Safarchik will go Leftist, Safarchik will pull boners.” The above-mentioned Safarovist perspective does not invalidate this characterization. Safarov has gone considerably Leftist and it must be admitted that he did not upset the second half of Lenin’s formula. To begin with, the question of the revolutionary ascent of the masses of the people develops “on the basis” of the struggle of the Communists for proletarian hegemony. The whole process is turned on its head. We think that the proletarian vanguard enters or is preparing to enter or should enter a struggle for hegemony on the basis of a new revolutionary ascent. The perspective of struggle, according to Safarov, is the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Here, for the sake of Leftism, the word “democratic’ is shaken off. But it is not said frankly what kind of a dual composition dictatorship this is: a Kuomintang or an October type. But for that we are assured on his word of honour that this dictatorship can be accomplished “only in the Soviet form”. It sounds very noble. Why the slogan of the Constituent Assembly? Safarov is ready to agree only with the Soviet “form”.
The essence of epigonism – its contemptible and sinister essence – lies in the fact that from the actual processes of the past and its lessons it abstracts only the bare form and converts it into a fetish. This is what has happened to the Soviets. Without saying anything about the class character of the dictatorship – a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, like the Kuomintang, or a dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, like the October? – Safarov lulls somebody and primarily himself, by the Soviet form of the dictatorship. As if the Soviets cannot be a weapon for deceiving the workers and peasants! What else were the Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary Soviets of 1917? Nothing but a weapon for the support of the power of the bourgeoisie and the preparation of its dictatorship. What were the social democratic Soviets in Germany and Austria in 1918-1919? Organs for saving the bourgeoisie and for deceiving the workers. With the further development of the revolutionary movement in India, with the greater swing of mass struggles and with the weakness of the Communist Party – and the latter is inevitable with a Safarovist muddle prevailing in its mind – the Indian national bourgeoisie itself may create workers’ and peasants’ Soviets in order to direct them just as it now directs the trade unions, in order thus to slaughter the revolution as the German social democracy, by getting at the head of the Soviets, slaughtered it. The treacherous character of the slogan of the democratic dictatorship lies in the fact that it does not close tightly to the enemies, once and for all, such a possibility.
The Indian Communist Party, the creation of which was held back for six years – and what years! – is now deprived, in the circumstances of revolutionary democratic ascent, of one of the most important weapons for mobilizing the masses, precisely the slogan of the democratic Constituent Assembly. Instead of that, the young Party which has not yet taken its first steps is inflicted with the abstract slogan of Soviets as a form of abstract dictatorship, that is, a dictatorship of nobody knows what class. It is truly an apotheosis of confusion! And all this is accompanied as usual with disgusting colouring and sugaring of an as yet difficult and not in the least sweet situation.
The official press, particularly this same Safarov, depicts the situation as if bourgeois nationalism in India is already a corpse, as if communism either has got or is getting at the head of the proletariat, which, in its turn, is already almost leading the peasantry behind it. The leaders and their sociologists, in the most conscienceless manner, proclaim the desired as the existing. To put it more correctly, they proclaim that which might have been with a correct policy for the past six years, for what has actually developed as a result of the false policy. But when the inconsistency of the inventions and realities are revealed, the ones to be blamed will be the Indian Communists, as bad executors of the general inconsistency which is advanced as a general line.
The vanguard of the Indian proletariat is as yet at the threshold of its great tasks and there is a long road ahead. A series of defeats will be the reckoning not only for the general backwardness of the proletariat and the peasantry but also for the sins of the leadership. The chief task at present is a clear Marxist conception of the moving forces of the revolution, and a correct perspective, a far-sighted policy which rejects stereotyped, bureaucratic prescriptions, but which, in the accomplishment of great revolutionary tasks, carefully adjusts itself to the actual stages of the political awakening and the revolutionary growth of the working class.
Written on 30th May 1930 and
published in Byulleten Oppozitsii, June-July 1930
Dear Comrade Perera [17],
The question about the possible military intervention of the Red Army in India (not to speak about Ceylon) has been launched absolutely artificially by some of the American comrades. The possibility is not excluded, but it is not this question that is now on the order of the day. From the principled point of view I don’t see here any new question in comparison with the Chinese or Spanish experience. The Red Army is not an independent political factor but a military instrument of the Bonapartist bureaucracy of the USSR. The military intervention would be only the continuation of the political intervention and the political intervention of Stalin’s Comintern is developing in India as elsewhere every day. But our task is not to speculate about the possibilities of a future military intervention – rather it is to learn how to fight against the present political intervention. Every fight demands a correct appreciation of all the factors involved.
The first thing is not to forget that the direct enemy of the Indian workers and peasants is not the Red Army but British imperialism. Some comrades, who in the last period have replaced Marxist policy by anti-Stalinist policy, forget the political realities in India and imitate the Stalinists of yesterday who proclaimed – before the Stalin-Hitler pact of course – that the main enemy in India is ... Japan.
The Stalinists in India directly support the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois national parties and do all they can to subjugate the workers and peasants through these parties. What we must do is create an absolutely independent proletarian party with a clear class programme.
The general historic role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and their Comintern is counter-revolutionary. But through their military and other interests they can be forced to support progressive movements. (Even Ludendorff [18] felt himself forced to give Lenin a train – a very progressive action – and Lenin accepted it.) We must keep our eyes open to discern the progressive acts of the Stalinists, support them independently, foresee in time the danger, the betrayals, warn the masses and gain their confidence. If our policy is firm and intransigent and realistic at the same time, we would succeed in compromising the Stalinists on the basis of the revolutionary experience. If the Red Army intervenes we will continue the same policy, adapting it to military conditions. We will teach the Indian workers to fraternize with the rank-and-file soldiers and denounce the repressive measures of their commanders and so on.
The main task in India is the overthrow of the British domination. This task imposes upon the proletariat the support of every oppositional and revolutionary action directed against imperialism.
This support must be inspired by a firm distrust of the national bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois agencies.
We must not confound our organization, our programme, our banner with theirs for a moment.
We must observe strictly the old rule: march separately, strike together.
We must keep a suspicious eye on the temporary ally as well as on the foe.
We must use the dissensions of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies in order to reinforce the self-confidence of the proletarian vanguard.
If we follow seriously these good old rules, the intervention of the Red Army would not take us unawares.
With warmest greetings to yourself and to the Ceylon comrades, and with best wishes for your trip,
Letter to an Indian comrade (dated 24th November 1939),
Internal Bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party, December 1939
Dear Friends,
Titanic and terrible events are approaching with implacable force. Mankind lives in expectation of war which will, of course, also draw into its maelstrom the colonial countries and which is of vital significance for their destiny. Agents of the British government depict the matter as though the war will be waged for principles of “democracy” which must be saved from fascism. All classes and peoples must rally around the “peaceful”, “democratic” governments so as to repel the fascist aggressors. Then “democracy” will be saved and peace stabilized forever. This gospel rests on a deliberate lie. If the British government were really concerned with the flowering of democracy then a very simple opportunity to demonstrate this exists: let the government give complete freedom to India. The right of national independence is one of the elementary democratic rights. But actually, the London government is ready to hand over all the democracies in the world in return for one tenth of its colonies.
If the Indian people do not wish to remain as slaves for all eternity, then they must expose and reject those false preachers who assert that the sole enemy of the people is fascism. Hitler and Mussolini are, beyond doubt, the bitterest enemies of the toilers and oppressed. They are gory executioners, deserving of the greatest hatred from the toilers and oppressed of the world. But they are, before everything, the enemies of the German and Italian peoples on whose backs they sit. The oppressed classes and peoples – as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Liebknecht [19] have taught us – must always seek out their main and enemy at home, cast in the role of their own immediate oppressors, exploiters. In India that enemy above all is the British bourgeoisie. The overthrow of British imperialism would deliver a terrible blow at all the oppressors, including the fascist dictators. In the long run the imperialists are distinguished from one another in form – not in essence. German imperialism, deprived of colonies, puts on the fearful mask of fascism with its sabre-teeth protruding. British imperialism, gorged, because it possesses immense colonies, hides its sabre-teeth behind a mask of democracy. But this democracy exists only for the metropolitan centre, for the 45,000,000 souls – or more correctly, for the ruling bourgeoisie – in the metropolitan centre. India is deprived not only of democracy but of the most elementary right of national independence. Imperialist democracy is thus the democracy of slave owners fed by the life blood of the colonies. But India seeks her own democracy, and not to serve as fertilizer for the slave owners.
Those who desire to end fascism, reaction and all forms of oppression must overthrow imperialism. There is no other road. This task cannot, however, be accomplished by peaceful methods, by negotiations and pledges. Never before in history have slave owners voluntarily freed their slaves. Only a bold, resolute struggle of the Indian people for their economic and national emancipation can free India.
The Indian bourgeoisie is incapable of leading a revolutionary struggle. They are closely bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism. They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses. They seek compromises with British imperialism no matter what the price and lull the Indian masses with hopes of reforms from above. The leader and prophet of this bourgeoisie is Gandhi. A fake leader and a false prophet! Gandhi and his compeers have developed a theory that India’s position will constantly improve, that her liberties will continually be enlarged and that India will gradually become a Dominion on the road of peaceful reforms. Later on, perhaps even achieve full independence. This entire perspective is false to the core. The imperialist classes were able to make concessions to colonial peoples as well as to their own workers, only so long as capitalism marched uphill, so long as the exploiters could firmly bank an the further growth of profits. Nowadays there cannot even be talk of this. World imperialism is in decline. The condition of all imperialist nations daily becomes more difficult while the contradictions between them become more and more aggravated. Monstrous armaments devour an ever greater share of national incomes. The imperialists can no longer make serious concessions either to their own toiling masses or to the colonies. On the contrary, they are compelled to resort to an ever more bestial exploitation. It is precisely in this that capitalism’s death agony is expressed. To retain their colonies, markets and concessions, from Germany, Italy and Japan, the London government stands ready to mow down millions of people. Is it possible, without losing one’s senses, to pin any hopes that this greedy and savage financial oligarchy will voluntarily free India?
True enough, a government of the so-called Labour Party may replace the Tory government. But this will alter nothing. The Labour Party – as witness its entire past and present programme – is in no way distinguished from the Tories on the colonial question. The Labour Party in reality expresses not the interests of the working class, but only the interests of the British labour bureaucracy and labour aristocracy. It is to this stratum that the bourgeoisie can toss juicy morsels, due to the fact that they themselves ruthlessly exploit the colonies, above all India. The British labour bureaucracy – in the Labour Party as well as in the trade unions – is directly interested in the exploitation of colonies. It has not the slightest desire to think of the emancipation of India. All these gentlemen – Major Attlee, Sir Walter Citrine [20] and Co. – are ready at any moment to brand the revolutionary movement of the Indian people as “betrayal”, as aid to Hitler and Mussolini and to resort to military measures for its suppression.
In no way superior is the policy of the present day Communist International. To be sure, 20 years ago the Third, or Communist, International was founded as a genuine revolutionary organization. One of its most important tasks was the liberation of the colonial peoples. Only recollections today remain of this programme, however. The leaders of the Communist International have long since become the mere tools of the Moscow bureaucracy which has stifled the Soviet working masses and which has become transformed into a new aristocracy. In the ranks of the Communist Parties of various countries – including India – there are no doubt many honest workers, students, etc.: but they do not fix the politics of the Comintern. The deciding word belongs to the Kremlin which is guided not by the interests of the oppressed, but by those of the USSR’s new aristocracy.
Stalin and his clique, for the sake of an alliance with the imperialist governments, have completely renounced the revolutionary programme for the emancipation of the colonies. This was openly avowed at the last Congress of Stalin’s party in Moscow in March of the current year by Manuilsky, one of the leaders of the Comintern, who declared: “The Communists advance to the forefront the struggle for the realization of the right of self-determination of nationalities enslaved by fascist governments. They demand free self-determination for Austria ... the Sudeten regions ... Korea, Formosa, Abyssinia ...” And what about India, Indo-China, Algeria and other colonies of England and France? The Comintern representative answers this question as follows, “The Communists ... demand of the imperialist governments of the so-called bourgeois democratic states the immediate [sic] drastic [!] improvement in the living standards of the toiling masses in the colonies and the granting of broad democratic rights and liberties to the colonies.” (Pravda, issue No.70, March 12, 1939.) In other words, as regards the colonies of England and France the Comintern has completely gone over to Gandhi’s position and the position of the conciliationist colonial bourgeoisie in general. The Comintern has completely renounced revolutionary struggle for India’s independence. It “demands” (on its hands and knees) the “granting” of “democratic liberties” to India by British imperialism. The words “immediate drastic improvement in the living standards of the toiling masses in the colonies”, have an especially false and cynical ring. Modern capitalism – declining, gangrenous, disintegrating – is more and more compelled to worsen the position of workers in the metropolitan centre itself. How then can it improve the position of the toilers in the colonies from whom it is compelled to squeeze out all the juices of life so as to maintain its own state of equilibrium? The improvement of the conditions of the toiling masses in the colonies is possible only on the road to the complete overthrow of imperialism.
But the Communist International has travelled even further on this road of betrayal. Communists, according to Manuilsky, “subordinate the realization of this right of secession ... in the interests of defeating fascism.” In other words, in the event of war between England and France over colonies, the Indian people must support their present slave-owners, the British imperialists. That is to say, must shed their blood not for their own emancipation, but for the preservation of the rule of “the City” over India. And these cheaply-to-be-bought scoundrels dare to quote Marx and Lenin! As a matter of fact, their teacher and leader is none other than Stalin, the head of a new bureaucratic aristocracy, the butcher of the Bolshevik Party, the strangler of workers and peasants.
The Stalinists cover up their policy of servitude to British, French and USA imperialism with the formula of “People’s Front”. What a mockery of the people. “People’s Front” is only a new name for that old policy, the gist of which lies in class collaboration, in a coalition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In every such coalition, the leadership invariably turns out to be in the hands of the rightwing, that is, in the hands of the propertied class. The Indian bourgeoisie, as has already been stated, wants a peaceful horse trade and not a struggle. Coalition with the bourgeoisie leads to the proletariat’s abnegating the revolutionary struggle against imperialism. The policy of coalition implies marking time on one spot, temporizing, cherishing false hopes, engaging in hollow manoeuvres and intrigues. As a result of this policy disillusionment inevitably sets in among the working masses, while the peasants turn their backs on the proletariat, and fall into apathy. The German revolution, the Austrian revolution, the Chinese revolution and the Spanish revolution have all perished as a result of the policy of coalition. [21] The self-same danger also menaces the Indian revolution where the Stalinists, under the guise of “People’s Front”, are putting across a policy of subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. This signifies, in action, a rejection of the revolutionary agrarian programme, a rejection of arming the workers, a rejection of the struggle for power, a rejection of revolution.
In the event that the Indian bourgeoisie finds itself compelled to take even the tiniest step on the road of struggle against the arbitrary rule of Great Britain, the proletariat will naturally support such a step. But they will support it with their own methods: mass meetings, bold slogans, strikes, demonstrations and more decisive combat actions, depending on the relationship of forces and the circumstances. Precisely to do this must the proletariat have its hands free. Complete independence from the bourgeoisie is indispensable to the proletariat, above all in order to exert influence on the peasantry, the predominant mass of India’s population. Only the proletariat is capable of advancing a bold, revolutionary agrarian programme, of rousing and rallying tens of millions of peasants and leading them in struggle against the native oppressors and British imperialism. The alliance of workers and poor peasants is the only honest, reliable alliance that can assure the final victory of the Indian revolution.
All peacetime questions will preserve their full force in time of war, except that they will be invested with a far sharper expression. First of all, exploitation of the colonies will become greatly intensified. The metropolitan centres will not only pump from the colonies foodstuffs and raw materials, but they will also mobilize vast numbers of colonial slaves who are to die on the battlefields for their master. Meanwhile, the colonial bourgeoisie will have its snout deep in the trough of war orders and will naturally renounce opposition in the name of patriotism and profits. Gandhi is already preparing the ground for such a policy. These gentlemen will keep drumming: “We must wait patiently till the war ends – and then London will reward us for the assistance we have given.” As a matter of fact, the imperialists will redouble and treble their exploitation of the toilers both at home and especially in the colonies so as to rehabilitate the country after the havoc and devastation of the war. In these circumstances there cannot even be talk of new social reforms in the metropolitan centres or of grants of liberties to the colonies. Double chains of slavery – that will be the inevitable consequence of the war if the masses of India follow the politics of Gandhi, the Stalinists and their friends.
The war, however, may bring to India as well as to the other colonies not a redoubled slavery but, on the contrary, complete liberty: the proviso for this i{ a correct revolutionary policy. The Indian people must divorce their fate from the very outset from that of British imperialism. The oppressors and the oppressed stand on opposite sides of the trenches. No aid whatsoever to the slave-owners! On the contrary, those immense difficulties which the war will bring in its wake must be used so as to deal a mortal blow to all the ruling classes. That is how the oppressed classes and peoples in all countries should act, irrespective of whether Messrs. Imperialists don democratic or fascist masks.
To realize such a policy a revolutionary party, basing itself on the vanguard of the proletariat, is necessary. Such a party does not yet exist in India. The Fourth International offers this party its programme, its experience, its collaboration. The basic conditions for this party are: complete independence from imperialist democracy, complete independence from the Second and Third Internationals and complete independence from the national Indian bourgeoisie.
In a number of colonial and semi-colonial countries sections of the Fourth International already exist and are making successful progress. First place among them is unquestionably held by our section in French Indo-China [22] which is conducting an irreconcilable struggle against French imperialism and “People’s Front” mystifications. “The Stalinist leaders,” it is stated in the newspaper of the Saigon workers (The Struggle – La Lutte), of April 7, 1939, “have taken yet another step on the road of betrayal. Throwing off their masks as revolutionists, they have become champions of imperialism and openly speak out against emancipation of the oppressed colonial peoples. Owing to their bold revolutionary politics, the Saigon proletarians, members of the Fourth International, scored a brilliant victory over the bloc of the ruling party and the Stalinists at the elections to the colonial council held in April of this year.”
The very same policy ought to be pursued by the advanced workers of British India. We must cast away false hopes and repel false friends. We must pin hope only upon ourselves, our own revolutionary forces. The struggle for national independence, for an independent Indian republic is indissolubly linked up with the agrarian revolution, with the nationalization of banks and trusts, with a number of other economic measures aiming to raise the living standard of the country and to make the toiling masses the masters of their own destiny. Only the proletariat in an alliance with the peasantry is capable of executing these tasks.
In its initial stage the revolutionary party will no doubt comprise a tiny minority. In contras t to other parties, however, it will render a clear accounting of the situation and fearlessly march towards its great goal. It is indispensable in all the industrial centres and cities to establish workers’ groups, standing under the banner of the Fourth International. Only those intellectuals who have completely come over to the side of the proletariat must be allowed into these groups. Alien to sectarian self-immersion, the revolutionary worker-Marxists must actively participate in the work of the trade unions, educational societies, the Congress Socialist Party [23] and, in general all mass organizations. Everywhere they remain as the extreme left-wing, everywhere they set the example of courage in action, everywhere, in a patient and comradely manner, they explain their programme to the workers, peasants and revolutionary intellectuals, impending events will come to the aid of the Indian Bolshevik-Leninists, revealing to the masses the correctness of their path. The party will grow swiftly and become tempered in the fire. Allow me to express my firm hope that the revolutionary struggle for the emancipation of India will unfold under the banner of the Fourth International.
With warmest comradely greetings,
Leon Trotsky
An Open Letter to the Workers of India,
Byulleten oppozitsii, August-October 1939
India is participating in the imperialist war on the side of Great Britain. Does this mean that our attitude towards India not the Indian Bolsheviks but India – is the same as toward Great Britain? If there exist in this world, in addition to Shachtman and Burnham, only two imperialist camps, then where, permit me to ask, shall we put India? A Marxist will say that despite India’s being an integral part of the British Empire and India’s participating in the imperialist war; despite the perfidious policy of Gandhi and other nationalist leaders, our attitude toward India is altogether different from our attitude toward Britain. We defend India against Britain. Why then cannot our attitude toward the Soviet Union be different from our attitude toward Germany despite the fact that Stalin is allied with Hitler? Why can’t we defend the more progressive social forms which are capable of development against reactionary forms which are capable only of decomposition? We not only can but we must! The theoreticians of the stolen magazine replace class analysis with a mechanistic construction very captivating to petty-bourgeois intellectuals because of its pseudo-symmetry. just as the Stalinists camouflage their subservience to national socialism (the Nazis) with harsh epithets addressed to the imperialist democracies, so Shachtman and Co. [24] cover up their capitulation to American petty-bourgeois public opinion with the pompous phraseology of the “third camp. As if this “third camp” (what is it? a party? a club? a League of Abandoned Hopes? a “People’s Front”?) is free from the obligation of having a correct policy toward the petty bourgeoisie, the trade unions, India and the USSR!
From Petty Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party,
Socialist Appeal, 4th May 1940,
re-published in In Defence of Marxism, 1942
In the very first weeks of war the Indian masses exerted their growing pressure, compelling the opportunist “national’ leaders to speak in an unaccustomed tongue. But woe to the Indian people if they place trust in high-sounding words! Under the mask of the slogan of national independence Gandhi has already hastened to proclaim his refusal to create difficulties for Great Britain during the present severe crisis. As if the oppressed anywhere or at any time have ever been able to free themselves except by exploiting the difficulties of their oppressors!
Gandhi’s “moral” revulsion from violence merely reflects the fear of the Indian bourgeoisie before their own masses. They have very good grounds for their foreboding that British imperialism will drag them down too in the collapse. London for its part warns that at the first display of disobedience it will apply “all necessary measures” – including, of course, the air force in which it is deficient at the Western Front. There is a clear-cut division of labour between the colonial bourgeoisie and the British government: Gandhi needs the threats of Chamberlain and Churchill [25] in order more successfully to paralyse the revolutionary movement.
In the near future the antagonism between the Indian masses and the bourgeoisie promises to become sharper as the imperialist war more and more becomes a gigantic commercial enterprise for the Indian bourgeoisie. By opening up an exceptionally favourable market for raw materials it may rapidly promote Indian industry. If the complete destruction of the British empire slashes the umbilical cord linking Indian capital with the City of London, the national bourgeoisie would quickly seek a new patron in New York’s Wall Street. The material interests of the bourgeoisie determine their politics with the force of the laws of gravitation.
So long as the liberating movement is controlled by the exploiting class it is incapable of getting out of a blind alley. The only thing that can weld India together is the agrarian revolution under the banner of national independence. A revolution led by the proletariat will be directed not only against British rule but also against the Indian princes, foreign concessions, the top layer of the national bourgeoisie, and the leaders of the National Congress as well as against the leaders of the Moslem League. [26] It is the pressing task of the Fourth International to create a stable and powerful section in India.
From the Manifesto of the Fourth International on
the Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution,
adopted by the Emergency Conference of
the Fourth International, 26th May 1940
1. The partition of Bengal in 1905 by the British colonial administration resulted in the intensification of nationalist activity in a number of forms. There was a considerable growth in the organization of the Congress which itself split in 1907 as a result of demands for more militant policies. In April 1908 a terrorist bomb at Muzatarpur killed two English women.
2. John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher, first of the British empiricists but also an important contributor to social contract theory. – Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English jurist and philosopher, founder of utilitarianism. – John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), British philosopher, political economist and politician. He was a leading liberal thinker of the 19th century and an advocate of utilitarianism.
3. Herman Gorter (1864-1927) was a poet and a member of the Dutch Socialist Party, associated with a left-wing group expelled in 1908 that set up the Independent Socialist Party. Together with syndicalists Gorter rallied to the Communist International in 1919 but became a convinced ultra-left, attacking Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. This extract forms part of Trotsky’s reply.
4. Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Scottish Labour politician, member of Independent Labour Party (ILP), adopted pacifist position during World War I, prime minister in the first (1924) and second (1929-1931) Labour governments, defected in 1931 with Philip Snowden and Jimmy Thomas to form the National Government with the Conservatives after the Labour government split on the question of cutting unemployment benefits, served as prime minister until 1935.
5. Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) was the chief leader of Indian nationalism at this period. The tactics of his movement of non-violent “civil disobedience” against the British authorities were part of a constant willingness to compromise with imperialism.
6. L. Kornilov (1870-1920) was a tsarist general who tried unsuccessfully to lead a counter-revolutionary coup against the Provisional Government during 1917. Later he commanded White detachments against the Red Army.
7. The lower level civil servants of tsarist Russia. The word has much the same connotation as the English phrase “petty officialdom”.
8. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best remembered today for his great novels, particularly War and Peace. From the 1880s onwards, however, he was famed in Russia as the proponent of a highly individualistic philosophy of Christian anarchism, renouncing property the Church and all forms of violence.
9. Alexander Martinov (1865-1935) was a right-wing Menshevik who opposed the October Revolution and joined the Soviet Communist Party only in 1923. He then became a leading opponent of “Trotskyism”, using all his old arguments in favour of the two stages’ theory of revolutionary development. He was the main theorist of the “bloc of four classes”, Stalin’s justification for the betrayal of the Chinese Revolution of 1927. (See The Third International After Lenin, pp.249-252.)
10. N.I. Bukharin (1888-1938), Bolshevik who joined the Party in 1906, worked with Stalin against the opposition since 1923. In 1928, in launching his ultra-left turn, Stalin broke with Bukharin removing him in the following year from his posts as editor of Pravda and chairman of the Comintern. On capitulating to Stalin he was assigned to “educational work”. Framed and murdered by Stalin in the last of the Moscow Trials, 1938.
11. Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), Chinese military and political leader; assumed leadership of the Kuomintang after the death of Sun Yat-sen; led the Northern Expedition (1926-27) in alliance with the Communist Party against the warlords to unify China, but after entering Shanghai the KMT forces massacred the workers. Eventually driven from the Chinese mainland in 1949, he retreated to Taiwan, which he ruled as the Republic of China until his death in 1975.
12. Andrei Bubnov (1883-1940), Russian Bolshevik; a member of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP; mainly active within Russia he was imprisoned and exiled on numerous occasions; member of the Militar-Revolutionary Committee which organised the October insurrection; originally a member of the Left Opposition, he switched to supporting Stalin in 1924; replaced Lunacharsky as People’s Commissar for Education; expelled from the Central Committee in November 1937, he was arrested and perished in prison.
13. M.N. Roy (1887-1954) was a founder member of the Indian Communist Party in 1924. He became a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and an agent of Stalin. Broke from Stalin in 1929 as a Right Oppositionist, but eventually became an anti-communist and an enemy of the struggle against imperialism.
14. Dimitri Manuilsky (1883-1952) was at one time a member of the independent Marxist organization, Mezhrayontzi, along with Trotsky, and with him joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. In 1919 he became one of the leaders of the Ukrainian government. Thereafter he was a supporter of Stalin, being particularly associated with the “left” phases of his policies, replacing Kuusinen as Secretary of the Comintern in 1931, and himself giving way to Dimitrov in 1935. – Otto Kuusinen (1881-1964) was a Finnish social democrat who fled to the Soviet Union after the collapse of the Finnish Revolution of 1918. He became a Comintern functionary and a consistent supporter of Stalinist policies. He was Comintern Secretary from 1922 to 1931.
15. Wang Ching-wei (1883-1944), Chinese nationalist politician; a member of the left wing of the Kuomintang; opposed the massacre of the Communists during the Norhtern expedition, but because of miltiary weakness compelled to subordinate the left wing to Chiang Kai-shek; eventually collaborated with the japanese occupation forces and headed a puppet government from 1940 until his death.
16. George Safarov (1891-1938), an old Bolshevik, was in exile with Lenin and returned with him after the February revolution. A specialist in Eastern questions, he carried out a number of missions for the Comintern, of which he was an EC member. A Zinovievist, he was sent to China and then to Turkey where he carried out secret oppositional activity. Disappeared during the purges.
17. Selina Perera, treasurer of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); wife of N.M. Perera, another leading member of the party.
18. Erich Ludendorff (1867-1937) was a member of the aristocratic Prussian officer corps and the commander of the German army during the last years of the First World War. He was also an early supporter of Hitler.
19. Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919), founder of the German Communist movement and son of the co-founder of the German Social-Democratic Party. Before the First World War he was an active opponent of militarism and was imprisoned for his agitation. In 1914 he, together with Luxemburg, Mehring and Zetkin publicly opposed the Social-Democratic Party’s official support for the war. In 1915 he began to organize the Spartacus League and when the International Socialist Conference was held that year at Zimmerwald to formulate a policy of opposition to the war, he wrote from the army where he had been conscripted “Not civil peace but civil war – that is our slogan”. He was expelled from the Social-Democratic parliamentary group in 1916 and was imprisoned for anti-war agitation the same year. Greatly inspired by the Russian revolution and freed from prison by the 1918 revolution he led the struggle against the Social-Democrats and the Independents and for the immediate and unconditional transfer of state power to the Soviets formed in the revolution. He led the Berlin uprising of January 1919 and on its suppression by Scheidemann, Ebert and Noske he was arrested and assassinated by a squad of counter-revolutionary officers given free rein by Ebert and Noske.
20. Clement Attlee (1883-1967), British Labour politician and university lecturer; became leader of the Labour Party in 1935 after Lansbury’s resignation and remained leader until 1955; prime minister 1945-51. – Walter Citrine (1887-1983), British trade unionist; Acting General Secretary of the TUC 1925-26, General Secretary of the TUC 1926-46.
21. The experience of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927 is of the most direct significance for India. I heartily recommend to the Indian revolutionists Harold Isaacs’ excellent book, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution – L.D.T.
22. The Vietnamese Trotskyist movement was established in 1933 and its leaders included Ta Thu Thau and Tran Van Trach. During the 1930s they held seats on the Saigon municipal council and in 1939 won a majority of votes on the Cochin Chinese Colonial Council. In 1945 Ta, Tran and other leaders of the movement were murdered by the Stalinists when they led mass strikes and demonstrations against the return of French imperialist rule which the Stalinists were advocating.
23. Established in 1933 by various participants in the Indian nationalist movement including the pro-Stalinist J. Narayan (1902-1979) and the former British Labour Party member, M.R. Masani (1905-1998). It worked in the so-called United Front with the Indian CP from 1937 to 1940, but eventually expelled all its CP members and moved to the right as the main bourgeois party in India.
24. Leaders of the petty-bourgeois revisionist tendency in the Socialist Workers Party at this time, who denied the need to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism. Trotsky’s struggle against them is documented in In Defence of Marxism. Shachtman later became a social democrat and Burnham a cold war reactionary. – Note by New Park Publications [Note by TIA: Max Shachtman (1904-1972), American Marxist theoretician and translator; became a member of the Communist Party of the USA during the 1920s; organiser of the Communist yourth organisation and editor of Young Worker; expelled with James p. Cannon and martin Abern in 1928 for siding with Trotsky against Stalin; founded The Militant and the Copmmunist League of America; represented the CLA at various meetings of the International Left Opposition. Shachtman translated many of Trotsky’s writings and popularised his ideas. Towards the end of the 1930s Trotsky felt increasingly that Shachtman was too conciliatory towards political opponents. The differences peaked in the split in the Socialist Workers Party (the name of the organisation from 1938) over the attitude towards the Soviet Union after the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. Although Shachtman split from the SWP he still considered himself a Trotskyist and supporter of the Fourth International. However during the Cold War he drifted to the right and ended up suppoorting the US intervention in Vietnam.]
25. Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), British Conservative politician; prime minister 1937-1940; most famous for his notorious remarks about “peace for our time” on his return from the Munich conference with Hitler after the effective annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. – Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British politician, started as a Conservative, switched to the Liberals in 1904, returning to the Conservatives in 1924, served as minister in various positions in both Liberal and Conservative governbments; served as prime minister 1940-1945 und again 1951-1955.
26. These were the leading parties of bourgeois nationalism in the Indian sub-continent in this period. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 to demand reforms, only gradually taking up the aim of national independence. The Muslim League was set up at Dacca in 1906 on the grounds that the Congress catered exclusively for the interests of Hindus. It also eventually came round to supporting national independence, which it thought could only be safeguarded by establishing a separate state for Muslims. The two organizations thus became the basis for the ruling parties of the states of India and Pakistan.
Last updated on: 1.7.2007