(Links and quotes selected by anti-caste. We support the ICL but we don't speak for it.)
(FOURTH INTERNATIONALIST)
from "Bangladesh: Women Garment Workers Fight Starvation Wages," Workers Hammer No. 213 (Winter 2010-2011):
For us revolutionary Marxists, the young women garment workers in Bangladesh are not mere victims in need of charity from the West, but are the backbone of a multi-billion pound industry that is vital to the economy of Bangladesh. Driven from the villages by desperate poverty, Bangladeshi women workers face brutal forms of exploitation, but they also stand to gain a new consciousness and for the first time in their lives participate in organised struggle against oppression as a class. In this hideously poor country that remains largely rural, the proletariat is small relative to the rest of the population but has tremendous social power and is a crucial link in the chain of the world economy.
The venal ruling class of Bangladesh is tied to the imperialist powers by a thousand and one threads, not least to British imperialism, the former colonial power that exploited and dismembered the subcontinent. A WikiLeaks report in December revealed that British police forces, starting when Labour was in government, have been training the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion that is notorious for torture and killings of Bangladeshi workers’ leaders, tribal activists, leftists and other political opponents of the government.
The horrific conditions of life in Bangladesh are a product not only of imperialist exploitation but of the tyranny of religious obscurantism. Whether under the Awami League, the Bangladesh National Party or military rule, Islamic strictures lead to brutish treatment of women who are secluded from social life and treated as chattel property of fathers and husbands. A job in the garment factories, however dangerous and poorly paid it may be, is one of the few socially acceptable ways for a woman to earn a living and to achieve a degree of independence. But to address the most basic democratic questions facing women workers in Bangladesh—who are subject to exploitation by employers, murderous state repression by the police, the danger of rape, as well as malnutrition for themselves and their children—requires a revolutionary socialist programme.
In 1994 the courageous Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin was hounded out of the country by rabid Islamic fundamentalists incensed by her fight for the rights of women including to contraception and abortion. But the anti-woman hordes mobilised by the mullahs were not unopposed: in June 1994, 500 women garment workers in Dhaka armed with sticks mobilised in defence of Nasrin and against a strike call by fundamentalists, the aim of which was to pressure the government to arrest and execute Nasrin (see “Women and the Permanent Revolution in Bangladesh,” Women and Revolution No. 44, Winter 1994-Spring 1995).
The emancipation of women as part of the liberation of the downtrodden of the entire subcontinent requires a struggle for permanent revolution—the perspective fought for by Lenin and Trotsky in the great October 1917 Revolution in Russia: the workers seizing power at the head of the oppressed masses, agrarian revolution to liberate the peasantry, the socialisation and rational reorganisation of the economy in the interests of human needs not profit, and the fight to extend socialist revolution internationally, especially to the imperialist heartlands.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "[Sri Lanka:] Asylum Now for All Refugees! Stop Persecution of Tamils!," Workers Hammer No. 212 (Autumn 2010):
Lessons of Bitter Defeat
The dire situation of the Lankan Tamil people today is testimony to the reactionary logic of nationalism. It also confirms that under capitalism, where two peoples are interpenetrated within the same territory, the national rights of one people can only be expressed at the expense of the other people. Prior to 1983 there was considerable economical and geographic interpenetration of the Tamil and Sinhalese peoples. But the bloodletting and mass population transfers of 1983 forced a separation of the island’s peoples. Tamils were increasingly compacted in the North and the East, which had been largely Tamil but had also historically been a region of mixed populations, including a substantial Muslim component. Only the overthrow of capitalism through workers revolution can lay the basis for the equitable resolution of the conflicting national claims of the peoples of Sri Lanka.
Drawing the lessons from a bitter defeat is difficult, but necessary. For Tamil (and Sinhalese) pro-working-class activists who are reeling from this massive defeat, the chief political lesson is that the programme of nationalism has proven bankrupt for the oppressed Tamils. We base ourselves on the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution, a programme for the semicolonial countries which means the industrial and agricultural proletariat must lead all the oppressed in the struggle against semi-feudal backwardness that is the heritage of centuries of colonial subjugation, a struggle which can attain victory only through the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of proletarian power.
The core of this programme is proletarian internationalism: a perspective for socialist revolution not only in Lanka but throughout the Indian subcontinent. Developments in Sri Lanka do not take place in isolation but are subject to developments in the international situation. The venal ruling class is beholden to the imperialist powers and the Sri Lankan economy is dependent on foreign investment and on the European Union as a market for the island’s textiles. The working class—including textile workers who are mainly women, and the strategically placed “Indian Tamil” tea plantation workers in the central highlands, descendants of a deeply exploited population brought in from India as indentured labourers by the British—are class brothers and sisters of the more powerful working class in India and elsewhere. We fight for Marxist workers parties throughout South Asia that can unite the working people and oppressed in the struggle for workers revolutions which provide the only road to liberation from the poverty, oppression and national chauvinism that are endemic to capitalist rule, particularly in the neocolonies.
The authentic programme of Trotskyism is today upheld by the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The once-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) abandoned the interests of the proletariat and the defence of the Tamil people when it entered the Sinhala-chauvinist government of the SLFP in 1964. This was prefigured by the LSSP’s support to the “Sinhala only” campaign against the Tamil minority. Again in the 1980s, government terror against the Tamils drew the line sharply between revolutionists and fake Trotskyists, who capitulated to Sinhala chauvinism.
At the time of the 1983 pogroms, our international tendency was virtually alone on the left in initiating and joining protests internationally in defence of the Tamils. Noting that the blood-bath had “catastrophically altered for the foreseeable future the prospects for common class struggle between the Sinhalese working class and the oppressed Tamil minority,” we raised the call for the right of Tamil Eelam—a separate Tamil state in the North—and for a federated socialist republic of Eelam and Lanka as part of a socialist federation of South Asia.
Prior to 1983 our organisation had upheld the right to Tamil self-determination while counselling against separation, arguing in favour of united working-class struggle for Tamil freedom and socialist revolution in Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and its extension through the Indian subcontinent. But as we wrote, “in the wake of the mass killing of Tamils, the bitterness and hostility between the peoples of Ceylon has evidently become insurmountable at least in the short run.” While calling for the right of Tamil Eelam, we also noted: “The bloody communal struggle argues that even with proletarian revolution in Ceylon and South Asia generally, a federated socialist republic in Ceylon will be necessary to achieve the unity of Tamils and Sinhalese on a basis of justice and equality” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 35, Autumn 1983).
At the same time we noted that the prospects for an independent Tamil capitalist state in the underdeveloped North were poor. Nor would the formation of such a state ensure the national survival of the Tamils, who were interpenetrated with the Sinhalese majority throughout much of the island. On the other hand, the establishment of a federated socialist republic of Eelam and Lanka would be a beacon to the oppressed and subjugated masses throughout the subcontinent, including among the 65 million Tamils across the Palk Strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
In the years of civil war that followed the 1983 pogroms, at least 70,000 civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands of Tamils driven into exile or squalid refugee camps. The LTTE managed to compact a Tamil mini-state in parts of the North and East and eventually signed a ceasefire agreement with the Colombo government in 2002. But the Sinhalese-chauvinist army’s provocations never stopped. After the 2005 election of hard-line SLFP president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who ruled out even autonomy for Tamil regions, the government abrogated the ceasefire and then withdrew from it entirely in early 2008.
Today, contrary to imperialist hype about reconciliation and a return to “stability” on the island, the Rajapaksa family oligarchy makes little effort to maintain even the trappings of “democracy,” having even locked up Sarath Fonseka, who was head of the military during the war on the Tamils and who challenged Mahinda Rajapaksa for the presidency in the last election. Stable bourgeois democratic rule is not on the historic agenda in Sri Lanka, nor is a democratic resolution of the oppression of the Tamil minority. Washington’s central strategic goal on the island is a stable regime that can provide access to the strategic deep-water harbour of Trincomalee in the Eastern Province.
Successive Sri Lankan governments have engaged in brutal “ethnic cleansing” and a bloody process of “Sinhalisation” has forced hundreds of thousands of Tamils to leave the area while those who remain live under a state of siege. Large tracts of land are still prohibited areas and in all likelihood Tamils will not be allowed to return to certain locations. Foreigners and journalists are still restricted from travelling to the North, where permanent military cantonments are being built on former Tamil areas. Many Tamil refugees remain in camps in the North and thousands of alleged LTTE cadres are held in camps to which relatives, aid organisations or the Red Cross have no access.
The struggle to forge a new, revolutionary party in Lanka must begin with the understanding that the eradication of national oppression and true social progress for the peoples of Lanka and the region will come when the barbaric rule of capital and the divisions inherited from imperialist domination are overturned through socialist revolution. Lasting national and class justice for the Tamil working people will be secured through rule by the workers and peasants in a socialist federation of South Asia, and the extension of proletarian revolutions into the imperialist centres.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "All Indian and Pakistani Troops Out Now! Down With India’s Bloody Repression in Kashmir!," Workers Hammer No. 212 (Autumn 2010):
Today, insofar as the Kashmiri struggle is not decisively subordinated to a military conflict between the Pakistani ruling class and its Indian rival, Marxists uphold the right of self-determination for the people of Kashmir, which means the right to independence or—should they so choose—to merge with Pakistan (or India). Historically, despite the virulent Hindu chauvinism of New Delhi, union with Pakistan has found little support in Indian-controlled Kashmir, whose population, in addition to the four million Muslims in the valley of Kashmir, includes two million Hindus, concentrated in Jammu, as well as a smaller number of Sikhs and Buddhists. Pakistan is a stultifying Islamic theocracy which has long denied basic civil and political rights to its own people, much less to the Kashmiris in so-called Azad (Free) Kashmir on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control. Like India, Pakistan is a prison house for its national and religious minorities.
In supporting the right of self-determination for Kashmir we do not give an ounce of political support to any of the competing Kashmiri opposition forces—neither the “secular” separatist Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), nor the various Islamic-fundamentalist outfits like Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba. All of these forces are hostile to the class struggle of the workers and peasants against capitalist oppression and exploitation whether in India, Pakistan or Kashmir. Especially since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the subsequent counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, many of the imperialist-backed Islamic-fundamentalists who were fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan have shifted to Kashmir where they have largely supplanted the JKLF in the leadership of the anti-India struggle. Far from fighting for the national emancipation of the Kashmiri people, these reactionary forces engage in communalist terror against non-Muslim religious minorities in Kashmir and India, and pose a deadly threat to Kashmiri women in particular.
While power remains in the hands of the bloody capitalist rulers in Islamabad and New Delhi, backed by the imperialists, the prospects for Kashmiri national liberation are slim indeed. This is especially so given Kashmir’s strategic location and historical role in relations between India and Pakistan. The cause of national justice for the Kashmiri people is inseparably tied up with the revolutionary struggle of the working masses of both countries against their capitalist oppressors. There can be no genuine expression of the right of Kashmiri self-determination without the withdrawal of both occupying armies. In opposition to the chauvinism of the rulers in New Delhi and Islamabad workers in both countries must demand: all Indian and Pakistani troops out now!
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "India: Down With Government War on Maoists, Tribal Peoples! Only Workers Revolution Can Liberate the Indian Masses," Workers Vanguard No. 962 (30 July 2010):
Permanent Revolution vs. Stalinist Class Collaboration
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) denounces the Indian government’s war against the CPI (Maoist) and adivasi villagers, which is being waged at the behest of the venal Indian bourgeoisie and the international mining magnates. The working class in India and internationally must take up the defense of the Maoists and tribal peoples against the bloody state offensive.
But the political strategy of the CPI (Maoist) provides no way forward for India’s oppressed masses. Like all the many variants of Indian Stalinism, the Maoists seek an alliance with a mythical “progressive” wing of the capitalist class in the “first stage” of a “two-stage” revolution. Party general secretary Ganapathy made this explicit in an interview:
“We have a clear-cut understanding to unify all revolutionary, democratic, progressive, patriotic forces and all oppressed social communities including oppressed nationalities against imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism. Our New Democratic United Front (UF) consists of four democratic classes, i.e. workers, peasants, urban petty-bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie.”
—Sanhati, January 2010
The strategy of allying with a wing of the bourgeois exploiters—whether dubbed “national,” “patriotic” or “progressive”—has produced defeat after defeat for the workers and oppressed, in India and around the world. All wings of the Indian capitalist class are tied by a thousand threads to the imperialist powers of Europe, North America and Japan; none are in any sense potential allies of the working class and oppressed. In The State and Revolution and many other works, V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, savaged the idea that the class interests of the bourgeoisie and proletariat are anything other than irreconcilable.
The Russian workers were able to take power in 1917 thanks to the Bolsheviks’ intransigent struggle for class independence from the capitalists. The result was a workers state, a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. Key to cementing the workers’ alliance with the peasants was the Bolsheviks’ support for peasant seizures of the landed estates and the division of the land among those who worked it. The Bolsheviks also won widespread support among the peasantry through their revolutionary opposition to the first interimperialist war, in which countless hundreds of thousands were killed among the working-class and peasant base of the army.
The perspective of permanent revolution, first developed by Leon Trotsky during the 1905 Russian Revolution and vindicated by the October 1917 proletarian seizure of power, outlines most clearly the road to liberation for the Indian masses. Like tsarist Russia, present-day India is marked by combined and uneven development, with stark contrasts of wealth and poverty, modern industries directly abutting unspeakable squalor. Myriad forms of special oppression—based on sex, caste, nationality, religion—are among the heritages of a pre-industrial past that were reinforced and deepened by nearly two centuries of brutal British colonial rule. This culminated with the British partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, which unleashed communalist slaughter and the forced migration of millions of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. Since independence, and mainly under the rule of the nominally secular Congress Party, the Indian bourgeoisie has continued to fan the flames of every kind of murderous division.
National and social liberation for the masses cannot be carried out by, or in alliance with, India’s capitalist exploiters. What is required is the smashing of capitalist class rule and the creation of a workers and peasants government. The Indian proletariat is the only social force that can lead such a struggle. Due to its central role in production—where its collective labor in the factories, mines, transport systems and other industries is exploited by the capitalists for profit—the working class has vast potential power.
The essential instrument for victory is an internationalist Leninist vanguard party of the working class. Rejecting the centrality of the working class, the CPI (Maoist) bases itself on the rural peasantry. But the peasant masses, highly stratified and dispersed in small villages all over India, are incapable of cohering an independent social policy. There are only two decisive classes in capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The peasants are part of a heterogeneous intermediate layer, the petty bourgeoisie. Their immediate felt interests are centrally proprietary, for the defense or acquisition of land. Thus peasant parties are at bottom pro-bourgeois or bourgeois, even though sections of some of such parties may be won to the side of the revolutionary proletariat.
Especially in countries like India where the working class is numerically smaller than the peasantry, the question of agrarian revolution is a key component of the program for proletarian state power. The working class must win the support of the masses of poor and/or landless peasants, including through demands for expropriation of the landlords and land to the tiller, while seeking as much as possible to neutralize the middle and upper strata of the peasantry.
Freedom from the imperialist yoke, the destruction of all forms of oppression, economic development in the interests of the vast majority—these urgent tasks require proletarian revolution and its extension to the advanced capitalist countries of North America, West Europe and Japan. A socialist revolution in India would reverberate throughout South Asia and the world over, finding powerful allies in the proletariat of the imperialist centers as well as that of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state. A crucial task of an Indian workers state supported by the peasantry would be to generate the material basis to end poverty and hunger, including through the collectivization and modernization of agriculture. Success in this endeavor hinges on the resources that would be made available by socialist revolution in the imperialist heartlands.
A revolutionary workers party in India would champion the cause of all the downtrodden, including the rural and urban poor, oppressed castes and tribal peoples. It would intransigently fight for the liberation of India’s hideously oppressed women and defend persecuted national and religious minorities, notably Muslims targeted by Hindu chauvinism. Such a party can only be forged through political struggle against the class-collaborationist programs of the various Stalinist organizations. The political outlook of the petty-bourgeois CPI (Maoist)—a species of “reformism with guns”—provides no alternative to the overt parliamentary reformism of the longstanding mass Stalinist parties, the Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist).
AND SEE:
“On Nepal and Caste Oppression (Letter)” in Workers Vanguard 964
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Obama Escalates War in Afghanistan," Workers Vanguard No. 931 (27 February 2009):
Pakistan, like India, is a prison house of peoples, a legacy of three centuries of British colonial “divide and rule” in the region. That policy culminated in the partition of the Indian subcontinent by the British imperialists in 1947, unleashing the forced migration of millions of poor Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs accompanied by communalist slaughter of indescribable savagery. During the partition, Punjab and Pakistan’s North West Province were rent by murderous pogroms.
Pakistan’s claim to constitute “one nation” of all Muslims masks the domination of the Punjabi ruling class over Baluchis, Pashtuns and other oppressed nationalities. The myth of “national unity” has been imposed through brutal repression carried out by the Pakistani military. For most of the years since Pakistan was created, it has been subjected to direct military rule. In addition, the borders arbitrarily drawn by the British imperialists and inherited by Pakistan deliberately cut across the territory of virtually all the nationalities. The purpose was to undercut their power to revolt while creating a legacy of conflict that could be manipulated at will by the imperialists.
A prime example is the Pashtuns, who inhabit territory that today covers much of southern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. The border that divides them dates from 1893 when the British, smarting from the defeat of their second attempt to militarily subjugate Afghanistan, drew an arbitrary frontier through the mountains to demarcate Afghanistan as a buffer state between British India and tsarist Russia. The resulting Durand Line has been disputed by successive Afghan governments.
[...]
Pakistan is an example of uneven and combined development, reflecting the impact of imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation superimposed on an underdeveloped and backward society. In Pakistan, women are subjected to purdah (seclusion) and jailed or stoned to death for adultery and similar “crimes” under Islamic law or murdered in “honor killings” by their own families.
At the same time, Pakistan has a significant working class that has shown a determination to struggle. In the past years, there have been major strikes in several industries. In 2008, tens of thousands of workers at the Pakistan Telecommunication Company struck for several weeks, gaining a 35 percent pay raise and regularizing contract workers. There have also been strikes by textile, sugar mill and transport workers. Reportedly, thousands of health care workers struck throughout Pakistani-occupied Kashmir in mid-February.
The task of liberating all the exploited and oppressed of the Indian subcontinent demands the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisies in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and the establishment of a socialist federation of South Asia. Crucial to such a proletarian-internationalist perspective is the fight for workers political revolution in the Chinese deformed workers state, a fight that must be premised on the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and domestic counterrevolution. Only an internationalist perspective, uniting social struggle on the subcontinent with the fight for workers revolution in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries, can open the door to real social liberation for the impoverished masses.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Defend the Tamil People! Army Bloodbath in Sri Lanka," Workers Vanguard No. 930 (13 February 2009):
The working class internationally must protest the murderous onslaught by the Sri Lankan government and army! Around the world, tens of thousands of Tamils have taken to the streets in protest. Fifty thousand protested in Toronto on January 30, filling downtown streets for five hours on a weekday afternoon. Another 50,000 marched in London the next day. The government of India’s Tamil Nadu state ordered the closure of all colleges and student hostels to prevent a threatened student strike in support of Lankan Tamils.
The Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste of Canada [section of the International Communist League] has joined protests against the massacre, distributing literature in solidarity with the besieged Tamils and putting forward our proletarian-revolutionary perspective for national and social liberation. We have long upheld the right of self-determination for the Tamil people—i.e., their right to form an independent state in the largely Tamil North and East. We stand for the military defense of the LTTE against the army assault and demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Lankan army from the area.
At the same time, we give no political support to the LTTE—bourgeois nationalists who, carrying out the logic of nationalism, have staged their own inter-ethnic attacks on Sinhalese villagers and expelled Muslims from the historic Tamil city of Jaffna, the capital of the northern region, while employing murderous violence against other Tamil nationalist groups. Our perspective is the fight for Marxist workers parties throughout the region that can unite the working people and oppressed in the struggle for workers revolutions in Lanka and throughout South Asia. That is the only road to liberation from the poverty, oppression and national chauvinism that are endemic to capitalist rule and visited with particular brutality on the masses of imperialism’s neocolonies.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "India: The Nandigram Massacre—'Left Front' Government’s State Repression in West Bengal," Spartacist Canada No. 159 (Winter 2008/2009):
Only Workers Revolution Will Liberate the Indian Masses!
The idea that capitalist development in a country like India (or anywhere else for that matter) could be other than brutal and exploitative is a lie pushed by the bourgeoisie and their reformist frontmen. India is a country of enormous social contradictions where modern industry is grafted onto a backward society marked by profound women’s oppression as well as national, religious and caste oppression—the heritage of the pre-industrial past, reinforced and deepened by more than two centuries of British colonial rule.
Imperialist subjugation foreclosed any possibility of the Indian bourgeoisie playing the historical role of the bourgeoisies of Western Europe in liberating and developing the productive forces from feudal backwardness. The perspective for resolving the questions posed by what Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky termed “combined and uneven development” is provided by the theory and program of permanent revolution, developed by Trotsky and vindicated by the victory of the 1917 Russian Revolution (see “The Development and Extension of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution,” ICL Pamphlet [2008]).
In a country like India where development is belated and strangled by imperialist subjugation, the weak national bourgeoisie is dependent on its imperialist masters—yesterday the British, today the U.S.—and above all fears its “own” working class. The only road to liberation for the subjugated masses lies in the successful struggle of the proletariat for state power, at the head of all the oppressed, especially the vast peasantry, under the leadership of a revolutionary workers party. An Indian workers revolution would spark a revolutionary upsurge throughout the subcontinent, from Pakistan to Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Its survival and advancement would hinge on the achievement of social revolutions in the imperialist centers: Japan, North America and West Europe.
This is emphatically not the perspective of the Indian variants of Stalinism, including Maoism. Stalinism as an ideology arose in the Soviet workers state following the defeat of the post-1917 revolutionary wave in Europe. Beginning in 1923-24 a conservative bureaucratic caste which came to be led by Stalin usurped political power from the proletariat. Among its greatest crimes against the world working class was the resurrection of a variant of the class-collaborationist Menshevik program which had been defeated and discredited in the victorious 1917 Revolution. The Stalinist dogma of “two-stage revolution,” in which the masses are tied to a mythical “progressive” bourgeoisie in a first, supposedly “democratic” stage of struggle, has brought bloody defeat to struggling workers and peasants around the world.
Over the decades, both before and after independence, the Stalinized Communist Party of India (CPI) has often given support to the bourgeois Congress Party and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The CPI(M), which issued from the CPI in 1964, continues this pattern of class collaboration. At the head of the Left Front, it has ruled West Bengal continuously since 1977, wielding the repressive powers of the bourgeois state in defense of private property and profit over a deeply impoverished population. At the all-India level, both CPs have continued to back Congress and its allies, including until recently the Congress-dominated United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in New Delhi. This is the political logic of the bankrupt program of “revolution by stages.” Whether labelled the “National Democratic Revolution” or the “Peoples Democratic Revolution,” the masses remain brutally oppressed by capitalism and the supposed second, socialist stage never comes.
Many of those who have harboured illusions in the capacity of the CPI(M) to bring progress and a better life to the masses of West Bengal have been shaken by the atrocities in Nandigram. The months after the massacre saw a wave of resignations from the party, and heavy electoral losses in its former rural strongholds followed this year. Most of these losses were to the virulent anti-Communists of the Trinamool Congress, which has also been the main force in the BUPC-organized protests in Nandigram. In a rotten class-collaborationist alliance, this “resistance committee” is also supported by the Socialist Unity Centre of India, one of the country’s many Maoist groups.
Another group, the CPI (Maoist), also claims to provide an alternative to the Left Front’s SEZ policy. But their program of “New Democratic Revolution” and “People’s War” is no less bankrupt than that of the CPI(M) and CPI. Basing themselves on the peasantry, not the proletariat, the Maoists call for a “bloc of four classes” including with so-called “progressive” capitalists. In The State and Revolution and many other works, Lenin savaged the idea that the class interests of the bourgeoisie and proletariat were anything other than irreconcilable.
It is necessary to break with this deeply ingrained class collaborationism which has long branded India’s various Communist Parties and their offshoots. The history of the international working-class struggle against capitalist wage slavery abounds with betrayals by Stalinism, whose anti-Marxist dogma of “socialism in one country” has meant pursuit of the pipedream of “peaceful coexistence” with world imperialism and opposition to the struggle for international socialist revolution. As well as “two-stage” betrayal, it has also meant forming and supporting popular-front governments—political blocs with capitalist parties in which the politics of the working class are necessarily subordinated to those of the bourgeoisie. Too often workers have paid with their lives for the treacherous policies of their leaders.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Behind the Hunger Crisis: Capitalist Profits—Imperialism Starves World’s Poor" (Part Two), Workers Vanguard No. 920 (September 12, 2008):
The “Green Revolution” and Its Effects
The development of world food production has been prodigious, outstripping population growth since the 1960s as a result of the “Green Revolution” in agricultural technology. Yet under capitalism even such gains have translated into increased hunger and misery. They have also translated into vast profits for agribusiness giants who can patent hybrid strains of food crops and monopolize the seed market.
The “Green Revolution” was launched in 1943 in Sonora, Mexico, where Norman Borlaug (who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize), with the backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, used genetic selection to develop “miracle” strains. Since they were introduced in the mid 1960s, hybrid strains of wheat, rice and corn have provided spectacularly increased yields. India went in five years from severe famine to being self-sufficient in grains. Indonesia, which had been the world’s largest rice importer, became self-sufficient in two years. The new hybrid strains were touted as solving the problem of world hunger.
In fact, the hunger of the world’s poor has increased as a result of the “Green Revolution.” Hybrid strains will grow only if they have irrigation, fertilizer and insecticides which require enormous capital outlays. Only the largest landowners can profit from the new technology, and small peasants, unable to compete, are driven from their land. (Indeed, part of the impulse behind investing in the “Green Revolution” in the early 1940s was a ruling-class backlash against the policies of the previous Mexican president, the bourgeois populist Lázaro Cárdenas. In order to head off social upheavals in the turbulent period of the 1930s, he had distributed substantial tracts of land to the rural population—in addition to nationalizing the Rockefeller Standard Oil subsidiary.)
Moreover, the “Green Revolution” has not been self-sustaining. Over time, the hybrid strains developed and introduced in the mid-late 1960s and ’70s have become increasingly susceptible to plant diseases and crop-killing pests. For example, when the rice variety IR8 was introduced in 1966, it produced almost ten tons per hectare (2.5 acres); now it yields barely seven (Economist, 19 April). Throughout the Third World, yields not only of rice but also of wheat and maize have fallen steadily in recent decades. Moreover, commercial agriculture now depends on a limited number of plant varieties; the lack of genetic diversity of the seed stock means that one pest or disease could quickly wipe out a significant portion of world production.
India, the country in which “Green Revolution” technology has been applied on the widest scale, is often cited as the archetype of its “spectacular success.” That “success” drove so many poor peasants from their land that, over the past two decades, the country’s urban slum population has more than doubled and now exceeds the entire population of Britain. By one estimate, some 150,000 poor peasants, driven to desperation by poverty and crushing debt, have committed suicide. Poverty is so entrenched that almost 46 percent of India’s children under the age of three suffer from malnutrition—a higher rate than in sub-Saharan Africa (London Times online, 22 February 2007).
Peasant Agriculture in the Chinese Deformed Workers State
An explanation for rising world food prices put forward by U.S. agribusiness corporations, the Bush administration and others is that a raised standard of living in India and China has led to increased meat consumption, in turn boosting the demand for cereals to be used as animal feed. The defense minister of India, where per capita meat consumption is one twenty-fourth that in the U.S., aptly called President Bush’s “explanation” of high food prices a “cruel joke.” In China, it is true that per capita meat consumption has increased prodigiously—it is now ten times that of India—but as the Economist (6 December 2007) pointed out: “Because this change in diet has been slow and incremental, it cannot explain the dramatic price movements of the past year.”
In fact, China and India are two fundamentally different kinds of states and societies, a fact highlighted by the current food crisis. India, a capitalist regional power that is nonetheless dominated by imperialism, exports foodstuffs such as rice and wheat for profit on the world market. Meanwhile, according to UN estimates, India has more hungry people than any other country in the world.
The People’s Republic of China is a bureaucratically deformed workers state and has been since the 1949 Chinese Revolution overthrew capitalist/landlord rule and ripped the world’s most populous country out of the clutches of the imperialist powers that had long held China in their grip. Despite the bureaucratic parasitism and mismanagement by the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the collectivization of the economy has resulted in enormous social gains for workers, peasants and women—not least an end to centuries of chronic starvation in the countryside.
Smashing the Chinese workers state is a strategic goal for the capitalist powers, particularly the American and Japanese imperialists, who seek to turn China into a vast sphere of untrammeled exploitation and super-profits. To that end, they are increasing the military pressure on China while pursuing a policy of internal economic and political subversion, including promoting counterrevolutionary provocations, as in Tibet in the name of “human rights.”
The economic slowdown in the U.S. has been accompanied by increasing calls for chauvinist protectionism that are pushed by both Democratic politicians and the trade-union bureaucracy. Protectionism is deadly poison for workers in the U.S., not least because it is based on the lie that their enemies are the workers of other countries, while serving to conceal the fact that it is the capitalists and their system that are responsible for the destitution of the working class. During the Cold War era, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy was among the most rabid supporters of American imperialism against the Soviet Union. Today, these labor misleaders are directing their virulent hostility toward the People’s Republic of China in the name of “workers’ rights.”
As Trotskyists (i.e., genuine Marxists), we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, just as we stand for the military defense of the other remaining deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—including their need to develop and possess nuclear weapons. Defense of the Chinese workers state is undermined by the rule of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy whose policies are encapsulated in the anti-Marxist dogma of “building socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence” with world imperialism. We call for a proletarian political revolution to oust the venal and oppressive CCP regime and replace it with a government based on democratically elected workers and peasants councils, a government committed to the program and perspective of international proletarian revolution.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Pakistan in Crisis After Bhutto Assassination: Down With Bush, Democrats’ 'War on Terror'! U.S. Out of Afghanistan, Iraq!," Workers Vanguard No. 905 (January 4, 2008):
In its editorial following Bhutto’s killing, the New York Times, mouthpiece of the U.S. imperialists, wrote with its typical haughtiness that Bhutto was a “democratic” leader who was, nevertheless, “indifferent to human rights.” That’s putting it mildly! Bhutto’s regimes were marked by rampant torture, killings and deaths in police custody.
With degrees from Harvard and Oxford and with great wealth derived from her family’s huge landholdings in Sind province, Prime Minister Bhutto ruled over a country marked by intense poverty and all-sided oppression. In a leaflet protesting Bhutto’s appearance at Harvard University in June 1989, at a time when the Afghan city of Jalalabad was besieged by the mujahedin killers, the Spartacus Youth Club wrote that “this first female leader of an Islamic state” had “betrayed the hopes of thousands of women who expected her to do away with the hated Hadood Ordinance against ‘moral offenses,’ under which women are condemned to death by public stoning for ‘adultery’ and even prohibited from testifying at their own ‘trials’.” The leaflet noted, “Her government bleeds the poor to fund the Afghan war and oppress the many different ethnic peoples who live in the prison house that is Pakistan” (see “Protest Benazir Bhutto! Hail Heroic Afghan Defense of Jalalabad!” WV No. 478, 26 May 1989).
Pakistan was created through the partition of the Indian subcontinent by the British imperialists in 1947—culminating some three centuries of colonial “divide and rule” in the region—which unleashed the communalist slaughter and forced migration of millions of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. The ruling classes of Pakistan and India—which is also nuclear-armed—rest on that legacy of deadly nationalism and communalism.
Today in Pakistan, India and throughout the world, religious and social reaction has flourished in a period marked above all by the imperialist-backed counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. Swimming against the stream of “death of communism” ideology, we seek to imbue advanced sections of the working class with the understanding that only the fight for new October Revolutions can pose a way out of brutal oppression, exploitation, imperialist domination and war.
The task of liberating all the exploited and oppressed of the Indian subcontinent demands the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisies in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the establishment of a socialist federation of South Asia. Crucial to such a proletarian-internationalist perspective is the fight for workers political revolution in the Chinese deformed workers state, a fight that must be premised on the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and domestic counterrevolution. Only an internationalist perspective, uniting social struggle on the subcontinent with the fight for workers revolution in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries, can open the door to real social liberation for the impoverished masses.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Women’s Oppression and Racist Reaction: The 'Honour' Killing of Aqsa Parvez," Spartacist Canada No. 156 (Spring 2008):
“Honour” Killings, Women’s Oppression and the Family
The subjugation of women in underdeveloped countries like Pakistan and India, as well as in immigrant communities within Canada, is not rooted in some uniquely reactionary quality of Islam or Sikhism, as some right-wing ideologues claim. The institution of the family—the main vehicle for the transfer of private property and the regimentation of society—is the main source for the oppression of women. This holds true in the imperialist and neocolonial worlds alike. Christianity too has a long, grisly history of anti-woman brutality, which continues to this day: witness the barbaric “family values” crusades of Christian fundamentalists against abortion, birth control and gay rights.
Nonetheless, the rise of capitalist property and the Enlightenment profoundly undermined backward feudal social relations rooted in agriculture, which were largely swept away as West Europe and later North America developed into advanced industrial societies. The power of the church was constrained, while the status of women improved over time through social struggle. In the Near East and South Asia, however, capitalism arrived belatedly—and it arrived with European colonialism, which allied itself with the local feudal powers. Imperialist penetration blocked the path of social and economic development. Thus the religions of the East did not have to adapt in the same way as Christianity (or Judaism), and anti-woman barbarism has remained correspondingly more profound and overt.
Karl Marx’s close collaborator Friedrich Engels explained the material roots of women’s oppression in his classic work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). Under the “primitive communism” of the Stone Age, where a primitive equality prevailed, the division of labour between men and women derived from biology (women had to bear and nurse the young) and implied no subordinate social status. Technological advances, particularly the development of agriculture, created for the first time a social surplus. This was appropriated by a minority, producing the division of society into classes.
With classes came the development of the institution of the family, which Engels called “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.” The biological fact of childbearing and child rearing was henceforth tied to the social oppression of women. As a means of consolidating wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, the patriarchal family decreed monogamy of women to determine inheritance of property. The concept of “family honour,” i.e., control of the sexuality of women by the father or husband, far from being exclusively Islamic or Sikh, is connected to a mode of production where a clan—a series of related extended families—holds and works the land in common. As Engels noted:
“In order to guarantee the fidelity of the wife, that is, the paternity of the children, the woman is placed in the man’s absolute power; if he kills her, he is but exercising his right.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "The Development and Extension of Leon Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution" (Part Four), Workers Vanguard No. 904 (December 7, 2007):
As in Trotsky’s time, there are today a number of especially backward countries—e.g., Afghanistan, East Timor, Rwanda—in which there is not a modern, concentrated proletariat with sufficient social weight to lead the oppressed masses in carrying out the tasks of permanent revolution. Even so, as we noted in regard to the modernizing intellectuals and military officers of the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in the 1980s, radicals have much to learn from the struggles of Georgi Plekhanov a century earlier, notwithstanding the vast differences between contemporary Afghanistan and tsarist Russia. Despite the fact that the Russian proletariat in the 1880s was also a relatively insignificant social force, Plekhanov fought to forge a core of Marxist revolutionaries through polemical and ideological struggle (see Part One of this article). What is crucial is to develop a Marxist-internationalist framework, linking the struggle for social modernization and liberation to the class struggles of the proletariat in more advanced countries outside their own countries’ boundaries.
[...]
[I]n desperately poor Nepal, where Maoist forces have waged a peasant-guerrilla struggle aimed at replacing the monarchy with a bourgeois coalition government, the proletariat is relatively insignificant. However, Nepalis have for decades crossed into India to live and work, becoming a part of what is now a rapidly growing proletariat in India; hundreds of thousands of Nepalis work elsewhere in Asia. A proletarian revolution in India would have a massive immediate effect on Nepal and other neighboring countries, posing a struggle for a socialist federation of the subcontinent. Crucial to such a proletarian-internationalist perspective is the fight for workers political revolution in the Chinese deformed workers state, a fight that must be premised on the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and domestic counterrevolution.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Spartacists Intervene at Chicago Social Forum: Ford Foundation, CIA and the Social Forums," Workers Vanguard No. 849 (May 27, 2005)
The social forums have a pretense of fighting against poverty and oppression. But far from offering any solution to the enormous miseries of world capitalism, the World Social Forum (WSF) was set up in the aftermath of the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, and subsequent mass protests against the WTO and IMF internationally, in order to ensure that those who oppose the depredations of capitalism do not challenge the capitalist system itself. An article titled "Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum" in Aspects of India's Economy (September 2003) described this process:
"Attempts by the ruling circles of those countries to suppress this movement met with no success; indeed, the movement grew. It was in this context that the WSF was initiated by ATTAC, a French NGO (non-governmental organisation) platform devoted to lobbying international financial institutions to reform and humanise themselves, and by the Brazilian Workers Party, whose leftist image and 'participatory' techniques of government have not prevented it from scrupulously implementing the stipulations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)."
This insightful article details a calculated strategy to prevent struggle that might challenge the framework of capitalism by creating a modern day popular front: a class-collaborationist political bloc of working-class parties with capitalist parties in which the politics of the working-class component of the bloc are subordinated to the politics of the bourgeoisie, to the defense of the bourgeois state and capitalism.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "For Separation of Religion and State: No to Ontario's 'Sharia Courts'! Down With Anti-Muslim Racism!," Spartacist Canada No. 142 (Fall 2004)
Sharia Law and Muslim Women
Sharia is the 1,300-year-old body of Muslim canon law that regulates every aspect of life. In Muslim personal law, women are inherently unequal (as in all organized religion); indeed they are considered less than fully human. Women may be beaten by their husbands, denied divorce, or divorced by the husband simply repeating three times, "I divorce you." Who can forget Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman who narrowly escaped death by stoning for having a child out of wedlock?
Many of the opponents of Ontario's sharia plans are women who have fled Iran. Women in that "Islamic paradise" must cover themselves in the headscarf (hijab); they may not work in occupations that might compromise their "chastity"; and they can be stoned to death (and many have been) for having sexual relationships outside of marriage. In 2003 three young Iranian women—Nika, Mahdis and Mahnam Nahasati—were arrested, beaten with chains and sentenced to 120 lashes for the "crime" of allegedly having boyfriends. They had to overcome multiple racist hurdles thrown up by Canadian immigration authorities in order to escape Iran. Their brother Mohsen Mofidi was less fortunate—sentenced to 80 lashes, he died of injuries inflicted by the regime.
We especially oppose the Koranic strictures that dictate the seclusion of women. The head-to-toe chador (veil) is a walking prison, physically excluding women from society. It is not primarily a religious statement, but an embodiment of the submission of women to men, and the permanent, imposed affirmation of their inferior status. It represents the extension outside the home of the seclusion imposed on women by reactionary sharia law. We solidarize with the countless women who have sought to escape this tyranny, whether in the historically Muslim world or the imperialist centers.
[...]
Religion, the Family and Women's Oppression
Karl Marx was right when he asserted that "Man makes religion, religion does not make man." He concluded:
"The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.
"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
—"Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law," 1844
Islam has no monopoly on religious savagery, and the subjugation of women is not unique to it. For years the Catholic Church has used its power in the state-funded separate school system to poison children with anti-abortion and anti-gay bigotry. The religious lunatics who spent the 1990s trying to murder abortion doctors in Canada and the U.S. were certainly not Muslim. The Catholic Church still does not allow divorce or contraception. In Jewish law the Beis Din system is a lot like sharia, intensely anti-woman. For example, women may not give testimony or sit in judgement of others; once married, women are essentially the property of their husbands.
Institutionalized religions are key to reinforcing women's oppression, but they are not its origin. The institution of the family—today fashioned to serve the needs of capitalist class rule—is the main source of women's oppression. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, written in the late 19th century, Friedrich Engels explained that the monogamous patrilineal family "is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity." The family is the vehicle for transmitting property from one generation to the next, and the mechanism for raising new generations of workers. Bourgeois family law is thus tightly bound up with defense of private property, and women's inequality is always reflected in the legal and social codes of every society.
The entire fabric of Muslim family law, the subordination of women through polygamy, the bride price, dowry, the veil—these are not simply the "bad ideas" of an evil caste of mullahs. In origin, they were a means of enforcing property rights and attendant mechanisms of social control in a pre-capitalist society.
In the eight and ninth centuries, when Europe was in the Dark Ages, Muslim civilization was at its zenith. Islam gave us algebra, Arabic numbers; it preserved medical knowledge and many other key inventions. In the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century the Muslims and Jews were driven out of Spain by the crown and Catholic Church. Thousands upon thousands of books of mathematics, astronomy, medicine and poetry were burned.
Christianity and Judaism, in their many variants, also preach stifling moral codes meant to uphold the patriarchal family. But sections of Christianity and Judaism, also with roots in pre-capitalist society, had to conform with rising industrial capitalism and the bourgeois nation-states where they existed. The radical democratic principles of the Enlightenment were the ideological reflection of historic material advances over a backward, feudal society. But as a religion, Islam has not had to adapt, largely because it remains rooted in those parts of the world where imperialist penetration has reinforced social backwardness as a prop to its domination.
Capitalism came belatedly to these countries, with the European colonizers who manipulated and nurtured all that was backward and retrograde, while suppressing class struggle. And today among concentrations of immigrants in the Western imperialist countries, capitalist rule has reinforced anti-woman practices, from the barbarism of female genital mutilation to veiling to arranged marriages.
The Western imperialists fulminate against Islam. But it was these imperialist exploiters who fuelled the growth of political Islam over the last half century. In their drive to destroy the Soviet Union—the state that emerged from the victorious 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—the imperialists allied with indigenous forces of social reaction to act as a bulwark against godless Communism and the Soviet Union, and to ensure the continued flow of superprofits.
Afghanistan is the clearest example. In the late 1970s when a modernizing Afghan government moved to implement modest reforms for women (lowering the bride price, instituting education) the tribal mujahedin erupted in insurrectionary violence. To protect its borders from the fundamentalist threat, already backed by the CIA, in late 1979 the Soviet Red Army entered Afghanistan at the invitation of the left-nationalist government in Kabul. The U.S. government spent billions to fund the mujahedin's holy war against the Soviet Union in what was the biggest CIA operation in history. We declared "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan," and called to extend the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples, especially the terribly oppressed women.
But this was not the Soviet Union of Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky, but a degenerated workers state headed by a bureaucratic caste intent on conciliating the imperialist order. Criminally, instead of fighting to win, in 1989 the Soviets withdrew, paving the way for the victory of Washington's brutal religious fanatics—including the future Taliban—and opening the door to counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself. The Taliban, Osama Bin Laden—this whole reactionary crew is literally the Frankenstein monster created by the imperialists in their war on the Soviet Union.
[...]
For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Any perspective for the liberation of women must start with revolutionary opposition to the imperialist rulers, who exploit workers at home while subjugating and plundering entire countries in the Third World. It is necessary to generate the resources to change the material conditions of life, and that can only come from the expropriation of the capitalist class. Looking ahead to the socialist revolution, in Origin of the Family Engels wrote:
"With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate of not."
When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, they sought to carry out this program. But the resources of the new workers state, devastated by imperialist war, famine and civil war, were agonizingly slender, and this imposed harsh limits on the measures they could take. Even so, health care and education were free, and there was child care in workplaces. The Bolsheviks' earliest measures were directed at the emancipation of women. Unlike both modern bourgeois law and religious tradition, they made marriage and divorce simple matters of civil registration. The welfare of children was the responsibility of the state. They did away with the repressive laws against homosexuality and abortion.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "'Market Socialism' and the Legacy of Mao: Whither China?," Workers Vanguard Nos. 743 and 745 (6 October and 3 November 2000):
The Socialist Transformation of Backward Countries: From Marx to Trotsky
Just as [Maurice] Meisner [neo-Maoist author of The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994 (1996)] falsifies through omission and selective quotations Marx’s views on the relationship between capitalism and socialism in general, he likewise falsifies Marx’s views on the socialist transformation of backward countries. He begins his book by insisting that Marx held that socialism can be built only in an advanced industrial society previously developed under capitalism.
Marx and Engels initially did believe that industrial capitalism would be extended more or less uniformly on a worldwide basis, but they later abandoned that view in light of subsequent historical experience. The founders of scientific socialism were by no means blind or indifferent to the monumental crimes committed by the Western colonial powers against the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. But they initially considered such crimes as a historical overhead cost for the modernization of these backward regions. In an 1853 article, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Marx wrote:
“England had to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of the old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia....
“Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary division of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.”
This projection was not borne out by the actual course of development. While the Western bourgeoisies introduced certain elements of modern industrial technology (e.g., railroads) into their colonies and semicolonies, the overall effect of capitalist imperialism was to arrest the social and economic development of backward countries. Thus, British colonial rule deliberately perpetuated and utilized traditional reactionary institutions such as the caste system in India and tribalism in sub-Saharan Africa.
Moreover, the economic development which was introduced under European colonial rule had a deformed character. Thus, the British built the railways in India only from the hinterland to the port to facilitate trade with the imperialist metropolis. The rail lines did not connect the different regions of the Indian subcontinent. By contrast, railway construction in the United States during this same period was a prime factor in the economic and social integration of the American nation-state.
By the late 19th century, Marx and Engels had become champions of colonial independence and recognized that the modernization of Asia, Africa and Latin America could take place only within the context of a world socialist order. Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky in 1882:
“India will perhaps, indeed very probably, make a revolution and as a proletariat in process of self-emancipation cannot conduct any colonial wars, it would have to be allowed to run its course.... The same might also take place elsewhere, e.g., in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly be the best thing for us.... Once Europe is reorganized, and North America, that will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilized countries will of themselves follow in their wake: economic needs, if anything, will see to that. But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organization, I think we today can advance only rather idle hypotheses.”
Marx was still alive at this time and was collaborating closely with Engels. So this represents their final, mature judgment on the socialist transformation of backward countries. Contrary to Meisner, Marx did not maintain that the backward countries had to go through a prolonged period of capitalist development emulating the experience of West Europe and North America.
In the 1880s, at the beginning of the era of modern capitalist imperialism, it was understandable that Marx and Engels assumed that proletarian revolution would first take place in the advanced capitalist countries and that the socialist transformation of the more backward regions of the world would gradually follow in consequence. However, imperialist domination and exploitation strengthened the bourgeois order in West Europe and North America, not least by infecting the working class of these countries with the ideology of national chauvinism and racism. As Lenin pointed out in his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, superprofits derived from the colonial and semicolonial countries made it “economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat” in the imperialist countries.
At the same time, imperialism tended to destabilize the traditional social order in backward countries, generating contradictions which Leon Trotsky termed “combined and uneven development.” A sizable industrial proletariat, working with modern technology, emerged alongside the mass of impoverished peasants still subject to feudal-derived and other pre-capitalist forms of exploitation. The day-to-day struggle against capitalist and precapitalist forms of exploitation was organically intertwined with, and reinforced by, the struggle for national independence.
Recognizing the international contradictions in the era of modern imperialism, Trotsky in his theory of permanent revolution challenged the hitherto accepted sequencing of the world socialist revolution from the advanced to backward countries. It was now possible that the proletariat of a backward country, leading the peasant masses in the struggle against feudal-derived exploitation and foreign imperialist domination, could come to power in advance of the workers of West Europe and North America. Such revolutions would severely weaken the bourgeois order in the imperialist centers while giving a powerful impetus to the revolutionary consciousness of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries.
Drawing on the understanding first laid out by Marx and Engels in their 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” Trotsky developed this concept of permanent revolution at the beginning of the 20th century specifically with regard to tsarist Russia, and it was validated by life itself in the Bolshevik-led October Revolution of 1917. In the late 1920s, in light of the experience of the defeated Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, Trotsky generalized the theory and program of permanent revolution to what is now called the “Third World.” Trotsky recognized that while the socialist revolution could well begin in a backward country oppressed by imperialism, it could be completed only by proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries:
“The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet....
“In a country where the proletariat has power in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the subsequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last analysis not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as upon the development of the international socialist revolution.”
— The Permanent Revolution (1929); reprinted in The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (1969)
[...]
From Mao to Deng: The Economic Dimension
The People’s Republic of China demonstrates the superiority of a planned, collectivized economy, even with bureaucratic parasitism and mismanagement, over a backward capitalist country. But it also demonstrates the impossibility of an economically backward workers state catching up with, much less overtaking, an advanced capitalist country.
The Chinese Revolution occurred about the same time that India achieved its independence from British colonialism. For the next several decades, this South Asian country—the most populous in the world after China—was governed by Nehru’s bourgeois-nationalist Congress Party. The economic conditions which Nehru & Co. inherited from the British Raj (colonial administration) were, on balance, more favorable (or less unfavorable) than those which confronted Mao and his colleagues in 1949. The Chinese economy—the agricultural as well as industrial sector—had been devastated by decades of war and civil war.
Yet within 20 years, China had surpassed India in all significant measures of economic and social progress. At the end of the Mao era, in 1977 China was producing 30 to 40 percent more food per capita than India even with 15 percent less arable land, and in China food was distributed far more equitably. By the early 1980s, per capita gross national product in China was 20 percent higher than in India. The infant mortality rate in China was 70 percent that of India, while life expectancy at birth was 67 years compared to 55 years in India. Secondary school enrollment was 44 percent of the school-age population in China compared to only 30 percent in India.
However, if one compares China to the United States or even the Soviet Union the picture is entirely different. When in 1978 Deng became the country’s paramount leader, crop yield per agricultural worker in China was 1,000 kilograms compared to 10,000 kilograms in the USSR and 95,000 kilograms in the U.S. China was generating 257 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, the United States 2.2 trillion kilowatt-hours. And since the population of China at this time was three times greater than that of the U.S., the difference in per capita output for the U.S. was three times greater than the difference in total amount.
It was precisely the acute contradiction between China’s relative economic backwardness and the “great power” nationalism of its bureaucratic rulers which impelled Deng & Co. down the road of market-based “reforms.” [...]
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from Imperialism, the "Global Economy" and Labor Reformism, Spartacist pamphlet (1999):
It was, however, in the economically backward regions of the world that the postwar period saw the most radical political changes affecting the international movement of capital. In the course of defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, the Soviet Red Army occupied East Europe. Over the next few years, under the hostile pressure of American imperialism, these countries were transformed, bureaucratically from above, into "people's democracies"—i.e., deformed workers states structurally similar to the Stalinized Soviet Union, based on planned, collectivized economies, the state monopoly of foreign trade, etc. Bureaucratically deformed workers states also emerged in China, North Korea and Vietnam, as a result of indigenous, peasant-based social revolutions led by Stalinists. It was above all fear of war with the Soviet Union which prevented Washington from using its nuclear weapons against Mao's China during the Korean War in the early 1950s and a few years later against the Viet Minh forces which were defeating the French colonial army in Indochina. A large part of the world was thus removed from the sphere of capitalist exploitation, although still subject to the powerful political, economic and military pressures of imperialism.
At the same time, radical political changes also took place in those economically backward countries which remained within the sphere of capitalist exploitation. The weakening of the West European imperialist states caused by World War II combined with the radicalization of the colonial masses led to the "decolonization" of much of Asia, the Near East and Africa. State power in these regions now passed into the hands of indigenous bourgeoisies, who sought to pursue their own national interests within a global context dominated by international finance capital.
Despite some CIA-organized coups (e.g., against Mossadeq in Iran in 1953), the ability of U.S. imperialism to control the governments of the former colonial and semicolonial countries was limited by the countervailing power of the Soviet Union. Moscow's backing allowed bourgeois-nationalist regimes like Nasser's Egypt, Nehru and Indira Gandhi's India and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to exercise a degree of political and economic independence of the imperialist powers which they could not have attained on the basis of their own national economic resources.
During the 1960s, Soviet funds and engineers helped build the Aswan High Dam—one of the largest in the world—in Nasser's Egypt. By the early '70s, the USSR had become the largest market for India's exports, while Moscow provided the New Delhi regime with over 60 percent of its imports of military hardware. At the same time, Western and Japanese corporations were discouraged from investing in countries like Egypt and India for fear of punitive taxation, restrictions on the repatriation of profits and the possibility of nationalization without adequate compensation. The 1960s and '70s thus marked the heyday of economic nationalism and statified capitalism in what was then called the "Afro-Asian bloc."
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer even a partial counterweight to Western/Japanese imperialist domination in the Third World. The 1991 Gulf War signaled that, without the protection of the USSR, those bourgeois- nationalist regimes which flouted the dictates of Washington would be subjected to the devastating power of the Pentagon war machine.
However, even with the relatively greater room for maneuver they had when the Soviet Union still existed, the bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Third World did not and could not chart a course truly independent of imperialism, nor could they bring about the economic and social modernization of their countries. Despite their "non-aligned" posture and even "socialist" rhetoric, the semicolonial bourgeoisies remained tied to the imperialist bourgeoisies by a thousand strings, subordinated and subservient to the power of the imperialist world market. Thus, India's exports remained concentrated, as in the colonial era, in light manufactures produced by unskilled labor. Egypt remained economically dependent on the export of cotton (as well as tolls from the Suez Canal), Ba'athist Iraq and Qaddafi's Libya on the vicissitudes of the world oil market controlled by the "Seven Sisters" monopolies. And Algeria under the radical-nationalist FLN regime relied heavily on money sent back by Algerians working in France. Only through the revolutionary overthrow of the local bourgeoisies, as part of a perspective of world socialist revolution reaching into the imperialist centers, can these countries achieve true independence from imperialism.
READ THE FULL PAMPHLET
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "India: Hindu Fascists Whip Up Religious Slaughter," Workers Hammer No. 133 (January-February 1993):
[...]India is a capitalist prison house for its myriad oppressed, from the horribly exploited workers of its great industrial cities to all the victims of the caste system, to the oppressed nations and minorities, to those slaves of slaves, the women of India.
There is no possibility of secular democracy under this capitalist regime which necessarily preserves the most horrific backwardness. For to get rid of the caste system, to get rid of the fundamentalist strongmen and communally organised religious fanaticism, will require a social revolution that brings the whole edifice of Indian capitalism tumbling down, even if it starts out as a purely democratic struggle. “Progressive” nationalists like Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk outlawed the veil, for example, but this only suppressed symbols of backwardness without eradicating the underlying conditions, so in time these practices have come back.
What is required is the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution, the seizure of power by the working class rallying behind it the peasant masses, the oppressed castes and national minorities, the subjugated and enslaved women. Only the working class leading the agrarian masses and all the downtrodden in workers revolution can save India from further communalist bloodbaths.
[...]
Born out of the paramilitary fascist RSS, an organisation which goes back to the days of independence and one of whose cadre assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the BJP is riddled with RSS members and supporters from other fascistic organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP—World Council of Hindus) and the youth-based Bajrang Dal.
The BJP wants a Hindu state, the “Ram Rajya” (Kingdom of Ram), and alleges that Indian governments have betrayed Hindus by favouring the Muslims (referred to as “ungrateful guests”) and other minorities. One journalist noted that “A freeze-frame of India today would show a nation wracked by the same changes that gave birth to fascism in Europe of the 1930s” (Independent, 9 December 1992). The government’s economic “liberalisation” policies in the ‘80s, and the more recent IMF/World Bank-dictated “reforms,” have created a large urban capitalistic-minded middle class, grasping to make ends meet, resentful of the entrenched and filthy-rich Congress tops and their big business cronies, and fearful of the impoverished toiling masses below them.
The BJP is an upper-caste Hindu-led party, oriented to maintaining the traditional caste hierarchy in the context of capitalist urbanisation which undermines the old rural-centred system. It appeals to layer of urban educated petty bourgeois who can find no jobs, and traders and petty entrepreneurs who often see the Muslims in the same way as the European fascists viewed the Jews before World War II. In India anti-Muslim communalism is the reactionary rallying cry for the fascist mobilisation of the new middle classes in the context of general urban plebian rage and economic desperation—a feature of modern capitalist India, not some feudal leftover. At the end of 1990 the BJP’s attempted kar seva at Ayodhya resulted in more than 2,000 communal killings and led to the fall of V.P. Singh’s National Front government.
[...]
In the struggle against colonial rule, the idea of a united Indian people struggling for freedom mobilised millions, in particular against British attempts at “divide and rule” along religious, national and caste lines. From Nehru on, bourgeois nationalists have touted secularism, but Indian nationalism always contained a strong element of Hindu and Hindi-language chauvinism. This reflected the late, uneven and arrested development of the Indian bourgeoisie in the context of multiple national, language and religious divisions. It is a lie that India was ever a secular democratic state. India and Pakistan were born out the defeat of secular-democratic aspirations in the anti-colonial struggle which were consumed in the flames of sectarian strife fueled by the British colonialists.
The Congress (I) is still the only genuinely all-India party and still the main party of the fragmented bourgeoisie, maintaining a posture of representing all India’s peoples. But despite its “secular,” “democratic” and even formerly “socialist” pretensions, it has always been chauvinist. Mahatma Gandhi was the first advocate of the “Ram Rajya,” and couched his appeals in reactionary, mythical terms. The Congress party presided over the bloody Partition in 1947 and two wars with Pakistan. It has mercilessly sought to crush national struggles like those of the Sikhs in Punjab and the Kashmiris.
Sikh militants avenged themselves for the Indian government’s slaughter at the Golden Temple in Amritsar by assassinating its architect, Mrs. Gandhi, in 1984. In response, Rajiv Gandhi condoned the butchering of thousands of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere by Hindu communalist mobs, mobs often led by Congress politicians. Two years later that playboy of the Eastern world got his from the Lankan Tamil Tigers, who had faced the murderous brutality of the expeditionary force he sent to Sri Lanka. Like the other “secular” parties, Congress seeks to play to communal and caste blocs for electoral advantage. During the last elections Congress (I) thugs opened fire on “Untouchables” in Bihar trying to vote for a Communist Party candidate.
[...]
Nor do the reformist Communist parties present any fundamental challenge to the plans of the bloodsucking IMF imperialists. Along with the BJP, the CPs backed V.P. Singh’s National Front government. Now, instead of mobilizing the working class and the oppressed in independent action, the Communist parties are playing around with a new popular-front alliance with Congress (I). And the inability of these reformists to solve the burning needs of the toiling masses breeds disillusionment.
Some land reform in West Bengal has helped to build support for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in that state, but without a thoroughgoing agrarian revolution which expropriates the feudal landlords and the big capitalist farmers, the poor peasants still have no land and can be sucked in by the communalists. While corruption increases and his son gets rich, West Bengal CPI(M) premier Jyoti Basu tries to attract imperialist investors to the state, on the promise that the working masses can be held in check.
Today, the CPs administer capitalist governments and defend the bourgeois order. There were also communal outbursts in Calcutta, capital of West Bengal, where the CPI(M) has ruled for 15 years. While both the CPI(M) and the CPI derive their mass support at least in part from an anti-communalist reputation, they undercut any decent impulses of their own militants by making alliances with communal and casteist organisations, as well as by denouncing the independence struggles of the Sikhs in Punjab and Muslim Kashmiris as “terrorism,” backing the central government’s ruthless repression of these legitimate struggles.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "80 Million Women Maimed: The Crime of Female Genital Mutilation," reprinted from Women and Revolution No. 41 (Summer/Autumn 1992):
Over 80 million women in the world today have been subjected to similar barbaric mutilation, a traditional practice that continues unabated in at least 28 African countries. According to the Minority Rights Group International, 90 percent of women in northern Sudan, Ethiopia and Mali, and nearly 100 percent in Somalia and Djibouti, undergo ritualistic genital excision. In these countries women are also infibulated, the two sides of the vulva sewn together with catgut or held with thorns, a match stick shoved in place to ensure an opening the size of a pinhole. Lesser mutilations are performed on women in parts of the Middle East and Pakistan, and among some Muslims in Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka.
[...]
There are standards in the evolution of human culture. Americans fought a civil war over the “quaint cultural tradition” of its Southern states; while the Confederacy argued that it had a right to self-determination, few today condone the practice of slavery. Similarly, female genital mutilation is not a relative cultural trait but a violent act of savagery. Those who have over the years covered the systematic mutilation of young girls in a shroud of silence because it is “an African tradition” are in fact promoting a kind of racism and are sacrificing women on the altar of liberal guilt.
There is a story from the time of British colonial rule in India that captures an element of the situation here. A British officer, trying to stop an act of suttee, was told by an Indian man, “It is our custom to burn a woman on the funeral pyre of her husband.” The Englishman replied, “And it is our custom to execute murderers.” As with the British subjugation of India, Marx initially regarded the intervention of the capitalist states into the backward regions of the world as historically progressive; he thought that their advanced economic and social institutions would inevitably accompany the Western colonization. But, as later became clear to Marx, this did not happen. The British Empire colonized India in order to reap profits and had very little interest in the lives or well-being of the people who lived there; indeed enhancing communal frictions was a conscious policy of the Raj. Nonetheless, the 1829 British law against suttee and the attempts to suppress the ritual in practice were supportable.
Britain had had a bourgeois revolution and the resulting capitalist state represented in some aspects an advance for mankind which the warring feudal princedoms and empires in India had not provided. Industrial capitalism destroyed the agrarian economies upon which female servitude was based, and bourgeois revolutions legally and formally wiped out the more abhorrent aspects of women’s oppression. But the Western “democracies” did not bring these bourgeois-democratic reforms with them into the colonial countries. As in Africa, the penetration of decaying capitalism into the Third World has fostered the most reactionary aspects of degenerated tribalism. The imperialists today perpetuate general impoverishment the better to reap profits themselves.
The bourgeois revolutions in the advanced industrial countries were carried out by radical Enlightenment thinkers who attacked Western cultural standards defended by Christianity and the feudal order. They believed that society’s control over nature could liberate all people from the centuries-old stranglehold of religion, superstition and barbaric rituals. In the epoch of imperialism, the nationalist, neocolonial politicians, like Jomo Kenyatta or Algeria’s Ben Bella, might mumble rhetoric about “African socialism” but they cannot provide economic independence or even the most basic democratic rights avowed by the bourgeois revolutions in the last two centuries. In order to mobilize sufficient support to establish themselves as the ruling class in their own countries, bourgeois nationalists must rely on backward-looking “cultural traditions.”
Either the “national principle” or the principles of communism will have a defining character in the Third World. This is no abstract question. An imperialist-dependent ruling class, subcontractor for plundering “its own” impoverished workers and peasants for the benefit of the IMF and the capitalist world market, merely offers the masses a new flag; its “anti-imperialism” consists of embracing the “glorious past” and “protecting” the dominant nationality at the expense of minority peoples. Hindu chauvinists in India take “revenge” on former Mogul emperors by trashing impoverished Muslims; blacks in eastern Africa were promised self-determination by the expulsion of Asians brought to Africa under the old British Empire and abandoned.
In “independent” India, such atrocities as suttee, dowry murder and female infanticide are actually on the rise; in the name of cultural self-defense, urban Iranian women and Palestinian émigrées in the West have been forced back into the veil. Only the victory of communism, which looks toward a fundamental reshaping of society on new lines, can guarantee equality for all peoples and free women from the “traditional” degradation prescribed by religious obscurantism and precapitalist cultural practices.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "The 'Quit India' Movement 40 Years On: Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution," Workers Hammer (September/October and November/December 1992):
CPI and Britain’s “Divide and Rule”
From the outset, 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 BG 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 combine today. In the absence of a communist leadership consciously able to transcend and combat it by bringing the revolutionary proletarian, anticommunal, 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.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East," Women and Revolution issue No. 12 (Summer 1976):
[anti-caste note: We're including this article here because it is relevant to the project of undoing not only women's oppression among both Muslims and Hindus but also the caste system in a post-revolutionary, workers-ruled South Asia.]
The triumph of the October Revolution in 1917, which dramatically transformed the lives of Russian women, wrought even greater transformations in the lives of the women inhabiting the Central Asian regions which had been colonized by tsarist Russia. But in these feudal or pre-feudal generally Islamic cultures, where the lot of women was frequently inferior to that of the livestock, change came more slowly.
The status of women varied, of course, from culture to culture and within cultures, depending on social class and the nature of the, productive process. But from the mouth of the Volga through the Caucasus and Turkestan, from Iran and Afghanistan to Mongolia and northward to Siberia virtual enslavement was the rule, although restrictions were of necessity less strictly applied to women of the poorer classes—nomads and peasant women—whose labor was essential. A certain level of trade and industry and a settled way of life in the cities was a prerequisite for the luxury of strict enforcement of Islamic law.
It was not only the formal prescriptions of the Koran, but also local customs codified in the religious common law (the Shariat) and the civil law (the Adats), which determined the situation of Islamic women. The few partial reforms expressed in the Koran–the forbidding of female infanticide, the restriction of polygamy, the recognition of limited property and inheritance rights for women–were generally nullified by local Shariats and Adats.
The practically universal institution of kalym or bride price in itself illustrates the Muslim conception of marriage as a purely commercial contract having nothing to do with emotional bonds or personal commitments. In some areas the bride’s presence was not even required at the wedding. The purchase price of the female commodity had already been negotiated between the families of the bride and groom, and the wedding was merely a ceremony at which the transaction was notarized. The marriage contract was subject to dissolution by the husband at any time, and polygamy and child marriage were quite common. Children too physically immature for marital relations were subjected to the “horrible operation”—they were ripped open by a midwife to make consummation possible.
Kalym bound a woman, often from childhood, to the husband who satisfied her father’s price. If she ran away, she could be pursued as a criminal and punished by her husband or his clan. A runaway wife might be punished by having her legs broken or by other barbaric tortures. For a woman so much as suspected of infidelity, the appropriate punishment was branding on the genitals with a hot iron.
For the poor, marriage by capture often replaced payment of kalym. Once she was seized, carried off and raped, the woman had no choice but to remain with her abductor, since she had been disgraced and no other man would have her. Even widowhood brought no freedom, because a wife for whom kalym had been paid was the property of the husband’s family or clan and was bequeathed to his brother. Suicide by fire was the only alternative according to the laws of Islam. However, access to heaven was dependent on the will of the husband, and if cheated out of kalym by a wife’s suicide, he was unlikely to invite her to enter into paradise.
Rules demanding the veiling and seclusion of women had been introduced into Islamic law with the conversion of the Persian aristocracy in 641 A.D. In many parts of Central Asia the veil required was not simply the yashmuk, covering the mouth, but the paranja, which covers the whole face and body without openings for sight or breath. For centuries many women have lived thus shrouded and imprisoned in their ichkaris (segregated living quarters). A Yakutsk legend depicts a model daughter of Islam. Her living body is set before guests who proceed to cutoff pieces to eat. The girl not only bears this torment in silence but tries to smile pleasingly.
The triumph of Russian imperialism in the 1880’s brought few advances in social organization or technology in the Muslim East. The wretched Russian peasantry lived like royalty in comparison with the primitive peoples of this area.
The tsarist government forced the agricultural villages to switch at this time from food crops to cotton, and railroads were built to transport this product to Russian textile plants. Following the railroad workers were women who did not wear veils—Russian prostitutes. For a long time they were the only models available to the Muslim nomads and peasants of the “liberation” which Russian capitalism had bestowed upon women.
The October Revolution Transforms Central Asia
With the victory of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks turned toward Central Asia in the hope of developing its vast and desperately needed natural resources. The flow of these resources to the West was threatened, however, by the fact that Central Asia was from the beginning a haven for every sort of counterrevolutionary tendency and for the retreating White armies. Bourgeois consolidation anywhere in this area would have provided a base for the imperialist powers to launch an anti-Soviet attack.
The extension of the proletarian revolution to Central Asia, moreover, could become the example of socialist development in an economically backward area which would undermine the resistance of burgeoning nationalism in the East and inspire the toilers of other underdeveloped regions the world over.
But immense economic and cultural leaps were required to integrate Soviet Central Asia into a society revolutionized by the Bolsheviks in power. Trotsky called the area “the most backward of the backward,” still living a “prehistoric existence.” Indeed, the journey eastward from Moscow across Central Asia was a trip backward through the centuries of human development.
The Bolsheviks viewed the extreme oppression of women as an indicator of the primitive level of the whole society, but their approach was based on materialism, not moralism. They understood that the fact that women were veiled and caged, bought and sold, was but the surface of the problem. Kalym was not some sinister plot against womankind, but an institution which was central to the organization of production, integrally connected to land and water rights. Payment of kalyin, often by the whole clan over a long period of time, committed those involved to an elaborate system of debts, duties and loyalties which ultimately led to participation in the private army of the local beys (landowners and wholesale merchants). All commitments were thus backed up with the threat of feuds and blood vengeance.
These kinship and tribal loyalties were obstacles to social progress because they obscured class relations and held back the expropriation and redistribution of land and other property. Poor peasants who stood to gain by the equalization of wealth, hid the property of their rich relatives threatened with expropriation. Blood vengeance enforced vows of silence, and Soviet authority was undermined by conspiracies that served only the old oppressors.
Civil War
The Bolsheviks hoped that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain, but this necessitated a great deal of preparation, for the Muslim institutions, oppressive as they were, served real social functions and could not be simply abolished. Like the bourgeois family, they had to be replaced.
Lenin warned against prematurely confronting respected native institutions, even when these clearly violated communist principle and Soviet law. Instead, he proposed to use Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine them while simultaneously demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions, a policy which had worked well against the powerful Russian Orthodox Church.
Extending this practice to Central Asia, the Soviet government waged a campaign to build the authority of the Soviet legal system and civil courts as an alternative to the traditional Muslim kadi courts and legal codes. Although the kadi courts were permitted to function, their powers were circumscribed in that they were forbidden to handle political cases or any cases in which both parties to the dispute had not agreed to use the kadi rather than the parallel Soviet court system. As the Soviet courts became more accepted, criminal cases were eliminated from the kadis’ sphere. Next, the government invited dissatisfied parties to appeal the kadis’ decisions to a Soviet court. In this manner the Soviets earned the reputation of being partisans of the oppressed, while the kadis were exposed as defenders of the status quo. Eventually the kadis were forbidden to enforce any Muslim law which contradicted Soviet law. Two Soviet representatives, including one member of Zhenotdel—the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women—were assigned to witness all kadi proceedings and to approve their decisions. Finally, when the wafks (endowment properties), which had supported the kadis, were expropriated and redistributed among the peasantry, the kadis disappeared completely.
This non-confrontationist policy in no way implied capitulation to backward, repressive institutions. It was made clear that there could be no reconciliation between communism and the Koran. Although “Red Mullahs,” attracted by the Bolshevik program of self-determination and land to the tiller, suggested to their followers that Islam was socialism and vice versa, the Bolsheviks insisted that Soviet and Muslim law could never be reconciled precisely on the grounds that the most basic rights of women would be sacrificed.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "The Classes of India and Their Political Roles," A Thesis of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Indian section of the Fourth [Trotskyist] International (1942):
The Permanent Revolution
India faces a historically belated bourgeois-democratic revolution, the main tasks of which are the overthrow of British Imperialism, the liquidation of a semi-feudal land system, and the clearing away of feudal remnants in the form of the Indian Native States. But although the bourgeois-democratic revolution occurring in the advanced capitalist countries in previous centuries found leadership in the then rising bourgeoisie, the Indian bourgeoisie, appearing on the scene only after the progressive role of the bourgeoisie in the world as a whole has been exhausted, is incapable of providing leadership to the revolution that is unfolding in India.
In the first place, as a historically belated class, they do not possess the strength and independence of the early bourgeoisie of former times. Connected with and dependent on British capital from their birth, they have progressively been brought into a position of subservience to British finance-capital, and today display the characteristics of a predominantly comprador bourgeoisie enjoying at the best the position of a very junior partner in the firm British Imperialism & Co. Hence, while they have been prepared to place themselves, through the Indian National Congress, at the head of the anti-imperialist mass movement for the purpose of utilizing it as a bargaining weapon to secure concessions from the imperialists, they have restricted its scope and prevented its development into a revolutionary assault on imperialism. Incapable from the very nature of their position of embarking on a revolutionary struggle to secure their independence, and fearful of such a struggle, they have maintained their control over the mass movement only to betray it at every critical juncture.
Secondly, unlike the once revolutionary bourgeoisie of former times, which arose in opposition to the feudal landowning class and in constant struggle against it, the Indian bourgeoisie [has developed largely from the landowning class itself, and is in addition] closely connected with the landlords through mortgages. They are therefore incapable of leading the peasants in the agrarian revolt against landlordism. On the contrary, as is clearly demonstrated by the declared policy and actions of the Indian National Congress, both during the Civil Disobedience Movements and in the period of the Congress Ministries, they are staunch supporters of Zemindari interests.
Finally, unlike the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of former times, the revolution in India is unfolding at a time when large concentrations of workers already exist in the country. The industrial proletariat numbering 5 millions occupies a position of strategic importance in the economy of the country which cannot be measured by its mere numerical strength. It is important to remember, moreover, that a hitherto uncalculated but undoubtedly very high proportion of these workers are employed in large concerns employing several hundreds of thousands of workers. The high degree of concentration of the Indian proletariat immeasurably advances its class consciousness and organizational strength. It was only in the post-war years that the Indian working class emerged as an organized force on a national scale. But the militant and widespread strike-waves of 1918-21 and of 1928-29, which were the precursors of the mass civil disobedience movements of 1920-21 and of 1930-34 respectively, testify to the rapidity of the awakening. These workers are in daily conflict not only with the Imperialist owners of capital, but also with the native bourgeoisie. These workers, moreover, being a class exploited not only by indigenous capital, but also in fact predominantly by foreign capital, have as a class grown to an extent out of all proportion to the size and strength of the Indian bourgeoisie. Faced by the threat of this new and growing class, which is rapidly awakening to consciousness and making a bid to play an independent role in the national political arena, the Indian bourgeoisie has grown more conservative and suspicious. With every advance in organization and consciousness of the workers, they have drawn nearer to the Imperialists and further away from the masses. Even the oppositional role they were wont to play against Imperialism has become a caricature of its former self. Fearful already of any kind of mass movement against Imperialism, the aim of their control over the national movement through the Indian National Congress is today not so much the securing of concessions from Imperialism as preventing the outbreak of an anti-imperialist movement on a mass scale. It is clear that not a single one of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution can be solved under the leadership of the Indian bourgeoisie. Far from leading the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Indian bourgeoisie will go over to the camp of the Imperialists and landlords on the outbreak of the revolution and will play an actively counter-revolutionary role.
The urban petty bourgeoisie, daily becoming declassed and pauperized under imperialism, and declining into economic insignificance, cannot even conceive of playing an independent role in the coming revolution. Since, however, there is no prospect whatever of improving their condition under imperialism, but on the contrary they are faced with actual pauperization and ruin, they are forced on to the revolutionary road.
The peasantry, the largest numerically and the most atomized, backward and oppressed class, is capable of local uprisings and partisan warfare, but requires the leadership of a more advanced [and centralized] class for this struggle to be elevated to an all-national level. Without such leadership the peasantry alone cannot make a revolution. The task of such leadership falls in the nature of things on the Indian proletariat, which is the only class capable of leading the toiling masses in the onslaught against Imperialism, landlordism and the Native Princes. The concentration and discipline induced by its very place in capitalist economy, its numerical strength, the sharpness of the class antagonism which daily brings it into conflict with the Imperialists who are the main owners of capital in India, its organization and experience of struggle, and the vital position it occupies in the economy of the country, as also its steadily worsening condition under Imperialism, all combine to fit the Indian proletariat for this task.
But the leadership of the working class in the bourgeois-democratic revolution poses before the working class the prospect of seizing the power and, in addition to accomplishing the long overdue bourgeois-democratic tasks, proceeding with its own socialist tasks. And thus the bourgeois-democratic revolution develops uninterruptedly into the proletarian revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only state-form capable of supplanting the dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeoisie in India. The realization of the combined character of the Indian revolution is essential for the planning of the revolutionary strategy of the working class. Should the working class fail in its historic task of seizing the power and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolution will inevitably recede, the bourgeois tasks themselves remain unperformed, and the power swing back in the end to the imperialists without whom the Indian bourgeoisie cannot maintain itself against the hostile masses. A backward country like India can accomplish its bourgeois-democratic revolution only through the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The correctness of this axiom of the theory of permanent revolution is demonstrated by the victorious Russian revolution of October 1917, and it is confirmed on the negative side by the tragic fate of the Chinese revolution of 1925-27.
In India, moreover, where the Imperialists are the main owners of capital, the revolutionary assault of the workers against Imperialism will bring them into direct and open conflict with the property forms of the Imperialists from the moment the struggle enters the openly revolutionary stage. The exigencies of the struggle itself will in the course of the openly revolutionary assault against Imperialism demonstrate to the workers the necessity of destroying not only Imperialism but the foundations of capitalism itself. Thus, though the Indian revolution will be bourgeois in its immediate aims, the tasks of the proletarian revolution will be posed from the outset.
But the revolution cannot be stabilized even at this stage. The ultimate fate of the revolution in India, as in Russia, will be determined in the arena of the international revolution. Nor will India by its own forces be able to accomplish the task of making the transition to socialism. Not only the backwardness of the country, but also the international division of labor and the interdependence—produced by capitalism itself—of the different parts of world economy, demand that this task of the establishment of socialism can be accomplished only on a world scale. The victorious revolution in India, however, dealing a mortal blow to the oldest and most widespread Imperialism in the world will on the one hand produce the most profound crisis in the entire capitalist world and shake world capitalism to its foundations. On the other hand it will inspire and galvanize into action millions of proletarians and colonial slaves the world over and inaugurate a new era of world revolution.
and see also documents of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "To the Workers and Peasants of India: Manifesto of the Fourth International" (September 26, 1942):
National Liberation through the Agrarian Revolution!
National liberation can be won only through the agrarian revolution. The great driving force of the Indian revolution, as of the Russian revolution, is the agrarian crisis. The great mass of the peasantry is incessantly striving to throw off the three-fold oppression of government taxation, the landlord’s rent, and the usury of the moneylender. THE ABOLITION OF LANDLORDISM and THE LIQUIDATION OF AGRICULTURAL INDEBTNESS—these are the only slogans which can rally the peasantry to smash imperialism and its native agents. But the peasantry, although numerically so enormous, is dispersed over the countryside. History testifies to the fact that peasant rebellions cannot succeed, unless they are supported and led by a powerful class in the cities.
That class cannot be the bourgeoisie, with its close social and economic ties with the zamindars. And the Congress is the party of the bourgeoisie. The Congress leadership shows its bourgeois and zamindar character by the fact that it rebuked the peasants when they ceased to pay rent during the civil disobedience campaigns of 1920-22 and 1930-34. This time, too, the Congress Working Committee resolution of July 15 calls for a civil disobedience campaign without making a single proposal to lighten the rent and usury burden of the peasantry—not to speak of abolition of landlordism!
It is clear, then, that only the industrial proletariat can lead the peasantry in the revolution. As Trotsky wrote in 1939 to the workers of India: “The alliance of workers and poor peasants is the only honest, reliable alliance that can assure the final victory of the Indian revolution.”
The working class of India is fully capable of assuming the leadership of the Indian revolution. The specific weight of the Indian proletariat far exceeds that of the Indian bourgeoisie, and to its weight must be added its rich experience of political and trade union struggle since 1917. The Indian proletariat enters the revolution with the tremendous advantage of having before it the example of the Russian revolution, which was also led by a proletariat in a predominantly agricultural country.
What form will the alliance of the workers and the peasants take? The most democratic form possible—a vast network of committees elected directly by the toilers, with new elections whenever the masses desire it.
and see also the Fourth International on India
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "The Revolution in India: Its Tasks and Dangers," Leon Trotsky (1930):
If today the Indian proletariat is numerically weaker than the Russian [in 1917] this in itself does not at all predetermine the smaller swing of its revolutionary possibilities, just as the numerical weakness of the Russian proletariat compared to the American or British was no hindrance to the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. On the contrary all those social peculiarities which made possible and unavoidable the October revolution are present in India in a still sharper form. In this country of poor peasants, the hegemony of the city has no less clear a character than in tsarist Russia. The concentration of industrial, commercial and banking power in the hands of the big bourgeoisie, primarily the foreign bourgeoisie, on the one hand; a swift growth of a sharply-defined proletariat, on the other, excludes the possibility of an independent role of the petty bourgeoisie of the city and to an extent the intellectuals and transforms by this the political mechanics of the revolution into a struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie for the leadership of the peasant masses. So far there is 'only' one condition missing: a Bolshevik party. And that is where the problem lies now.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from The Third International After Lenin, Leon Trotsky (1928):
The imperialist yoke assumes in India, the classic colony, infinitely more direct and palpable forms than in China. The survivals of feudal and serf relations in India are immeasurably deeper and greater. Nevertheless, or rather precisely for this reason, the methods which, applied in China, undermined the revolution, must result in India in even more fatal consequences. The overthrow of Hindu feudalism and of Anglo-Hindu bureaucracy and British militarism can be accomplished only by a gigantic and an indomitable movement of the popular masses which precisely because of its powerful sweep and irresistability, its international aims and ties, cannot tolerate any halfway and compromising opportunist measures on the part of the leadership.
READ THE FULL CHAPTER
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Communism and Women of the East," speech at third anniversary of the founding of the Communist University for Toilers of the East in Moscow by Leon Trotsky (1924):
That is why it is not through its theoretical content, which is still far from assimilated, or fully thought out, but through its liberating breath of life that it has become the favourite teaching for the countries of the East. It is in your paper that we read ever fresh confirmations of the fact that Lenin is well known not only in the saklias of the Caucasus but in the depths of India too. We know that in China, toiling people, who have probably never in their life read a single one of Lenin’s articles, ardently gravitate towards Bolshevism for such is the might of history’s breath! They have sensed that here is a teaching which is addressed to the pariahs, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the millions and to the tens and hundreds of millions for whom there lies otherwise no historical solution for whom there is otherwise no salvation. And there is the reason why Leninism encounters such a fervent response in the hearts of toiling women—because there is no more oppressed layer on earth than the toiling woman! When I read how the student from your university spoke in Kazan and how the illiterate Tartar women gathered around her, I recalled my recent brief stay in Baku where for the first time I saw and heard a Turkic girl communist and where I could observe in the hall several tens and possibly hundreds of Turkic girl communists and saw and heard their enthusiasm, this passion of yesterday’s slave of slaves who has heard the new words of liberation and has awoken to a new life, and where for the first time I came to a quite clear conclusion and told myself that in the movement of the peoples of the East woman will play a greater role than in Europe and here (applause). Why? Just precisely because Eastern woman is incomparably more fettered, crushed and befuddled by prejudices than is the Eastern man and because new economic relations and new historical currents will tear her out of the old motionless relations with even greater force and abruptness than they will man. Even today we can still observe in the East the rule of Islam, of the old prejudices, beliefs and customs but these will more and more turn to dust and ashes. Just as a rotting piece of cloth, when you look at it from a distance, it seems to be all of a piece, all the pattern is there and all the folds remain but a movement of the hand or a puff of wind is enough for the whole cloth to turn to dust. And so in the East the old beliefs which appear to be so deep are actually but a shadow of the past: in Turkey they abolished the Caliphate and not a single hair fell out of the heads of those who violated the Caliphate; this means that the old beliefs have rotted and that with the coming historical movement of the toiling masses the old beliefs will not present a serious obstacle. And this, moreover, means that the Eastern woman who is the most paralysed in life, in her habits and in creativity, the slave of slaves, that she, having at the demand of the new economic relations taken off her cloak will at once feel herself lacking any sort of religious buttress; she will have a passionate thirst to gain new ideas, a new consciousness which will permit her to appreciate her new position in society. And there will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker (applause).
and see also Leon Trotsky on India and permanent revolution
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
from "Socialism and War," V.I. Lenin (1915):
For example, if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be "just," "defensive" wars, irrespective of who attacked first, and every socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory "great" powers.
But picture to yourselves a slave-owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave-owner who owned 200 slaves for a more “just” distribution of slaves. Clearly, the application of the term “defensive” war, or war “for the defence of the fatherland” in such a case would be historically false, and in practice would be sheer deception of the common people, of philistines, of ignorant people, by the astute slaveowners. Precisely in this way are the present-day imperialist bourgeoisie deceiving the peoples by means of “national ideology and the term “defence of the fatherland" in the present war [i.e., World War I] between slave-owners for fortifying and strengthening slavery.
and see also Lenin and the early Communist International on colonialism
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Marx and Engels on India and colonialism
Comments