Workers World, Vol. 13, No. 15
We have, from the very beginning of the struggle in East Pakistan, come out resolutely in defense of the right of self-determination for the Bengali people – the right to determine their own destiny like all other nations. The right of self-determination can express itself in a variety of forms.
In the given context, it means the right to set up an independent state separate and apart from West Pakistan. This also includes the right as a nation to belong to a federation of states in the sub-continent.
The Bengalis may form a confederation with West Pakistan, if they want to, with the West Bengalis (of India), or even with India, or again – although it is now extremely remote – may rejoin West Pakistan on the basis of an agreement for local autonomy, or on any other basis which would provide the Bengali people with freedom from national oppression. The latter is the crux of the matter.
Imperialism, as Lenin pointed out more than half a century ago, exacerbates all national oppression precisely because monopoly capitalism “must strive for domination” and subjugation everywhere. It flows from the very nature of the fundamental contradictions of monopoly capitalism and the unbridled drive for super-profit which is its motivating force.
But neither India nor Pakistan are imperialist states.
Instead, the artificial division of the sub-continent is the legacy of British imperialism. Less than 25 years ago the British were forced to grant political independence to the Indian sub-continent. Before their troops left, however, their strategy was to keep this vast area divided and to retain imperialist influence, economically and politically, if not for British imperialist itself, certainly for its senior partner in Washington.
So while there is political independence in West Pakistan as well as in India, the economic facts of life show the deep interest of predatory monopoly capitalism in both countries regardless of their political and diplomatic position at this moment.
India and Pakistan are dependent countries. The ruling classes of India and Pakistan, regardless of their immediate political and diplomatic position, are tied to Western imperialism. And this is not merely in the narrow economic sense, but in the broader, sociological sense, in that they are both bourgeois ruling classes which dominate, oppress and exploit the working class, the peasants and the population generally in the interests of their own class, and seek to perpetuate and strengthen their rule by whatever means is the most expedient politically.
To deny this is to deny the most elementary fact of real life in India and Pakistan. Without a doubt, every progressive human being must unconditionally support the struggle of India and West Pakistan against imperialist aggression, domination and the threats of violence and diplomatic retaliation forthcoming every time they try to free themselves from the stranglehold of the imperialist vise. But we must never for a moment lose sight of the true class relations which constitute the economic anatomy of the social system prevailing on the sub-continent.
To lost sight of that is to lose sight of proletarian class interest and the struggle for socialism.
The crocodile tears shed on behalf of the Bengali people in the United States by the liberal bourgeoisie are the most disgusting spectacle of hypocrisy.
Just look at the New York Times, the Washington Post and a hundred other capitalist newspapers as well as radio and TV, and you cannot help but marvel at the speed with which they documented the case for self-determination and secession for Bangla Desh.
On the basis of culture, geography, language, etc., the capitalist press was immediately able to make a case for setting up an independent state in East Pakistan. Well and good!
But how come the same capitalist media have not to this day found any good and sufficient reason to proclaim the right of the Black people in this country to self-determination? They won’t even raise it to the level of an honest discussion. Nor, for that matter, will they discuss the right of self-determination for Puerto Rico. The U.S. government has to this day failed to sign (just to sign, not even put into effect) a meaningless anti-genocide resolution in the United Nations, for fear it might some day be applied to themselves.
Yet suddenly they release a Niagara of tears for the slaughter of the Bengali people and champion their right to secession. Why? It is not out of genuine sympathy, but out of genuine concern for a vital imperialist interest. They must find new points of support for aggressive U.S. finance capital, where older supports are crumbling.
British imperialism divided the sub-continent into Pakistan and India to better maintain a stranglehold on it. Managing two small states is easier than one large one. U.S. imperialism, doing the British one better, wants to have possibly three or four division on the sub-continent. How much better and easier to exploit them while inciting one against another, selling arms and ammunition to each of them, giving so-called aid and assistance to one at the expense of another! All of it is calculated to maintain whatever domination they can over the sub-continent at a time when U.S. imperialism generally is on the decline and licking its wounds from its disastrous defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese people.
Anyone who has watched the diplomatic deterioration in U.S.-Indian relations and the growing rapprochement, also diplomatically, between the Soviet Union and India (witness the new Soviet-Indian Friendship Treaty) can be easily misled as to what the real relationships between India and the U.S. are from the point of view of economics, which always in the long run proves decisive.
As late as June 7, 1971, the New York Times quoted G.L. Mehta, India’s former ambassador to the United States, one of his country’s key investment planners, and a big capitalist himself, on the growing investment of American companies in India.
“The earning ratio of United States manufacturing industries in India was 14.7 percent in 1969, a figure much higher than those for Canada (8.6 percent), Latin America (10.7 percent) and even Europe (12 percent).”
Thus we see that American corporations in India can expect high profits than in Canada, Latin America and even Europe. A real eye opener! But let us listen to Mr. Mehta again:
“The Indian Government has always unfailingly permitted the repatriation of foreign capital whenever sought and the remittance of profits, dividends and royalties earned by non-resident stockholders.”
So at a time when the U.S. balance of payments deficit is so great, at a time when most foreign states, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin America, are doing their utmost to keep whatever dollars are in their respective treasuries, or to severely restrict their outflow, the Indian government “has unfailingly permitted to repatriate foreign capital” – that is, U.S. capital – back to the coffers of Wall Street. Not only are profit percentages highest in India, but U.S. capitalists take their profits home quickly!
How understandable it is that 300 U.S. corporations have (according to Mehta) invested capital in India, and that 98 percent of them had profitable operations. And American finance capital’s position in Pakistan differs only in degree from that in India.
Whoever fails to take these vital economic facts into consideration can never hope to understand the true political motivation of U.S. imperialism on the sub-continent or anywhere else.
The end of the Second World War and the period following it saw a whole series of formerly dependent colonial people win their political independence from imperialism. Many have taken a political position of diplomatic neutrality between the socialist countries and imperialism, while some have taken strong and even militantly anti-imperialist stands. At great risk the latter have thrown off diplomatic and military alignments with U.S. imperialism which went under the cover of SEATO, CENTO, or other U.S. instruments of the Pentagon.
In radical circles in the United States, it is often forgotten that even in the most militant and anti-imperialist of the formerly colonial nations, bourgeois relations of production prevail. The domination of the bourgeoisie at home in alliance with the landlords or the remnants thereof, exploit and oppress the workers and peasants ruthlessly, while covering themselves with socialist phrases.
Such is the case in India, in Egypt and elsewhere. Their neutrality – so-called – between the socialist countries and imperialism, or even their alliance with the socialist countries, does not in the least change the basic character of the relations of exploitation which prevail in these countries.
Thus the bourgeoisie in Egypt, in India or in Pakistan may find it absolutely necessary, in the interest of maintaining their own domination at home, and as a temporary expedient against imperialist aggression, to ally itself with a socialist country, be it the Soviet Union or China.
This does not, however, for a moment change the basic class position of either the exploiting or the exploited classes in these countries.
What must always be borne in mind is that the bourgeoisies of India, Pakistan, and Egypt all have a common class denominator with the imperialist bourgeoisie in that they are all possessing classes that base themselves on the capitalist relationship of exploitation of the dispossessed and oppressed masses.
Of course, this in no way nullifies the fundamental contradiction between the oppressing imperialist countries and the oppressed countries. In the struggle against imperialism, we support the oppressed countries that are striving for national independence against imperialist aggression. Failure to do this is class disloyalty to the cause of the emancipation from imperialism and a betrayal of socialism.
Such is the Marxist position as outlined by Lenin more than half a century ago and valid to this very day.
The objective of U.S. imperialism on the Indian sub-continent is to maintain political, economic and diplomatic influence by whatever means at its disposal in order to further its predatory class rule. Thus it can permit the capitalist press here and its liberal soothsayers to shed tears for the Bengali people, while the Nixon Administration with the other hand gives military aid to Pakistan to slaughter them.
Unquestionably, life for U.S. imperialism is difficult when it has to maintain “good relations” with the Indian bourgeoisie, while at the same time supplying the Pakistani bourgeoisie with weapons against India, and especially now against East Pakistan.
To find consistency in U.S. foreign policy, one must not look merely at diplomatic tactics or get bogged down in the morass of trying to establish a moral or humane criterion for Washington’s international relations. The only consistency that Washington knows is the consistent pursuit of its imperialist predatory interests.
If the U.S. should switch diplomatic “friendships” from India to Pakistan, or seemingly forsake one for the other, it can best be explained by what an old line British imperialist statesman once said.
“Britain has no permanent allies. It has only permanent (imperialist – S.M.) interests.”
This is the real clue to U.S. foreign policy on the Indian sub-continent, as everywhere else. U.S. imperialist interests may at times conflict. They may have to subordinate some interests for larger objectives, but always the interests are motivated by the pursuit of monopoly super-profits, the strengthening of the U.S. imperialist system and the struggle against the socialist revolution. This goes for so-called periods of peaceful development as well as during an imperialist war.
“All boundaries in nature and society are conventional and mobile. There is not a single phenomenon which cannot under certain conditions be transformed into its opposite.”
- Lenin
Lenin wrote the foregoing in 1916 in the midst of the first imperialist war in an answer to Rosa Luxemburg on the question of self-determination (see Lenin’s article “The Pamphlet of Junius”).
Luxemburg had maintained that the epoch of national wars of liberation in Europe had ended and was completely submerged by the imperialist war of 1914. Yes, answered Lenin, it is true that in the present imperialist war some of the smaller and oppressed nations of Europe have become submerged in the general imperialist war. Luxemburg was right, said Lenin, “... in emphasizing the decisive influence of the imperialist background of the imperialist war when she says that behind Serbia there is Russia, ‘behind Serbian nationalism there is Russian imperialism.’”
But, he adds, “... it would be a mistake to exaggerate this truth; to depart from the Marxian rule to be concrete; to apply the appraisal of the present war to all wars that are possible under imperialism; to lose sight of the national movements AGAINST imperialism.”
Later in this very article, Lenin says:
“A national war can be transformed into an imperialist war and VICE VERSA. For example, the wars of the Great French Revolution started as national wars and were such. They were revolutionary wars because they were waged in defense of the Great Revolution against a coalition of counter-revolutionary monarchies. But after Napoleon had created the French Empire by subjugating a number of large, virile, long established national states of Europe, the French national wars became imperialist wars, which IN THEIR TURN engendered wars for national liberation AGAINST Napoleon’s imperialism.”
(It should be noted that Lenin’s use of the world imperialism relates to the imperialist of the pre-monopoly epoch.)
What Lenin said is particularly relevant in relation to the struggle of the Bengali people for self-determination. Their struggle to secede from Pakistan and set up an independent state is an exercise of an elementary democratic right. But it is also very clear that India is supporting the Bengali move for secession, and it is obvious that U.S. imperialist agents are maneuvering, however restricted their arena may be, to bring the Bengali Liberation Movement within the political and diplomatic – not to mention economic – orbit of U.S. imperialism.
It is to be noted that the movement for secession is headed by the nationalist bourgeoisie of East Bengal, and is admittedly pro-Western in its general political outlook. Furthermore, even a superficial examination of the political forces in the U.S. that are raising the phony hue and cry for humanitarian aid to the Bengali people makes it very clear that a substantial section of the bourgeoisie in this country are in reality pulling the strings.
Should this invalidate independent working-class and revolutionary support to the struggle of the Bengali people for political independence?
It is true that the movement for the national independence of the Bengali people is led by the bourgeoisie of East Bengal. But that should not militate against us supporting it any more than we would desert the struggle of all India against British rule because it was led by the Indian bourgeoisie (India as well as what is now known as Pakistan).
It was plain at that time that the U.S. was maneuvering to supplant Britain as the predominant imperialist influence there, just as the U.S. is not trying covertly to do the same in East Pakistan. The fact that India is supporting the Bengali movement is not in itself a factor negating support for the Bengalis.
It is the right of the Bengali people, as we said, to determine their own destiny. They may decide to federate with West Bengal and with India, and even join a larger federation with Pakistan. Their right to self-determination in this sense is unconditional so far as our support goes.
Our support would become reactionary only if the Bengal movement for national liberation were to become completely submerged into a reactionary war manipulated by the imperialists were self-determination was turned into a façade for a puppet regime manipulated by imperialist interests. Such a development cannot be excluded under present circumstances. But this is not what is happening now. There is merely a tendency in that direction. Before that tendency develops to its ultimate conclusion, it can be overtaken by any number of other developments, such as the emergence of a genuinely mass revolutionary movement of the workers and peasants to set up a socialist state as in Cuba, North Vietnam or North Korea.
In the meantime, it is the duty of all progressives, not to speak of Marxist-Leninists, to give genuine wholehearted, but not uncritical support, to the present movement of the Bengali people, while giving the most comradely support to the revolutionary elements in East Pakistan.
It is important to note that in the very article of Lenin’s quoted previously, he also gave the example of the American War of Independence:
“The North American States started a war for national liberation against England alone. Out of enmity toward England, i.e., in conformity with their own imperialist interests, France and Spain, which still held parts of what are now the United States, concluded friendly treaties with the states that had risen against England. The French forces together with the American defeated the English. Here we have a war for national liberation in which imperialist rivalry is a contributory element of no great importance, which is the opposite of what we have in the war of 1914-16 (in which the national element in the Austro-Serbian war is of no great importance compared with the all-determining imperialist rivalry).”
Lenin saw the American War of Independence against Britain as a war of national liberation in which the imperialist struggle between Britain and France, with imperialist France helping the States, was a contributory factor in the war of independence, but not the decisive one. Had it been decisive the States would have been reduced to changing British rule for French rule.
In the same way, U.S. imperialist influence in the struggle on the Indian sub-continent is today a contributing factor in the struggle of the Bengali people for independence. But to say that the Bengali struggle has already become completely submerged in imperialist politics, and that it is actually becoming a puppet of U.S. imperialism, is certainly not true today.
To do that would be to exaggerate a tendency of development into a finished historical process, which is not at all the case in the current Bengali struggle.
This ought to serve as the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist answer to those who are trying to justify their abandonment of the struggle of oppressed peoples for the right to self-determination – in this case the Bengali people – under cover of revolutionary-sounding phrases while attacking the Bengali struggle as a CIA plot.
The CIA is plotting, all right, and not only on the issue of the Bengali liberation struggle, but wherever it can lay its hands. Those who are trying to defame and vilify the struggle of the oppressed people of Bengal are doing it in the name of preserving the “integrity of Pakistan.” But the reality of the situation is that those who are defending Pakistan on this issue are doing so because the People’s Republic of China is supporting Pakistan.
Then there are those who are supporting the Bengali struggle because the Soviet Union is supporting India.
To support the Bengali movement for independence because the Soviet Union is supporting India, and by implication, the Bengalis, or to support Pakistan because of China’s support for the latter, is to make a mockery of Marxism. The very fact that the Soviet Union and China are on opposite sides on this issue ought to put everyone on guard with respect to what interests both the Soviet Union and China have at stake in the sub-continent.
Here we have two socialist states which should be promoting jointly the revolutionary liberation movements and the cause of socialism on a world scale. But instead, we find that each is supporting either Pakistan or India, not because of the Bengali movement, but precisely because each finds it to its advantage – a short-sighted advantage, we might add – to support the national bourgeoisie in each of those countries against the fundamental class interests of the workers and peasants of Pakistan and India (including the Bengalis).
First of all, the Soviet Union has for a long time supported the Indian bourgeoisie while in recent years China has been supporting the Pakistani bourgeoisie. Pakistan is a bourgeois military dictatorship and India, except for the façade of its parliamentary machine, is little else. Yahya Khan and Indira Ghandi are ruling class representatives and enemies of the socialist revolution of the workers and peasants of the sub-continent.
If the Bengali people see fit to break from Pakistan and set up a state of their own, the elementary duty of any socialist state is to first champion the right of self-determination. And more importantly, to give aid and assistance to the revolutionary movement there. This is not what the Soviet Union is doing. The Soviet Union is pledged to give aid to India and only by implication (and one has to stretch that term) can it be concluded there is any kind of aid to the East Bengalis.
The friendship pact between India and the Soviet Union is calculated to strengthen India against Pakistan, not necessarily to give any aid to an insurgent mass movement. On the contrary, the Soviet bureaucracy would sooner snuff out the flames of any revolutionary movement than light one. Its interest in the sub-continent is based in part on its ability to check U.S. imperialism there also to collaborate with it. It is also concerned with checking the People’s Republic of China.
In similar fashion China is interested in part in checking U.S. imperialism there, and in the light of the projected visit of Nixon, to collaborate with the U.S. It also seeks to block the advance of Soviet influence.
In both cases, the Soviet Union and China are playing a sorry role. As we have said, it is the fundamental contradiction of monopoly capitalism, and the lust for super-profit, which drives the imperialists all over the globe and even outside of it. This is not true of the socialist states. Above everything else the imperialists are interested in stifling the socialist revolution.
But the absence of the driving forces of imperialism in the socialist countries does not necessarily mean that the leadership of the socialist countries will abandon methods of nationalist rivalry and narrow, selfish interests. This is the heritage from bourgeois society, and is still the predominant political form of relationships in the contemporary world.
We will deal with this them in a subsequent issue of Workers World paper.
Last updated: 11 May 2026