Maoists Appeal to the Workers to Kneel Down Before the Bourgeois

-Rajesh Tyagi / 2 May 2011

The Maoist group organised around the journal ‘Dayitva-bodh’ has recently presented a platform – “Workers’ Charter Movement-2011” calling upon the workers in India to present their demands to what they call the “peoples’ representatives” in Parliament.

Though their move to mobilise the workers around the leaflet on May day turned into a fiasco, as not even a handful turned at Jantar Mantar under their banner for the proposed presentation of the charter, yet the Maoist program for this platform, raises several very important points from the point of view of education of the working class.

The May day leaflet, Maoists issued in support of the charter movement, says: “This is just the beginning of a long campaign. And  as a first step towards  this, they are planning to present this charter to the people’s representatives occupying the Parliament and also the parties ruling at the centre, for  a dignified life, for living by fulfilling our basic necessities of life, for their just and democratic demands and for gaining their legitimate share in the development of this country.”

"legitimate share in the development of this country", is clearly demonstrative of the nationalist program of the Maoists where they call upon the workers to share the proceeds of national development alongwith other classes including the bourgeois. This complacence with Indian bourgeois comprises the core of thought and program of Maoists.

Leaflet further states, “As for the present, the workers are not asking the deaf occupying the parliament for anything more than just implementing the basic rights guaranteed by the constitution of the land, for us. We are only asking for the minimum requirements a human being needs to live. The struggle of the working class has a long way to go but for the time being let us start this long journey with the demand for our democratic rights, as a first step”.

Recommending the working class, a start from ground zero, where Maoists themselves stand today in their understanding of the labor movement, the leaflet says, ” A symbolic start is being made on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the historic ‘May Day’. This is the first step towards the long march for the liberation of the working class”.  This way they nullify all the achievements and the gains of workers’ movement till date. They nullify all lessons of history, the experiences, the debates etc. etc. For Maoists working class must start from zero, as the Maoist heroes stand at point zero.

Like all Stalinist and Maoist parties, this group also divides the program of working class artificially in two compartments- minimum and maximum, and then ties up the working class to the bottom of it. As the experience shows, these opportunist parties keep the working class tied to this rock bottom of the program and never permit it to go for a politcal struggle against the bourgeois rule. 

In throwing this charter movement at the face of working class in 2011, these Maoist heroes have copied the same from English Chartist Movement of 1840’s. In 1840’s, Chartist movement had played a great role as it symbolised the break of the proletariat from the bourgeois, of its organisational and political ties. It was a big leap forward given the political situation of the time. However, the Maoist charter of 2011, is reactionary through and through, as it nullifies all the gains made by the working class since more than one and a half century of English chartism. Instead of pulling out the working class from the political embrace of the bourgeois, the Maoist Charter of 2011, pushes it back to its arms.

In the 170 years since the English Chartism, the world working class and its national sections, have learnt a lot in history and everywhere its vanguard elements have armed themselves with these lessons. Maoist Charter, performs great service to the bourgeois by its attempts to propose to the working class to take a detour back to 170 years in history.

Maoist appeal to workers in 2011, is to present their demands to the agents of bourgeois, instead of turning to the world working class and the poor peasantry for reinforcement of a combined assault of workers and peasants, against the bourgeois. Ironically the whole leaflet does not mention even a word about the peasantry and the workers’ alliance with it.

After fallacy of Maoist path was exposed to the core during the peasant uprising of Naxalbari, those who followed it were left in disarray. Ironically, the failure of Maoist path occurred in the life time of Mao himself and under his direct leadership of the movement. The party CPI(M-L) organised by Maoists fell into pieces and lost itself in innumerable petty groups in no time.

One of its splinter groups, Communist League of India (CLI), was formed in 1978, which rejected the Maoist prescription of democratic revolution in India for its semi-feudal semi-colonial character, arriving at the conclusion that India was a less developed but a capitalist country and therefore it was the stage of socialist revolution in India. They presumed that the Indian bourgeois has completed the democratic tasks by 1960’s.  This way countering their errors of the past, these Maoists again landed into errors, on the other extreme, while remaining grounded in the two stage theory of revolution, first stage of which was completed with power falling in the hands of bourgeois in 1947.

The Chartist Maoists are one of the fractions of the CLI, which has since fallen apart into so many pieces. These Maoists presume that no democratic tasks are left in India, as after taking power in 1947, the bourgeois has accomplished them in a non-revolutionary way. Therefore, according to them, in India, it is now the stage of socialist revolution, i.e. the second stage of revolution in their two stage theory, with first occurring with bourgeois takeover of the power in 1947. In that they assign a progressive role to the Indian bourgeois for completing the democratic tasks, albeit in a non-revolutionary way between 1947 and 1970.

This Maoist group is one among those in rabid opposition to the theory of permanent revolution, who have carried out slanderous propaganda against it. While opposing Trotsky even without caring for looking at the disputes he raised inside CPSU and the Comintern, they had continued to chant sermons for Maoism, during lifetime of Mao. After crushing failure of Maoist path in naxalbari, only a turn towards troskyism was the alternative. But these Maoist leaders who had opposed Trotsky so much in the past, and still were oblivious of the theory of permanent revolution, failed to take a departure from Maoism.

In face of repression upon naxalbari uprising by the bourgeois state, these false heroes run away with their backs to the movement, though with Mao still in their hearts. They thus prepared a intriguing recipe of ideas, where they say that Mao is obsolete but to the extent of his prescription of democratic revolution in India, but still his brainchild – cultural revolution- holds good. They say that Russian revolution failed because Bolshevik leaders emphasized the development of productive forces (economism!)  instead of changing the production relations through a cultural revolution. Saying this they cover up the role of Stalinist bureaucracy in bringing down the USSR and comintern.

The fact is that Maoists have prepared their program in complete ignorance of the disputes that had come up inside the Comintern, the struggle of the left opposition and the subsequent founding of the fourth international. Petty bourgeois minds of these Maoist leaders were overwhelmed with the bureaucratic authority Stalin and Mao enjoyed in their times, in Kremlin and Peking respectively. They continued to derive their legacy out of that bureaucratic authority instead of political disputes, which they never addressed, rather kept their followers blind on them.

The post WW-II era, in which Stalinism became complacent with world capitalism and both regained strength with support to each other, was the real hey-day for Stalinist heroes. Maoist bureaucracy  emerged soon as Chinese version of Stalinism and in its mirror image. The false heroes, followed the path dictated by these bureaucracies for decades together. The fall of Stalinist and Maoist bureaucracy over the world and failure of subsequent attempts to restore it there and elsewhere, left these leaders in disarray.

These Stalinist and Maoist leaders, having nothing to offer to younger generations, have misled them away from the real disputes over the revolutionary program and strategy. Over decades of blackout of the real debates inside world workers’ movement, they presented their home made arbitrary explanations of the failure and solutions, to which they themselves were party to.

Like this Maoist group which presented the charter 2011, now after taking a U-turn prescribes that India  is in the stage of a ‘New Socialist Revolution’  i.e. not the Socialist revolution like October.  In this arbitrary staging of the revolution inside a country, they apply exclusive national parameters of growth of productive forces inside the boundaries of the given country, forgetting in the first instance that it is nowhere national capitalism but world capitalism which holds sway and that this world capitalism has subjugated all modes of production on the earth.

This debased nationalist conservative politics makes them apologists of national bourgeois and they find the national bourgeois carrying out the democratic tasks after taking power in 1947, in fight against the imperialists, not in conjunction with them.

In our articles we have again and again showed that the Indian bourgeois has come to power hand in gloves with the imperialists, through outright betrayal of the freedom movement. This bourgeois is reactionary from its birth and is unable to carry out even a single democratic task. The intrusion of capital in different sectors of life is based upon its adaptation to the old structures of economy and not their uprooting and this way the democratic tasks instead of being resolved have been complicated further and contradictions upon which they are based, flared up further, under its rule. The impending revolution though would bring the proletariat to power in India, like all countries of the world today, but the immediate tasks before the revolution will be democratic tasks, which bourgeois had failed to fulfil under its rule.  For, the Maoist-SRs these tasks do not exist at all, they give credit to the bourgeois for completing these tasks. Instead of exposing the role of Indian bourgeois as an agency of world bourgeois, the Maoist SRs say that it is politically independent and a junior partner of Imperialist countries. This way they conceal the real position of Indian bourgeois in the integrated structure of world capitalism.

This New SR line of Maoists is extremely counter revolutionary, as it turns its back upon the poor peasantry, which has keen interest in accomplishment of the democratic tasks. It glorifies bourgeois for its role it has played in India till 1960’s and it plays in many backward countries still. In fact, there Maoist-SRs have collected everything that is rotten and reactionary from economism to Maoism.

In their practice, these Maoist SRs bring all focus upon the 'mass activity', by which they mean economic trade unionism. They are neck-deep in worst sort of economism and criticise trotslyists for not having focus upon this 'mass activity'. As they are bound to, having no appeal for their confused program of 'new socialist revolution' among the advanced layer of workers, they turn to most backward of them for trade union struggles, making it sole plank of their activities. Anyone who is not trapped in this economism is an "idler" for them.

Lenin argued against economism saying that workers can well conduct trade union struggles on their own and hardly need assistance of communists in that. He made a critique of trade-unionism with reference to Robert Nite's activities in his work 'what is to be done'. But still economism remains favourite of all economists, Stalinists and Maoists, which they term as 'mass activity'. In fact, inside the trade union movement they play a pernicious role, subjecting the backward mass of the workers to their bureuacratic control, insulating it from political debates, making it a source of permanent revenues for the bureuacracy by collecting regular subscriptions from workers, etc. etc.

The politics of Maoist SRs and the charter movement they propose, is absolutely regressive in nature, that proposes to Indian working class a detour inside the movement of the world working class. The petty-bourgeois nationalists- renegades of naxalbari- now regrouping themselves in various groups of that sort, hardly present any alternative to the rule of capitalists and landlords in India. They are idler parasites on the body of the working class movement. Working class has to get rid of these parasites, in order to turn to the political struggle against its enemies.

We call upon the workers and youth, not to be misled by the reactionary politics of disgruntled elements, rooted in the degenerated Stalinist and Maoist soil. Having disoriented themselves completely, they are now bent upon to further disorient the revolutionary movement.

The program of permanent revolution as advanced by us in India, as part of the world socialist movement under ICFI, is the only revolutionary alternative to the rule of bourgeois and the only valid path to the world socialist revolution.