On The 200th Anniversary Of The War Of 1812-Symbol Of An Age- 'Old Hickory' Andrew Jackson

Book Review

Andrew Jackson-Symbol for an Age, John William Ward, Oxford University Press, London, 1962

American democratic politics, as can be easily seen in this year's presidential nominating processes, has always been encumbered with symbols. That fact is hardly new or news. What is news is that today's seemingly modern notion of proper electoral technique has a fairly ancient pedigree. Although Parson Weems did more than his share to establish the iconic figure of George Washington, arguably the subject of this work, Andrew Jackson, really was the first president to get the full public relations `spin' treatment that we take as a matter of course in today's politics.

The present volume builds the case for Jackson symbolic virtues at a time when America, after a series of nasty encounters with the British, notably the War of 1812, developed an inward look westward and away from the `degeneracy' of the seaboard. If Jackson did not fit the bill to a tee then his agents, paid or otherwise, filled in the blanks. First place in those efforts goes to highlighting his military prowess and soldierly concerns in defeating (to what real purpose no one knows since the war was over by this time) against the British at the tail end of the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans.

From there it was fairly simple to make him a man of the' people'. In this case the people being empathically not the residents of the eastern seaboard but the `fresh' yeomanry of the Westward trek. You know- the ones who exhibited all the plebian virtues as solid tillers of the soil, holders of folk wisdom against the effete nabobs of the cities and the true patriots of rising American agricultural capitalism. The author builds his case by using a series of fairly common references beginning his work with an analysis of a Jackson poetic tribute `The Hunters of Kentucky' and dissects that bit of work to see how it fit into the scheme of making Jackson the first "people's" president. All the other tributes and, at the end eulogies, then fall into place.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then his Whig opponents do that by learning from his handlers by the time of the `Tippecanoe' Harrison campaign of 1840. And from there we are off to the races. Note this- as if to reinforce the argument presented by the book- can anyone today deny that that myth around Jackson built so long ago still, with the exception of a dent caused by his savagery against the Native Americans, stands as the way he is thought of in the American pantheon? The Democrats continue their traditional Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners without blushing. Enough said.

***On The 200th Anniversary Years-Defense of A Nation- The War of 1812

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the War Of 1812

DVD REVIEW

The History Channel Presents: The War of 1812, two volumes, 2004

If you do not, like most people, know anything about the War of 1812-the so-called- ‘forgotten war’- or even if you are familiar with its details then this History Channel presentation will give you more than you will ever want to know about that event. I know, despite my intense love of the study of history, that I had had enough once I got through this two-volume four hours plus work. Mercifully it is broken up into sections so, for the faint-hearted, you can pick and choice. In any case, the section entitled "First Invasion" is must viewing to get an overall sense of the conflict.

So what is all the bother about? Well the short answer, very short, is that this war against old Mother England was the definitive moment when the seemingly improbable American victory announced to the world that fragile as the Republic was, and as isolated and uncomplicated its people that it was now a factor, if at that time a small factor, in the international scheme of things. Not bad for a ‘forgotten war’. Remember if the bloody British had been victorious America would have a name like, say, the United States of Canada.The History Channel’s presentation shows that this victory was a near thing. Suffering defeats, the torching of the capital, internal dissension and an apparently inevitable defeat at New Orleans after a peace treaty was signed this motley group of American yeomen and women broke through to preserve a slender democracy.

No look at the War of 1812 is complete without acknowledging the role of two men of opposing temperaments, James Madison, under whose presidency the issues became clarified and the causes of war outlined and Andrew Jackson whose victory at New Orleans sealed the fate of the country. By this last point I do not mean merely Jackson’s military victory but the rush toward a plebeian democracy that the forces who fought and supported the war unleashed. Later in the century the children and grandchildren of those fighters would be lost in the scramble to make America a capitalist fortress but back then the American world was young and fresh. Take a look.

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The "Socialist Alternative "Press- Britain 1931-Coalition, cutbacks and crisis

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Britain 1931-Coalition, cutbacks and crisis

While no historical period is identical with Britain now, the tumultuous events that shook the country 80 years ago – combining the great depression, a ‘grand coalition’ government wielding the axe, and a damaging currency peg – are rich in lessons for workers in Britain and Europe today. HANNAH SELL looks back at the autumn crisis of 1931.

THE 1929 WALL STREET crash was the trigger for the most profound global crisis in the history of capitalism, the great depression. And it took the second world war to create conditions for an escape from the economic cul-de-sac. For over half a century, capitalist economists believed that studying the depression was of purely historical interest. Then, over one weekend in 2008 – as the world financial markets teetered on the edge of breakdown following the collapse of Lehman Brothers – even the most obtuse representatives of capitalism realised that they faced the possibility of a repeat of their system’s worst ever crisis.

Unprecedented state measures – quantitative easing and stimulus programmes in the US, Japan and other major economies – were taken to bail out the financial system. While this prevented a repeat of the 1930s, however, it did not solve any of the underlying problems. It is the recognition that there is no prospect of healthy recovery, and that the global economic crisis is still developing, that has caused turmoil on the world’s financial markets again over the summer.

Like the Bourbon kings, capitalist governments seem to have forgotten nothing but learnt nothing. In the immediate aftermath of the 2007/08 financial crisis, capitalism behaved as if it had learnt something from their studies of the 1930s. However, the period of nation states ‘priming the pump’ was brief. Now, the world’s governments, above all the Con-Dems in Britain, have switched to savage cuts in public spending which are startlingly similar to the deflationary policies in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash.

The result, as in the 1930s, has been to worsen the economic situation, forcing the capitalists to consider priming the pump again. Even if they do so it will not solve the underlying economic problems. During the great depression the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, explained that only the richest capitalist country, the US, could afford even the minimal Keynesian policies of the pump-priming New Deal, which president Franklin D Roosevelt switched to in the mid-1930s in the aftermath of the savage cuts in state spending carried out by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover.

Today, in a sense, no country can afford a ‘New Deal’. US imperialism is weakened, crippled by the twin deficits of the federal budget and trade. Globally, we are witnessing a prolonged and deep, organic crisis of capitalism which, due to the massive and economically unsound financial bubble that has developed over the past 20 years, is becoming still deeper and dramatic in character. Capitalism will be hobbled for a protracted period. The lessons of the 1930s have never been more relevant to the working class than they are today.

The return to the gold standard
THE GREAT DEPRESSION meant appalling misery for the working class in Britain. By the end of 1930, UK exports had plummeted by 50% and unemployment had more than doubled to 20% of the workforce. Other countries, including the US, suffered an even greater fall in production but in Britain it followed many years of inexorable decline. Once the world’s great imperialist power, British capitalism had been first challenged and then decisively pushed down the pecking order by the development of German then US capitalism.

In 1925, the Tory government had put Britain back onto the ‘gold standard’, which linked sterling to the value of gold and, in reality, to the US dollar. This was an attempt to restore the power of British imperialism by re-establishing sterling at pre-war parity with gold and to slow the tendency of Britain’s colonies to orientate towards the ever more powerful USA. However, "the British empire [was] being mortgaged to the United States", as the Daily Mail commented.

In September 1931, the national government took Britain off the gold standard, following panic on the world financial markets. There are innumerable parallels between Britain’s experience of the gold standard and the crisis currently engulfing southern Europe. Both involved national capitalist classes tying their currencies to a more powerful country. Initially, both were hailed as a success when, as Trotsky explained regarding the gold standard, "we seem to have a great victory for British capitalism [but] in actual fact Britain’s decline is nowhere more clearly expressed than in this financial achievement". (Where is Britain Going? 1925) Just as with the gold standard, the outcome of the crisis in Europe will be the break up of the euro, sooner or later, with at least some countries being forced out of it. In the meantime, again as in the 1920s and early 1930s, the price of membership of a common currency is being extracted in the misery of millions of working-class people.

The decision to return to the gold standard at too high a level – overvalued by around 10% – had immediate economic consequences. The capitalist class responded by attempting to make the workers pay with savage pay cuts. The economist John Maynard Keynes attacked the decision, saying that it would be the workers in general, and miners in particular, who were the "victims of the economic juggernaut… Mr Churchill’s policy of improving the exchange by 10% was sooner or later a policy of reduction everyone’s wages by two shillings in the pound [10%]".

Like the Greek working class today, workers in Britain refused to pay for a crisis that was not of their making. The magnificent nine-day 1926 general strike, in which four million trade unionists took part (out of a total of five-and-a-half million), still remains the most important event in the history of the British working class. Due solely to the criminal betrayal of the trade union leaders, it is also its greatest defeat. That defeat forms a vital part of the backdrop to the events of 1931. In the aftermath of the strike, Britain’s capitalist class exacted a terrible revenge on the working class, with widespread wage cuts and hundreds of thousands of the most militant activists thrown out of work. Trade union membership fell by half a million in 1927 alone. The unemployed were treated with appalling brutality. The diseases of poverty, tuberculosis, rickets and polio, were common.

The 1926 defeat was heavier because the young Communist Party (CP), which included many of the most militant workers, had not put forward a clear strategy for victory during the strike. It followed behind the trade union leaders, particularly those of the left, too uncritically. As a result, it did not come out of the general strike strengthened as it could have been. Nor was it able to prepare effectively the most militant sections of the working class for the battles that were to come. The Minority Movement, founded by the CP and involving half-a-million trade unionists at its peak, went into terminal decline. These failings were exacerbated as the CP followed the policy zigzags of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union.

Today, the working class is not suffering from recent industrial defeats. On the contrary, workers in Britain are only now beginning to awake and attempt a serious struggle to defend their interests. Nonetheless, the defeats the working class has suffered over the longer period of the last three decades still have a negative effect. The ideological defeat caused by the collapse of Stalinism in 1989/90 and the resulting wave of capitalist triumphalism which pushed back socialist consciousness remain an important factor, albeit a decreasing one. Working-class consciousness today is still on a lower level than in the 1930s. Today, the lack of mass parties of the working class complicates the resistance to the capitalists’ onslaught. In 1931, the crisis was of the leadership of the political organisations of the working class. Today, it is of its very organisation. The trade unions, which organise over six million workers in Britain, remain intact and are crucial means for the working class to defend its interests. To do so effectively, however, trade unionists need to exert enormous pressure on the right-wing leaders of the TUC who are even more integrated into the capitalist system than in the past.

The profound crisis of capitalism is, however, pushing a new generation into searching for an alternative. The revolutionary wave that has swept North Africa, and the mighty uprising in Greece, represent the dramatic beginnings of a new stage of struggle. In Britain, we have already seen the biggest student movement in a quarter of a century, the biggest trade union organised demonstration in history and, most importantly, 750,000 workers taking co-ordinated strike action. One lesson that can be drawn from 1931 is that, despite the difficulties, the capitalist class could still not carry out its savage programme without mass and heroic resistance from the working class. Even against the background of a savage assault on the working class, the resistance forced the capitalists to retreat, at least partially. When the working class was blocked in the official trade unions it found other means of struggle, including the so-called bread riots, and the biggest naval mutiny in Britain for 150 years. The same kind of struggles will undoubtedly develop today as part of the current battle against cuts and could be central to it if, as in 1931, the trade union leaders succeed in blocking serious industrial struggle for a period.

The 1929-31 Labour government
IN THE AFTERMATH of the general strike, a defeat in the industrial struggle, the working class first turned to the political arena to try and defend itself. In May 1929, the second Labour government in history came to power as a minority government, backed by the Liberals, with ‘moderate’ Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister.

The Labour Party at that stage was a capitalist workers’ party. While the leadership acted in the interests of the capitalists, the mass, working-class base of the party was able (unlike today) to influence it through the party’s democratic structures. This was to be graphically demonstrated by the events of 1931. Trotsky anticipated what would develop in Where is Britain Going? "The masses will liberate themselves from the yoke of national conservatism, working out their own discipline of revolutionary action. Under this pressure from below the top layers of the Labour Party will quickly shed their skins. We do not in the least mean by this that MacDonald will change his spots into those of a revolutionary. No, he will be cast out".

The Labour Party had come to power in a period in which capitalism could not afford to carry out reforms: "Without reforms there is no reformism, without prosperous capitalism no reforms", Trotsky explained. "The right reformist wing becomes anti-reformist in the sense that it helps the bourgeoisie, directly or indirectly, to smash the old conquests of the working class". (Once More on Centrism, 23 March 1934, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34)

From the start, the MacDonald government disappointed the millions of workers who had voted for it, not least on the central issue of the day, unemployment. Even Hugh Gordon, a right-wing Labour MP, later admitted: "The government ran away from its programme [on unemployment] from the first day". (Nick Smart, The National Government 1931–40) A bill introduced by the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, Britain’s first woman cabinet minister, did not deal with any of the central issues facing the unemployed. Some of the most brutal aspects of the benefit system were left in place, such as the waiting period before benefits could be claimed and the onerous proofs of ‘genuinely seeking work’. Anger was such that, at the Labour Party conference in October 1929, an attempt to stage a protest against the Bondfield bill was only narrowly defeated.

This shows the difference between Labour at that stage and New Labour today. New Labour was able to carry out numerous attacks on the working class, including cutting disability benefits, introducing unprecedented privatisation in the NHS, and invading Iraq and Afghanistan, with barely a ripple at the Labour Party conference. When one lone pensioner dared to shout ‘nonsense’ at the occupation of Iraq in 2005 he was physically evicted from the conference and arrested!

In July 1931, as unemployment soared, the Labour government commissioned the May report into the public finances. This called for huge public-sector cuts, including a 10% cut in unemployment benefits. Like the Pasok government in Greece today, Labour was being told it had no choice but to dance to the tune of the markets. As Henry Pelling puts it in his Short History of the Labour Party: "In August [1931] the government faced the alternatives of abandoning the gold standard or securing fresh loans in Paris or New York; but the New York bankers would only help if they were sure that the government was taking sufficient measures of retrenchment to restore confidence on orthodox lines. This meant, in fact, cuts in civil service pay and in the pay of the forces, and also in unemployment benefits".

A narrow majority of the cabinet were in favour of implementing the May report, but senior figures who opposed it made it clear that they would resign if it was implemented. More to the point, the power of the organised working class, the trade unions, within the party made it impossible for the Labour government to go ahead and implement the report. Ernest Bevin, general secretary of the largest trade union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union and very far from being on the left, was among those who met the chancellor to report on behalf of the TUC that they could not accept the cuts.

In Britain, the so-called ‘cradle of capitalist democracy’, the capitalist class, when it could not use the Labour government as a reliable servant of its interests, did not hesitate to find another, more reliable, instrument in the form of a national government headed by MacDonald. On 23 August, MacDonald resigned. Early the next morning he accepted the invitation of the king to form a new government with the Liberals and the Conservatives. MacDonald and those Labour MPs who went with him were expelled from the Labour Party and gave themselves the name National Labour. This betrayal was burned into the consciousness of broad sections of the working class. Today, Ed Miliband and the leadership of New Labour clearly believe, wrongly, that a majority Labour government is ruled out and dream only of a coalition with the Liberals. However, up until the development of New Labour, no post-war Labour leader dared to support a coalition or national government, such was the memory of MacDonald’s betrayal. Tony Blair had hoped to change this, and to involve the Liberal Democrats in government in some form after the 1997 general election. The scale of Labour’s majority, however, made this impossible.

In any case, New Labour in power was such a reliable capitalist party that there was no need for a coalition. The leadership of the party was able to completely isolate itself from the pressure of the organised working class. The party conference had all of its powers taken away, while the trade union conference vote was reduced below 50%. Yet Miliband is now launching a campaign to remove even the few vestiges of democracy that still exist within the Labour Party, including the election of the shadow cabinet. While a Lib/Lab government is more likely in the future than a national government, the scale of the crisis means it can no longer be excluded despite the ingrained hatred of the Tories among big sections of the working class. Unlike in 1931, a majority of the current Labour Party could probably accept this in a ‘national emergency’.

In Europe, all the ex-workers’ parties have become safe tools for the capitalist class. In Greece, it is Pasok which is loyally trying to meet the demands of the ‘troika’ by implementing 33% wage cuts, benefit cuts and mass privatisation in a country which is already suffering an economic crisis of 1930s proportions. On 21 June, while a 48-hour general strike paralysed the country, the Pasok government used so much tear gas to clear the streets that, had the country been at war, it would have been illegal under the Geneva convention. Only one Pasok MP voted against the cuts, and was expelled from the party on the spot! Meanwhile, it was the traditional capitalist party, New Democracy, which has refused to join a national government, at this stage, and has cynically stated it would vote against the cuts.

Mutiny in the navy
AT THE END of August 1931 a national government was formed ‘to defend the gold standard’. Its slogan, like the Con-Dems’ ‘we’re all in this together’, was ‘equality of sacrifice’. It immediately introduced an emergency budget which demanded no sacrifice by the rich and meant starvation for the poor. It was incredibly similar to the budget of the government in Greece today which is, supposedly, to defend the euro. It is also echoed in the Con-Dems’ benefit cap and campaign to declare the disabled ‘fit to work’. In 1931, unemployment benefits were cut by 10% and the dreaded means test led to 193,542 men and 77,995 women immediately having all their benefits stopped. The means test meant that benefits were denied to the unemployed if anyone in the family – parents, grandparents, siblings – were judged able to keep them or if they had any goods, including basic furniture, which could be sold to buy food. At the same time, public-sector workers were told their pay would also be cut by 10%.

Mass opposition to these measures was given form, not by the trade union leaders, but in a dramatic naval mutiny. Sailors were facing pay cuts of between 10% and 25%. On 11 September, when ten warships of the Atlantic fleet arrived in Invergordon in Scotland, the sailors read about their pay cut in the newspapers. The next night a group met on shore at a football field, voted to organise a strike, and left singing The Red Flag. On 15 September, four warships refused to leave on manoeuvres and the mutiny had begun. It ended in the evening of 16 September when the navy conceded that sailors’ pay would be cut by no more than 10%, along with some other concessions.

The end of the mutiny was not the end of the story. The world financial markets panicked, and exerted huge pressure on the pound. On 21 September, the three-week old national government was forced to abandon the gold standard and the value of sterling fell by 25%.

Even those capitalist academics who try to deny that the Invergordon mutiny was responsible for Britain coming off the gold standard actually accept that it was the sailors’ determination which was the trigger for what followed. Nick Smart, for example, says: "The political impact of the Invergordon ‘mutiny’ was considerable. It is doubtful, however, whether the event, in itself, caused… the suspension of the gold standard on the Monday. What is more likely is that foreign holders of sterling… interpreted ‘disobedience in the fleet’ as a symptom of government unpopularity". Exactly! Compare the sailors’ spontaneous determination not to accept the misery being heaped on them with the pathetic servility of the right-wing Labour leaders, summed up by their Fabian guru, Sidney Webb, who when he heard Britain was off the gold standard whined: "No-one ever told us we could do that". In 1931, the British ruling class came up against the inner resistivity of the working class in the form of the naval mutiny and was forced to abandon its long held goal of sticking to the gold standard. Workers’ refusal to accept the scale of misery being demanded of them was bound to find an outlet, if not through the naval mutiny, by other means. The same will be true of the working class in Britain today, who will not be able to swallow the scale of cuts being demanded by the capitalist class.

It is possible that the police or armed forces will again play a role in the struggle. This is the first attempt since 1931 to cut the pay and conditions of the armed forces and the police. Margaret Thatcher did the opposite, stuffing the mouths of the police ‘with gold’ to ensure their loyalty. The current government proposes cuts of over 10% in real terms in the average police officer’s pay, plus major pension ‘reform’. The £4.7 billion that is being cut from the armed forces is mainly being found by cutting the conditions of ordinary soldiers and the pensions of ex-soldiers, not least those who have been disabled in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The police and armed forces ultimately play the role of ‘the armed bodies of men [and women]’ defending the interests of the capitalist class. The student movement has already suffered police brutality. The importance of organised, democratically controlled mass stewarding of demonstrations to protect them from police attack and agent-provocateurs will be an increasingly important demand. At the same time, socialists stand against cuts in all workers’ pay and conditions, including those of the police and armed forces. In a period of heightened class struggle it can be possible to split the forces of the state. We should support the moves of the Police Federation to campaign against the cuts, and to demand the right to be a real trade union. Police strikes, last seen in Britain in 1919, could be posed in the coming period and would make it far harder for the government to implement its cuts, just as the sailors’ mutiny of 1931 sent the government into retreat within 48 hours.

Other outlets of resistance
JUST AS MEMBERSHIP of a common currency is for the euro ‘periphery’ countries, the gold standard was a disastrous deflationary straitjacket for British capitalism. Coming off it, however, did not mean an end to the crisis or to deflationary policies. The capitalist class continued with its assault on workers’ living conditions. It was met with ferocious resistance. The left Labour MP, Nye Bevan, demanded in parliament to know if the unemployed would receive the same concessions as the sailors if they showed the same "rebellious tendencies". Over the coming years they did.

Over recent years, socialists have warned that, unless a determined mass movement of the working class against all cuts is organised by the trade union leaders, riots were inevitable as a cry of despair against mass unemployment, poverty and police brutality. This summer we have seen communities burn as a ‘lost generation’ rage against their lot. However, the riots of 2011 are on a far lower level and scale than the mass uprisings of whole communities which took place in the 1930s. Socialists and the trade union movement need to begin again to organise the unemployed around a clear programme in order to channel their anger into an effective movement. Youth Fight for Jobs (YFJ) has already begun important work in this direction.

In the 1930s, the CP, despite its political failings, played a crucial role in organising the unemployed in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). Two of its leading activists, Fred Copeman and Len Wincott, were first brought into activity and then membership of the CP after they helped to lead the Invergordon mutiny and were thrown out of the navy as a result. Today, it is the march of the unemployed from Jarrow to London in 1936 which is most remembered but, prior to this, the NUWM organised a whole series of marches of the unemployed. The first, in 1932, was greeted when it arrived in London by a brutal police assault, snatching the petition to parliament from the marchers, and subjecting them to a vicious beating.

In Birkenhead, in 1932, the labour movement, led by the CP, organised a magnificent struggle around clear demands: abolition of the means test; extension of work schemes, including building houses, schools and road repairs; a 25% rent reduction for corporation (council) houses and no evictions. They marched with clear slogans: ‘fight the means test’; ‘unemployed workers – struggle or starve’. The so-called ‘bread riots’, in fact a mass uprising of the Birkenhead working class, forced the council to make significant concessions, including an increase in unemployment benefits by two shillings a week. (See: Struggle or Starve, by Peter Taaffe, The Socialist No.656, 2 February 2011) In the aftermath of the Birkenhead victory, unemployed workers in many other towns and cities followed suit, including in Salford, Birmingham, Belfast and Glasgow. The 1934 reversal of the 10% cut in unemployment benefit, limited as it was, would not have taken place without these heroic struggles.

The workers’ political response to the experience of 1931 was multi-faceted. Superficial historians report that Labour suffered a massive defeat in the general election of October 1931. In terms of MPs this was true, but Labour’s vote only fell from 8.3 million in 1929 to 6.6 million. This showed the loyalty of the majority of the working class to the Labour Party, seeing it as a party that, unlike the betrayers MacDonald and Philip Snowden, stood in their interests. In that election, all the capitalist parties stood as a bloc, including National Labour, and an avalanche of vitriol poured forth from the capitalist class against the Labour Party. Former leader, MacDonald, gave an election broadcast describing the Labour Party’s programme as "Bolshevism run mad".

Trotsky had predicted in 1925 that, in the first instance, MacDonald would be replaced as leader of the Labour Party by "people of the ilk of [George] Lansbury…[who] will inevitably reveal that they are but a left variant of the same basic Fabian type". This was exactly what happened. However, under the impact of the crisis of capitalism and the experience of the 1929-31 Labour government, the Independent Labour Party moved rapidly to the left. In 1931, it disaffiliated from the Labour Party taking with it over 16,000 members. Although its failure to adopt a clear Marxist position meant that its membership dwindled over subsequent years, its rapid development in the immediate wake of the MacDonald betrayal gave an indication of the potential for a sizeable Marxist party to develop in Britain in the 1930s. The number of brave militants who were attracted to the CP despite its leadership also shows the revolutionary conclusions that were being drawn by the most advanced sections of the working class.

The weakness of the capitalist parties was shown by the fact that variations on a national government remained in power until the end of the second world war. The next government by a single party was the 1945 Labour government which, under the mass pressure of the working class – determined not to return to the misery of the 1930s – carried out a ‘quarter of a revolution’ by nationalising 20% of industry and creating the NHS. Successive governments, including New Labour’s, have systematically undermined the gains of 1945-50. Now the Con-Dem government intends to finish the job. However, it will face mass opposition from the working class. All kinds of heroic struggles will develop against the cuts, just as they did in the 1930s. The potential for many tens of thousands of workers to be won to Marxism, and for a mass party of the working class to develop again, will arise from the mighty battles that are coming

In The Age Of “The World Turned Upside Down”- D.H. Pennington’s “Europe In The Seventeenth Century”- A Book Review

Book Review

Europe In The Seventeenth Century, Second Edition, D.H. Pennington, Longman,
London, 1970

No question when I think of 17th century European history I am drawn immediately to think about the English bourgeois revolution of the mid-century. That event put paid to the notion that a ruler could rule by divine right and that through various twists and turns, not all of them historically progressive by any means, some rough semblance of democratic rule would work best. Work best then in tandem with an emerging capitalist order (of course the process stretched out for some two centuries but the shell was established then) as the means of creating a stable society.

Aside from kings and queens having to worry, worry to death, about their pretty little necks (ask Charles I and Louis XVI, among others) and having rough-hewn, warts and all, rulers like Oliver Cromwell enter the scene many other things were going on in Europe in the 17th century that would contribute as well to what we would recognize as a modern Europe. What those events were, and their importance, was why when I was first seriously looking at the English Revolution back in the late 1970s I picked up Professor Pennington’s nice little survey (well maybe not so little at six hundred plus pages). And a recent re-reading only confirms (with the obvious acknowledgement of a need for some updating given the immense increase in scholarship in this area since then) its worth as a primer.

Perhaps the most dramatic social change of the 17th century was the long term (very long term globally as it is still working its way through the whole planet) trend toward more efficient agriculture leading to the lessening need for farmer workers (and large farm families as well) freeing up a surplus population to head to the bright lights of the city (maybe) and availability to work in the newly emerging industries that were just beginning to be formed in a way that we would recognize. The old feudal lord-serf relations were beginning to become attenuated, very attenuated with this movement away from the land and its seemingly eternal fixed relationships. Starting with textiles and working through to almost every possible commodity it became easier to buy machine-made products, and usually, except in times of not infrequent economic duress, cheaper.

That little spurt into what we would now call the industrial revolution changed many other aspects of the European outlook as well. Science became a more pressing social concern as the need to understand the physical work and its laws became more pressing. Religion which drove conflicts of the previous century, while still important to the plebeian masses, was lessening its grip on a more urbanized population. And, of course with that change, without becoming enthralled with a “Whig” onward and upward progressive interpretation of history came a dramatic increase in more secular interest for the arts, education, thinking of new ways of governing beyond the old time divine right of kings theories, other more radical political ideas about the family and other social relationships, and the extremely important fact that the a “right to rebellion” if not in official dogma then in practice became a legitimate form of plebeian expression.



Needless to say, as with every century, wars, wars for possession, succession, or just plain hubris, highlighted by the Thirty Years War, get plenty of attention. And, at the governmental level, that way to resolve conflicts not unexpectedly takes up much of the book. But the real importance of Professor Pennington’s survey is that it gives the “losers” in that century, places like Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Denmark their “fifteen minutes of fame,” information that when I first read the book I was not award of since many presentations, including general surveys, are front-loaded toward looking at the “winners” in various periods. England and France get plenty of attention, especially at the end of the book (and the end of the century setting up the big rivalries of the next couple of centuries. I will admit though that trying to keep up with the various partitions, dissections, intersections, and the like would drive me mad-if I was a cartographer. If your grasp of 17th century European history could use a little brushing up this survey is just fine. Then you can use the extensive bibliography and end notes (over one hundred pages between them) and move on to get the inside story of places, people and events that interest you.

Once Upon A Time In China- Somerset Maugham’s “Painted Veil"- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film, The Painted Veil.

DVD Review

The Painted Veil, starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, Warner, 2006

Several years ago I reviewed a film, Reds, about the torrid love affair between pre-World War I radical journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant where the Russian revolution of 1917 was used a backdrop for much of the story line. I commented then that that approach had the focus in reverse of what was compelling about the film, the love affair small against the backdrop of the great historic event that swept the pair up in its wake. I then stepped back and went on to tip my hat to the right of an artist to use whatever creative license was at hand in order to tell his or her story. Those same sentiments apply here where the film under review, a film based on British author W. Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same name, The Painted Veil, tells the story of another tortured love affair set against the backdrop of the Chinese revolution of 1925-27. Except here the revolution is even more of a background echo.

Of course the period in question, in the aftermath of the decimation of the flower of British youth of all classes in the devastation of World War I, is the period of the slow decline of the British Empire. That empire however still included a not unimportant outpost in tumultuous China. And the bulk of this story takes place there. And a rather old-fashioned Victorian story it is. A younger daughter of the upper-middle class under pressure to get married (and married properly, but mainly married), played by Naomi Watts, and a British civil servant doctor stationed in that British outpost in Shanghai and in need of a wife, played by Edward Norton, meet in London, get married despite barely knowing each other and leave for China. However , as is plain, this is not a marriage made in heaven, no way. Like many such arrangements it is merely a matter of convenience.

And that mismatch, that inevitable tension, is just the kind of plot line that Maugham was good at in previous efforts of his that I have viewed (and also read) The Razor’s Edge and the more famous Of Human Bondage. The pair are trapped in a no man’s land so, of course, someone has to stray off the reservation. In this case Ms. Watts has an affair with another British civil servant in order to get out from under. Said British civil servant already is married, very married, and in no mood to get divorced. Such stories clutter all of literature although not all are filled with perfidious civil servants with meal ticket wives as an excuse.

Naturally Mr. Norton stumbles onto the affair, ruefully offers a divorce under conditions that cannot be met, and so the unhappy couple are held together by some unholy glue as they are off to the outback in order to stem a cholera epidemic. And here is where Maugham’s plot line shines. Through a very tortured set of ups and downs they actually come to under stand and love each other, although in the end it is only for one bright moment. Thus Maugham is forgiven, just this minute, for back-dropping the Chinese revolution. This is strictly an old-fashioned love story that may not appeal to the more modern sensibility, but it should.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-The 1940s “Quit India” Movement-Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution

Click on the headline to link to a Revolutionary History journal entry for a background article, Trotskyism in India, on Indian left politics during this period.

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.

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Workers Vanguard No. 970
3 December 2010

The 1940s “Quit India” Movement
Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution

The following originally appeared as a two-part article in Workers Hammer Nos. 131 and 132 (September/October and November/December 1992), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League. Both parts are reprinted below, incorporating a minor factual correction.

PART ONE

“The Indian scene [in 1947] was heavy with menace, but one thing at least gave [British Labour prime minister Major Clement] Attlee great satisfaction. How gratifying it was, he noted, that an old Haileybury School boy like himself [Sir Cyril Radcliffe] was being sent out to take on the task of drawing a line through the [Punjabi] homelands of eighty-eight million human beings.”

“In India, Sikhs and Hindus prowled the cars of ambushed trains slaughtering every circumcised male they found. In Pakistan, Moslems raced along the trains they had stopped, murdering every male who was not circumcised.”

—Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight

Fifty years ago India’s struggle for independence from Britain entered its final, decisive phase. Commonly known as the “Quit India” movement after the main slogan put out by Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma” or “great soul”) Gandhi’s bourgeois Indian National Congress in August 1942, this phase swelled to a crescendo between 1945 and 1946. Soon after this, the subcontinent was arbitrarily partitioned into an 80 per cent Hindu-dominated India and an Islamic-confessional Pakistan; a horrendous communal blood-bath was unleashed. The movement’s denouement in February 1948 presented an appropriately bizarre neocolonial spectacle: Britain’s last troops in India, the Somerset Light Infantry, disappeared marching westward through Bombay’s arched Gateway of India (where the “King Emperor” George V had landed in 1911) to the strains of “God Save the King” and “Auld Lang Syne,” played in parting salute by an Indian Navy honour guard band of Sikhs and Gurkhas.

Yet, at its tumultuous peak the mass upheaval, for a few crucial historic moments far outstripping the planned limits of its self-appointed minders and misleaders, had rocked the entire subcontinent, lifting it on to the very precipice of revolution. Millions of workers, soldiers, peasants, students and women, many flying Communist red flags alongside the Congress tricolour and the Muslim League’s green flag, defying British tank and machine-gun fire and even naval and aerial bombardment, jammed the streets and fields from Karachi to Calcutta. Cries of “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long live the revolution!) filled the air. Armed peasants started forcibly seizing land and setting up “soviets.” And in February 1946 a powerful strike by ratings (enlisted men) of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay touched off an armed uprising by hundreds of thousands, including Royal Indian Air Force men, in that port and across the whole, electrified country, bringing it to a virtual standstill.

Britain had lost control. Posed pointblank was not only India’s political independence from two hundred and fifty years of the British jackboot; the social liberation of India’s toiling masses from millennia of indigenous caste, gender, communal and class oppression was also now suddenly within grasp. What was needed was a revolutionary vanguard party of India’s small but strategic and modern, urbanised industrial working class which could rally and draw behind it the millions of peasant poor and other oppressed, oust the British, and put the native capitalist-landlord alliance out of business, launching a direct offensive for both national and social liberation through capturing proletarian state power.

This policy, that of the Permanent Revolution, had been the programme of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in the victorious October Revolution, thirty years earlier. That revolution had brought national and social liberation to the masses of backward Tsarist Russia, whose Tadzhik, Uzbek and other Central Asian peoples just on the other side of the Himalayan Pamirs from northern Kashmir) had been catapulted from the seventh century into the twentieth as a result. In India the toiling masses had seen the Russian Revolution as a beacon of hope.

Yet by midnight of 14 August 1947, when Congress prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru rose to address “free” India’s parliament of capitalists, landlords and princes, the spectacular upsurge had been derailed. Instead, a pro-imperialist alliance of the Congress bourgeoisie and the Muslim League landlords had successfully diverted the revolutionary momentum into British imperialism’s waiting trap, the nightmare of communalist Partition. India’s working masses had paid with their lives—and were now about to pay even more—for the absence of a revolutionary party to lead its millions in an independent struggle for workers power.

The new Muslim theocratic state of Pakistan (whose Punjabi-dominated west wing and Bengali east wing looked at each other across 1,000 miles of hostile Hindu Indian territory) was carved out of the living bodies of thoroughly interpenetrated peoples, precipitating the biggest forced population transfers and one of the ghastliest communal slaughters in history. And in this crime, the Labour government of imperialist Britain and their bourgeois-landlord alliance of lackeys in the Congress and Muslim League were fully aided and abetted by the treacherous Stalinist trinity of the Kremlin, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of India. For in this historic betrayal, Stalin was the mover, the CPGB the enforcer and the CPI the executor on the spot.

Lessons of the Chinese Revolution

The developing militant wave and the advent of World War II could have signalled the opening of great possibilities for a revolutionary party the size of the CPI. Instead the second imperialist war was to bring the nadir of Stalinist betrayal in India. To understand the CPI’s treachery on behalf of Churchill’s war effort it is necessary to take up the positions adopted by the Stalinised Comintern as against the Leninist tradition upheld by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.

The Russian Revolution in 1917 fully confirmed Trotsky’s prognosis that “the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism” (“Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution” [1939]).

Under the slogan of “socialism in one country” embraced by the conservative, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy which had risen in the context of the isolated, war-weary and encircled Soviet workers state, the struggle for the extension of the revolution internationally was shelved in favour of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. This translated into defeat after defeat for the world proletariat and eventually transformed—after ruthless purges in most cases—the parties of the (Third) Communist International into tools of class-collaboration with their “own” bourgeoisies. In the colonial and neocolonial world it meant rejecting the lessons of October and resuscitating the old Menshevik formula of “two-stage” revolution. As in China earlier, this was to have a devastating effect on the revolutionary proletariat of India.

The tragedy of the Chinese Revolution of 1927-28 was a powerful negative confirmation of the permanent revolution, and it was over China that Trotsky extended his correct prognosis in Russia to all of the backward, colonial countries. The debate on China was whether or not to subordinate the Chinese workers and peasants to the native bourgeoisie in the form of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in which the CP [Communist Party] was operating. When the Chinese CP proposed to leave the Kuomintang the plan was vetoed by the Comintern Executive on Stalin’s instruction. They were directed to hold down the class struggle against the “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie in the cities and contain the peasant movement in the countryside. In early 1926 the Kuomintang itself was admitted to the International as an associate party. Only a few weeks later, on 20 March, Chiang carried out his first anti-communist coup, barring CP members from all leadership posts and demanding a list of all CP members in the Kuomintang. Under orders, the CP complied! After a challenge from the United Opposition leaders Trotsky and Zinoviev and during the crucial days of the Shanghai insurrection which began in March 1927, Stalin stuck to the policy. The main task in China for the Communists was “the further development of the Kuomintang.” On 12 April the Kuomintang army carried out a massacre which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Communists and militant workers who had laid down their arms at Stalin’s orders. This was “socialism in one country” in practice!

Congress—the Indian “Kuomintang”—and the CPI

“India,” Trotsky had noted in May 1930, “is the classic colonial country as Britain is the classic metropolis. All the viciousness of the ruling classes and every form of oppression that capitalism has used against the backward people 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 for the past century and a half” (“The Revolution in India, Its Tasks and Dangers,” Writings of Leon Trotsky [1930]). Like pre-revolutionary Russia and China, the road to national liberation, agrarian reform, social equality and advancement lay in the programme of proletarian revolution, requiring a vanguard party defending the political independence of the working class. The weak national bourgeoisie, tied by a thousand threads to imperialism, could in no way carry out even the “democratic” tasks posed.

The Indian industrial bourgeoisie, which started growing towards the very end of the 19th century and expanded considerably during World War I, was still no match for British industrial and finance capital. The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI—Indian section of the Trotskyist Fourth International) pointed out:

“Despite the advance of Indian capital, British capital remains in effective monopolist domination in banking, commerce, exchange, insurance, shipping, in the tea, coffee and rubber plantations, and in the jute industry. In iron and steel, Indian capital has been forced to come to terms with British capital, and even in the cotton industry, the home of Indian capital, the control of British capital through the managing agency system is very great.”

—BLPI Draft Programme

Indian reality emphatically underlined the revolutionary correctness of the perspective of permanent revolution. The Indian Trotskyists drew the correct conclusion that “the Indian bourgeoisie, shackled as it is to Imperialism, cannot play the historical role of the West-European bourgeoisie in liberating and developing the productive forces. The industrial advance of India demands absolutely the overthrow of Imperialism, with which Indian bourgeois interests are indissolubly bound, and the overthrow of which they are bound to resist” (ibid).

Faced with British imperialist intransigence, the weak and dependent Indian bourgeoisie sought methods of struggle that could pressure the colonial masters to make concessions without disturbing the social order by unleashing struggles of the masses that would threaten not just the British but also the Indian capitalists and their landlord brothers. The origins of Congress are instructive in this regard.

An English ex-civil servant of the Empire, A.O. Hume, was a founder of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Its stated third aim was “THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE UNION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND INDIA, BY SECURING THE MODIFICATION OF SUCH OF ITS CONDITIONS AS MAY BE UNJUST OR INJURIOUS TO THE LATTER COUNTRY” (The Indian Nationalist Movement, 1885-1947: Select documents, ed. B.N. Pandey). As its first president, W.C. Bonnerjee explained:

“Lord Dufferin...said there was no body of persons in this country who performed the functions which Her Majesty’s Opposition did in England...and as the English were necessarily ignorant of what was thought of them and their policy in native circles, it would be very desirable in the interests as well of the rulers as of the ruled that Indian politicians should meet yearly and point out to the Government in what respects the administration was defective and how it could be improved” (ibid).

Enter Gandhi. At the time he arrived on the nationalist political scene at the start of World War I, Gandhi could be found enthusiastically urging London’s Indians to “think imperially” and organising a Field Ambulance Training Corps as his personal contribution to the interimperialist war “effort.” Gandhi’s job was to extract as much as possible from the British, in the common interests of saving capitalism, while keeping the burgeoning and now increasingly militant struggles of the workers and peasants at bay. The textile magnate Ambalal Sarabhai put it succinctly when he said Gandhi “was the best guarantee against communism which India possessed” (D.A. Low, Congress and the Raj).

It was only after World War I that India’s modern proletariat, numbering five million by the second imperialist world war, emerged as a distinct force. The first great wave of strikes (1918-21) was triggered by mass immiseration under war conditions, a flu epidemic that killed 14 million, the Amritsar massacre in the wake of the draconian Rowlatt Act, and the impact of the 1917 Revolution. And it was the backdrop to Gandhi’s 1920-21 mass civil disobedience campaign for minimal constitutional reforms. The first six months of 1920 saw 200 strikes involving half a million workers, along with growing peasant struggles. Gandhi got cold feet, declaring that he had committed a “blunder of Himalayan proportions which had enabled ill-disposed persons, not true passive resisters at all, to perpetrate disorders.” In February 1922, on the eve of another passive resistance crawl, when 22 policemen were killed in the course of a peasant anti-rent agitation, Gandhi called off the entire non-cooperation movement, essentially going into purdah over the next decade. And the Congress told its supporters that withholding rent to the zemindars [landlords] was contrary to its policies and “the best interests of the country.” Gandhi re-emerged in the thirties when new waves of militant struggles broke out. He reiterated his opposition to “class war” and called for the “harmonious cooperation of labour and capital, the landlord and tenant.”

The situation in India not only cried out for a revolutionary solution but provided great opportunities for building a communist-led movement against colonial oppression and to overthrow capitalism. The prestige of the October Revolution was immense among the toiling masses. Founded among other places in revolutionary Tashkent in 1920, the CPI had early succumbed to the global anti-revolutionary policies emanating from Stalin’s Comintern after 1924; Stalin’s search for “peaceful coexistence” did not help the Indian Communists. In the late twenties they employed themselves with generally rightist plans for front organisations and multi-class parties. Then the “Third Period” had them pursuing sterile sectarian policies which condemned the Indian nationalists equally with the British imperialists.

In the popular front period (1935-39) they accepted the leadership of the Congress and “Gandhiji” as necessary for the first “democratic” stage of the revolution. And moreover, because Stalin was pursuing an alliance with “democratic” imperialist Britain, the CPI soft-pedalled the struggle against British imperialism, placing the emphasis on reforms and gradualist change. At the Seventh Congress of the Third International in Moscow in July-August 1935, the CPI was denounced for long-standing “left” sectarian errors and for using slogans such as “an Indian Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Republic,” and “confiscation of lands belonging to the zemindars (landlords) without compensation.” Even as late as March 1936 the Congress was characterised as “definitely a class organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie” in a CPI publication, but the new class-collaborationist line laid down by “India experts” for the CPGB, R. Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley, was:

“The National Congress can play a great part and a foremost part in the work of realising the anti-imperialist People’s Front. It is even possible that the National Congress by the further transformation of its organisation and programme may become the form of realisation of the anti-imperialist People’s Front” (quoted in S. Tagore, Against the Stream).

The CPI supported the Congress in the provincial elections of 1937. In 1936 a miserable and tokenistic Congress proposal for agricultural reform was lauded. In fact the Congress ministries of this period did next to nothing to alleviate the condition of the peasantry. Indicatively the only places where Congress ministries even talked about land reform were in areas where the landlords were to a large extent Muslims and the peasants Hindus, such as the United Provinces, Bihar and Madras.

At the same time the inception of Congress ministries in some parts of India gave the CPI more room to organise, and with growing mass disillusionment with Congress the CPI began to grow significantly. It developed strong roots in the working class in major industrial cities like Bombay, and considerable influence in student and peasant organisations. But it held the struggles back in the interests of the alliance with Congress. In November 1938, after the shootings of workers protesting anti-trade-union legislation introduced by the Congress ministry in Bombay, one “Congress Communist” (CPI entrist in Congress) told a protest rally: “Anger and sorrow have been kindled in our minds by the oppression that has been perpetrated on the workers of Bombay. Still, we are proceeding with restraint with our eyes fixed on national solidarity and unity.”

The CPI in World War II

During the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact the CPI as all the other parties of the Comintern (which would be formally liquidated by Stalin in 1943) denounced the “democratic” facade of the British imperialists in their war against Germany. Indeed in contrast to the Stalinists of His Majesty’s CPGB who displayed visible discomfort at Stalin’s about face (with its pro-German tilt), many militants of the CPI appear to have relished the opportunity to take a full-blooded stance against their hated main enemy. In the context of mounting anti-imperialist militancy, this line would have come increasingly into contradiction with the CPI’s continuing adherence to the Stalinist policy of a “first” “democratic” stage in alliance with the bourgeois Congress, provoking splits and opportunities for revolutionary regroupment. But when Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa” was launched against the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the wartime alliance between Britain and the USSR was sealed, the Comintern instructed another sharp turn to the “People’s War Against Fascism” and all-out support for the war effort in the imperialist countries and their colonies. As late as July 1941 the CPI, lacking precise instructions from Stalin via the CPGB, however, had adopted a line which distinguished between the interimperialist war between the Allied and Axis powers and the need to defend the Soviet Union. A CPI manifesto issued at the time read in part:

“The Communist Party declares that the only way in which the Indian people can help in the just war which the Soviet is waging, is by fighting all the more vigorously for their own emancipation from the imperialist yoke. Our attitude towards the British Government and the imperialist war remains what it was.... We can render really effective aid to the Soviet Union, only as a free people. That is why our campaign for the demonstration of our support and solidarity with the Soviet Union, must be coupled with the exposure of the imperialist hypocrisy of the Churchills and Roosevelts with the demand for the intensification of our struggle for independence” (quoted in David N. Druhe, Soviet Russia and Indian Communism).

But the CPI leadership, after the years of its popular front treachery, were not going to oppose Stalin’s dictates. They soon embraced the Allied war effort. In the Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India, by the Central Party Education Department, the CPI noted the July position, adding: “Then a document proposing change of line was sent by the comrades in Deoli camp in December 1941. In February 1942 the PB said in a resolution: ‘Make the Indian people play a people’s role in the people’s war.’ In July 1942 the ban on the CPI was lifted and releases started. The main slogans were correct: ‘National government for national defence.’ ‘National unity for national government’.”

Let’s be clear. The emissaries from the Comintern responsible for dealing with the CPI—the Communist Party of Great Britain—broke the news to their Indian comrades that they were out of line. Harry Pollitt’s letter announcing this was even deliberately permitted by the British authorities to be passed to the Communists incarcerated in Deoli prison. Debate ensued and there were those who broke with the CPI rather than scab on the struggle against British imperialism for the sake of the “People’s War” but the CPI leaders accepted the new line. Their support to the war would now be “unqualified, wholehearted and full-throated.”

For its part Congress’ formal position was that its support to the war was conditional on being granted independence from Britain. What this boiled down to was “demanding” some concessions in exchange for producing cannon fodder for the imperialist war effort. Then, emboldened by Britain’s difficulties as Japan advanced through the Pacific and into Burma and cognisant that they might soon need to deal with another imperialist overlord, Congress went from conditional support to open opposition, seeking to force a settlement with British imperialism. Even arch-reactionary Churchill was compelled to recognise that concessions were needed to shore up the shaky Raj. Sir Stafford Cripps, a “left” Labourite reputed to be sympathetic to the Indian national cause was despatched to offer some meagre and insulting divide-and-rule concessions. Even Gandhi called them “a post dated cheque on a bank that was failing.” Then as Charles Wesley Ervin related in his “Trotskyism in India: Origins through World War Two (1935-1945)”: “On 8 August 1942 Congress called for mass civil disobedience to pressurise the British to ‘quit India.’ The British panicked. Within twelve hours every important Congress leader was in jail or on his way. News of the arrests brought thousands onto the streets of Bombay.... The August Struggle had begun” (Revolutionary History Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1988-89).

Arguing that Congress should form a temporary national government in collaboration with the Muslim League, the CPI bitterly opposed the “Quit India” resolution and in the ensuing struggles denounced Congress for its “sabotage.” Even in its mendacious retrospective, the CPI’s “Guidelines” admit: “It adopted an antistruggle antistrike line. A line of avoiding [!] mass struggles was worked out on the plea that they would damage the war effort or help profascist elements to sabotage it, eg. CC [Central Committee] plenum reports, articles in weekly People’s War. Quit India movement was opposed on the same basis [as] the Forward Bloc [Subhas Chandra Bose’s split] and socialists who attacked communists as ‘British agents’ were denounced in retaliation as fifth column and fascist agents.”

The newly formed BLPI plunged into the August events. Key cadre came from exiled Ceylonese Trotskyists who had escaped arrest and imprisonment in Ceylon, after the British crackdown on their party for its revolutionary defeatist stance on the imperialist war and their organising of militant struggles among the strategic Tamil plantation workers. As the heroic Trotskyists argued in their Bombay leaflet the very day the historic “August Action” began:

“The slogans of ‘Abolition of Landlordism without Compensation’ and ‘Cancellation of Peasant Debt’ must be leading slogans of the struggle. Not only no-tax campaigns against the government, but also no-rent campaigns against all landlords, must be commenced on the widest possible scale, leading to the seizure of land by the peasants through Peasants’ Committees.

“Manning the nerve centres of the economy, the workers are in the position to deal the most devastating blows against imperialism.... A mass general political strike against British imperialism will paralyse and bring to a stop the whole carefully built up machinery of imperialist administration.

“The Indian soldiers, who are peasants in uniform, cannot fail to be affected by the agrarian struggle against landlordism and imperialism.”

Many BLPI militants were imprisoned in the immediate aftermath. The British were not the only ones out to crush them, either; the CPI press “viciously slandered the Trotskyists as ‘criminals and gangsters who help the Fascists’ by allegedly calling for ‘strikes, sabotage, food riots and all forms of anarchy’ and ‘attempting to stir up trouble in all war industries’.... Stalinists from Ceylon were brought over to India to hunt for Samasamajists [Ceylonese Trotskyists], and CPI stool-pigeons fingered militants to the police during the war” (Ervin, ibid).

The BLPI’s draft programme made an eloquent exposition of Leninist tactics in the second imperialist war:

“With the mass slaughter, the unparalleled destruction and untold sufferings entailed by the war, the international proletariat and the oppressed masses of the colonies are being driven to the point where they will see in revolution the only way out. ‘The chief enemy of the people is in its own country.’ The prime task of proletarian revolutionaries in the present imperialist conflict is to follow the policy of revolutionary defeatism in relation to their ‘own’ government and to help develop the class struggle to the point of civil war regardless of the possibility of such a course leading to the defeat of one’s ‘own’ government....

“International developments are governed by two main contradictions. The first is the contradiction of the existence of a workers’ state (the Soviet Union) in a capitalist world. The second is the inter-imperialist rivalry which has now broken out openly into war.... But the supercession of the capitalist-workers’ state antagonism by the inter-imperialist antagonism and the temporary postponement of a united capitalist war of intervention against the Soviet Union by no means removed the danger of an attack on the Soviet Union by one of the parties in the inter-imperialist embroilment....

“But the parties of the Fourth International, while defending the Soviet Union from imperialist attack, do not for a single moment give up the struggle against the Stalinist apparatus. Incapable of carrying out the real defence of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy seeks the aid not of the international proletariat, but exclusively of Anglo-American Imperialism.... The workers’ state will be able to emerge victorious from the holocaust of war only under one condition, and that is, if it is assisted by the revolution in the West or in the East.”

Thus the BLPI stood out as a revolutionary pole during the Second World War. Despite its exemplary work, programmatic soundness and significant local successes, the small and overwhelmingly clandestine forces of the BLPI were insufficient to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis. The Congress leaders feared the unleashing of the workers and peasants against the capitalists and landlords many times more than they desired to enforce the demand to “Quit India” on the British imperialists; the Stalinists with their grovelling before Churchill had made themselves for a key period of time “the most universally detested political organisation in India.” The intervention of a revolutionary Trotskyist party with some real weight in the proletariat was at this juncture the decisive element in whether the question of India was solved along the October model or left after post-war “independence” to the bloody partition designed by the British imperialists.

During this period of subordination to Churchill and in line with the British divide-and-rule stratagems, the CPI flirted with the feudalist, British-backed Muslim League. It even decided there was a Muslim “nation” and adopted for some time the project of Pakistan. Later, they would shift back to fawning blandishments to Gandhi’s Congress. We will take up in greater detail these and other concrete examples of their perfidy and how Stalinist betrayal helped pave the way for the “solution” of the Churchills, Mountbattens and Cripps in the second and concluding part of this article.

PART TWO

In their efforts to crush the Indian independence struggle and radical social struggle, imperialist Britain, Churchill’s wartime coalition and Attlee’s Labour government alike, and the bourgeois-landlord lackeys in the Congress and Muslim League were fully aided and abetted by the treacherous Stalinist trinity of the Kremlin, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of India. The first part of this article concluded:

“During this period of subordination to Churchill and in line with the British divide-and-rule stratagems, the CPI flirted with the feudalist, British-backed Muslim League. It even decided there was a Muslim ‘nation’ and adopted for some time the project of Pakistan. Later, they would shift back to fawning blandishments to Gandhi’s Congress. We will take up in greater detail these and other concrete examples of their perfidy and how Stalinist betrayal helped pave the way for the ‘solution’ of the Churchills, Mountbattens and Cripps in the second and concluding part of this article.”

Before turning to the CPI’s own contribution to the horrors of the Partition, it is worth reviewing the line of the Communist Party of Great Britain on India during World War II, not least because the CPGB were the agency for enforcing the subordination of the struggle for independence to Churchill’s war in its “mentor” role to the Indian Communists.

Having enlisted enthusiastically in the “People’s War” the Communist Parties not only insisted on “sacrifices” (i.e., no strike pledges, cessation of social struggle) from the working classes within the “democratic” imperialist countries but also from the colonial slaves of those imperialisms. Thus, when resistance to British rule broke out in India, the British Stalinists (as well as the CPI) denounced the struggle as playing “into the hands of the Axis powers” (Black, Stalinism in Britain). CPGB leader Harry Pollitt wrote to Churchill with the following advice: “our [!] paramount aim must be to win the willing co-operation of the Indian nation in the common struggle against Fascism.” At its Congress in 1944 the CPGB emphatically rejected independence before the war ended, instructing the Indian masses that: “Establishment of a representative Indian National Government as an ally of the United Nations during the war, and freedom for the Indian people to choose their own form of Government after the war” was the order of the day. Black’s description of these Stalinists as the “Empire builders of the British ‘Communist’ Party” is apt.

The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, revolutionary Trotskyists, described the situation in India during the war:

“British imperialism has instituted a system of repressive legislation, progressively inaugurating a gendarme regime not less systematic and ruthless than that of Russian czarism or German fascism. Since the commencement of the imperialist war, repression has been many times intensified. Even those nominal rights previously possessed by the masses have been openly withdrawn, and a naked rule of terror substituted through the Defense of India Act.... The press has been gagged by a series of iniquitous Press Acts and a systematic police censorship of all publications. Rights of free speech and assembly have been so curtailed that they are practically non-existent. Radical and revolutionary political parties are compelled to lead an underground existence.

“The right to strike no longer exists in all ‘essential war industries’.... Thousands of militant mass leaders have been imprisoned on flimsy pretexts or detained without trial. The restriction of individual movement by means of externment and internment orders has become a commonplace...” (quoted in Henry Judd, India in Revolt).

By contrast the ban on the CPI was lifted by a grateful British Raj in 1942 and a government circular of 20 September 1943 praised the CPI as “almost the only Party which fought for victory.” A CPI self-criticism produced years later is damning enough about what this meant:

“It adopted an antistruggle antistrike line. A line of avoiding mass struggles was worked out on the plea that they would damage the war effort or help profascist elements to sabotage it, eg. CC plenum reports, articles in weekly People’s War. Quit India movement was opposed, on the same basis the Forward Bloc and socialists who attacked communists as ‘British agents’ were denounced in retaliation as fifth column and fascist agents. In B.T. Ranadive’s report to the first congress on ‘Working Class and National Defence’ it was stated that production is ‘a sacred trust’ and ‘conditional support of production was a left-nationalist deviation’ therefore ‘strikes should be firmly prevented’.”

In addition to its self-confessed “anti-struggle” line during the war, the CPI as well played straight into the hands of British imperialism’s schemes to consciously promote communalist divisions.

CPI and Britain’s “Divide-and-Rule”

From the outset, all Indian nationalism was “a theme scored with religious, class, caste, and regional variations” (Wolpert, A New History of India), which given its social origins, was dominantly Hindu and upper-caste-based and frequently openly reactionary. A prime example was the early Congress “Extremist” leader B.G. Tilak, who first made his mark when he opposed the token reformist 1891 “Age of Consent” Bill (raising the age of statutory rape of child brides from ten to twelve) under the war cry “Religion in danger!” Gandhi alienated vast numbers of Muslims with his explicitly Hindu-myth and scripture-based rhetoric, describing his utopia as Ram Rajya (“the kingdom of Ram”—the Hindu epic hero-god). Such themes are the basis for subsequent fascistic Hindu chauvinism, such as the BJP/RSS [Bharatiya Janata Party/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] combine today. In the absence of a communist leadership consciously able to transcend and combat it by bringing the revolutionary proletarian, anti-communal, integrated class axis decisively to bear on the events leading up to 1947, this poison was bound to skewer any possibility of a progressive solution to India’s complex internal problems.

Far from communalism being an “eternal” feature of the Indian landscape, as the racist imperialist apologists would have it, it was the British who, through their systematic backing of one community against another to subjugate both, consciously nurtured this phenomenon as well as other caste, religious and national differences. Following the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny (significantly sparked by the refusal by Muslim and upper-caste Hindu sepoys [soldiers] alike to bite a new cartridge coated with animal fat), which far exceeded the bounds of the initial triggering episodes and revealed the depth of anti-British anger in the country, Governor General Elphinstone urged: “Our endeavor should be to uphold in full force the (for us) fortunate separation which exists between the different religions and races: not to endeavor to amalgamate them” (Henry Judd, India in Revolt). From this to the creation of separate Hindu and Muslim electorates in 1905-6 and thence to a series of other notorious “Communal Awards” culminating in the Partition: the imperialist logic of “divide-and-rule” was clear.

The novel Tamas no doubt truly portrays the efforts of CPI militants in the Punjab to fight the communalist slaughter during the Partition, but that blood-bath was prepared both by the CPI’s general support to the bourgeois nationalists and its particular wartime policies with respect to the Muslim question. One aspect of the Cripps’ Mission proposals in 1942 was a concession aimed at the Muslim League that areas could “opt out.” Given that Jinnah’s Muslim League had pledged “benevolent neutrality” in the imperialist war and the importance of recruitment from Muslim Punjabis, Pathans and Baluchis for the British Indian Army, this was a crucial divide-and-rule attempt to uphold the British war effort. The CPI, in its Central Party Education Department’s Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India (1974) admits the “serious mistake our party made on the question of Pakistan”:

“With the antistruggle line referred to above went the right-opportunist approach to the question of Congress-League (or national) unity, logically culminating in our support to Pakistan and the akali demand for sikh homeland. Failure to build up enough pressure on British imperialists and to build unity from below led to helpless reliance on unity from above. ‘Destiny of the nation depends on national unity—Congress-League unity’ which with Jinnah adamant on his demand for Pakistan led to trailing behind the Muslim League in order to bring Gandhi-Jinnah together.”

The CPI went from denouncing the Muslim League as reactionary and communalist (which it was) to generally giving it more favourable coverage than Congress. Muslim League General Secretary Liaquat Ali Khan for example praised the CPI for its “ceaseless efforts to convince the Hindu masses of the justice of the demand for the rights of self-determination to Muslims.” And CPI leader Joshi argued in August 1944 for strong and independent Muslim states in the north-west and north-east. Additionally in late 1944 the CPI argued for separate electorates for Untouchables, exactly in line with British imperialist “divide-and-rule” manoeuvres at that time.

The CPI’s flirtation with the Muslim League and Pakistan was not some healthy attempt to grapple with the complexities of the national question as some apologists have suggested, but a direct product of the alliance with Churchill and their efforts to cement that alliance. After all the Muslim League was also opposed to the “Quit India” struggles. And when the CPI “corrected” its flirtation with the feudalist Muslim League it was only to swing back to bourgeois Congress, policies that led directly to the CPI and CPI(M)’s [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] refusal today to defend legitimate national struggles such as those of the Kashmiris and the Sikhs.

In the service of tailing Congress, CPI leader P.C. Joshi reached new depths of Stalinist prostration before the leader of India’s Kuomintang. At the time of Gandhi’s release from prison in 1944, Joshi declared:

“Gandhiji, the beloved leader of the greatest patriotic organisation of our people, the mighty Indian National Congress is back in our midst again.... Every son and daughter of India, every patriotic organisation of our land, is looking to the greatest son of our nation to take it out of the bog in which none is safe.”

Amidst this record of sordid betrayal, acknowledged by the Stalinists’ own self-criticisms, about the only thing left for them to point to in that period is the relief work that the CPI organised during the Bengal famine. That famine in 1943 was a direct result of the imperialist war: wartime inflation, grain speculation and hoarding exacerbated by the loss of grain from Burma led to mass starvation. The arrogant indifference of the colonial administration was compounded by Churchill’s decision to cut back shipping to India. A.J.P. Taylor noted “A million and a half Indians died of starvation for the sake of a white man’s quarrel in North Africa” (English History 1914-1945).

The CPI’s famine relief work was not part of some revolutionary agitation against the war, but linked closely to its “war effort” on the food production “front.” Even if it did assist many in dire straits, the CPI’s famine relief work was a variant of Salvation Army mission work for Winston Churchill. In Bengal the CPI lost cadre because of its flirtation with the Muslim League, and it is noteworthy that in areas where the CPI dominated the peasant associations such as eastern Bengal and Telangana the peasant struggles over land and usury were restrained during the war compared to other areas.

The situation in Bengal impinges directly on the question of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA). There are Stalinoid critics of Gandhi’s Congress (and thus presumably its CPI tails) who look to Bose’s INA as a revolutionary alternative. At one time a left critic within Congress and elected as its head over the objections of Gandhi et al., Bose split to form the Forward Bloc Party in Bengal. Forward Bloc was banned and Bose arrested in 1940; he escaped on the eve of his trial in 1941 and travelled across northern India to Afghanistan, from there to Moscow. During the pre-June Russo-German alliance, Bose was welcomed by Hitler and “given high-powered radio facilities to beam daily broadcasts to India...urging his countrymen to rise in revolt against British tyranny” (Wolpert). In the spring of 1943, Bose travelled to Southeast Asia whereupon Tojo turned over all his Indian POWs to Bose’s command. In January 1944 he started his Indian National Army on their march north crossing the borders of India and reached the outskirts of Tripura’s state capital, Imphal, by May. Defeated by the British garrison, the INA surrendered in Rangoon and Bose escaped on the last Japanese plane to leave Saigon. He died in Formosa after a crash landing. When the captured officers of Bose’s INA went on trial in the winter of 1945-6 they were widely heralded as nationalist martyrs. On 18 February 1946 the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay harbour; the mutiny spread to Karachi. The British stepped up their attempts to extricate themselves from India.

Undoubtedly the INA was popular, particularly in Bengal, and among its ranks were those seeking a way to fight British imperialism rather than “turning the other cheek” à la Gandhi. However the paeans offered to Bose in, for example, a feature article in the 4 August Asian Times as achieving “a signal victory” and providing “the last nail in the coffin of British rule in India” miss the point that larger world events had intervened and in fact Bose had subordinated himself to the Axis powers who were Britain’s imperialist rivals during the war. Where the CPI bowed before Churchill, the INA functioned at the behest of and under the protection of the Japanese imperialists. As the Japanese forces scored victories in rapid succession at Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma the possibility of a Japanese invasion and victory in India was strongly felt. Bose had thrown his lot in with another would-be colonial conqueror. The INA fought in Burma—just as Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang fought on the other side with American imperialism. Both the Kuomintang and the INA subordinated the national struggle to their respective imperialist overlords. In China and in Southeast Asia the colonial masses very quickly learnt that the Japanese masters were no better than their deeply hated English, American, Dutch and French masters. The tragedy in India, and especially Bengal, was that the masses were given no choice but subordination to one or another imperialist.

These betrayals in India expose those such as the Stalinists of the Lalkar publication of the Indian Workers Association who absurdly insist that “revisionism” began with Khrushchev’s reign. For them, “So long as Comrade Stalin was in the leadership of the CPSU and was organising the tireless vigilance that needed to be exercised” “trounc[ing]” “the reactionary Trotskyite and Bukharinite opposition” all was well! (In fact, the CPI(M) still celebrates Stalin’s birthday in Calcutta.) And the Stalinists today prefer not to talk too much about their record in India during the Second World War, not only because it is such an affront to the revolutionary aspirations of the masses but also because they continue to pursue a class-collaborationist alliance with the Indian bourgeoisie.

Instead they seek to hide behind the figure of Stalin as a great war leader who defeated fascist barbarism. Somehow the Stalinist sins in India are to be exonerated on the basis that Stalin saved mankind. To this end, Lalkar’s Harpal Brar turgidly regurgitates all the old Stalinist lies about Tukhachevsky being an agent of Hitler to justify his murder and the purge of the Red Army officer corps in his book Perestroika: The Complete Collapse of Revisionism. In the course of these bloody purges—between 1937 and 1939 (i.e., beginning during the popular front period)—the Red Army lost three of its five Marshals, all eleven of its Deputy Commissars for Defence, 75 of 80 of its members of the Military soviet, all its military district commanders who held that post in June 1937. The naval and air chiefs of staff were killed. Thirteen out of 15 army commanders were shot, 57 out of 85 corps commanders were shot, as were 110 out of the 195 divisional commanders. In the Far Eastern forces, over 80 per cent of the staff were purged. Tukhachevsky had predicted an attack like Operation Barbarossa and he and his comrades had a lively sense of technological innovation. These experienced and talented veterans of the Civil War were replaced by incompetent cronies of Stalin, who abolished the Red Army’s tank units—one of these replacements thought automatic weapons were just for policemen.

Right up to the day of the invasion Stalin was shipping vital raw materials to Germany. Warnings and precise intelligence from [Leopold] Trepper’s Red Orchestra and Richard Sorge in Japan were labelled as “English provocations” and not passed on to the general staff. Stalin forbade the dispersal of the air force (and it was consequently massacred on the ground) and ruled out any effective planning of defence in depth. Even after the invasion had begun, Stalin countermanded orders for the artillery to return fire, and forbade air-raid precautions in cities under attack. The criminal conduct of Stalin and his gang directly led to the loss of two and a half million soldiers in 1941, huge areas of territory (including important industrial plants which Stalin had refused to locate east of the Volga until that summer) and an almost fatal blow being delivered to the workers state.

The Soviet Union survived because despite Stalin the Red Army fought tooth and nail to stop the onslaught. In December 1941 Zhukov’s effective counterattack was wrecked by Stalin’s personal meddling and as late as the summer of 1942 the simple incompetence of Stalin and one of his toadies led to the loss of 200,000 men in the Crimea. It was only with the emergence of a competent layer of generals not liable to listen so much to Stalin that the heroism of the Red Army and Soviet peoples was turned into the liberation of the Soviet homeland and Eastern Europe from the Nazi scourge. Not only did Stalin’s general policies of “socialism in one country” lead to near fatal catastrophe but his particular military contribution was disastrous.

For a Revolutionary Proletarian Solution!

At independence the subcontinent faced the unspeakable horrors of Partition and today it remains one of the most impoverished, oppressed and exploited areas in the world, a veritable prison-house for national minorities, women and lower castes. The communalist slaughters engulfing Partition killed between one and two million Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus (mainly in Punjab and Bengal) and the forced migrations in its aftermath displaced over eleven million. A New York Times correspondent, Robert Trumbull, reported of the Partition: “In India today blood flows oftener than rain falls. I have seen dead by the hundreds and, worst of all, thousands of Indians without eyes, feet or hands. Death by shooting is merciful and uncommon” (quoted in Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight). Muslim babies were discovered “roasted like piglets on spits” and the 45-mile road from Lahore to Amritsar became such an “open graveyard” that, according to one British officer, “The vultures had become so bloated by their feasts they could no longer fly.” A stationmaster at Amritsar recounted what had initially seemed to be a “phantom train,” one of many rolling into Punjabi stations at the time: “The floor of the compartment before him was a mass of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bodies eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments.... He turned to look back at the train. As he did, he saw in great white-washed letters on the flank of the last car the [Pakistani] Moslem assassins’ calling card. ‘This train is our Independence gift to [Indian Congress nationalists] Nehru and Patel’” (ibid).

The lessons of the struggle for Indian independence and the social liberation of India’s toiling masses are crucial not only for revolutionaries on the subcontinent but in all those countries where the permanent revolution applies, from South Africa to Iran. A Leninist-Trotskyist party must be built in irreconcilable struggle against every kind of nationalism and popular frontism, counterposing a revolutionary programme for the emancipation and reconstruction of the oppressed nation under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Writing in 1915 of the tasks for Russian revolutionaries Leon Trotsky called for “a revolutionary workers’ government, the conquest of power by the Russian proletariat”:

“But revolution is first and foremost a question of power—not of the state form (constituent assembly, republic, united states) but of the social content of the government. The demands for a constituent assembly and the confiscation of land under present conditions lose all direct revolutionary significance without the readiness of the proletariat to fight for the conquest of power....” (“The Struggle for Power”)

Because the Bolsheviks were committed to such a programme, the Russian Revolution of 1917 produced the first workers state on the planet. The USSR stood then as a beacon for the colonial and semi-colonial masses struggling for their liberation, as well as for the exploited working masses in the imperialist countries. Lenin and Trotsky’s Third International, later to be destroyed by Stalin, sought to bring the lessons of October to the workers of every land.

Today we in the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fight to forge a revolutionary international which Lenin and Trotsky would recognise as their own. It will be an especially gratifying victory when the workers of the entire Indian subcontinent lead all the oppressed in throwing off the chains of neocolonial enslavement through victorious socialist revolution.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight- A Review

Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Trotskyism in India

Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Hammer"-On The British Labour Party, Circa 2010- A Guest Commentary

*Click onthe headline to link to a Workers Hammer article from Spring 2010 on the British Labour Party and the then upcoming elections.

*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- Writings on Britain: The Labour Movement 1906-1924: The Growth of the Labour Party

Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.