- Rajesh
Tyagi/ 19.4.2015
The 21st
Congress of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), closes to its end with little
fervor and apparent failure to implore any enthusiasm among its cadres. The 5
day Congress of the largest Stalinist left party in India, convened in coastal City of Vishakhapatnam, in South-East India, was a fiasco in terms of political manifestation.
The
Congress, was marred with factional strife inside the CPI (M) for the run up to
the top post of General Secretary and for entry and exit to the Central
Committee of the Party. Factions led by Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury were
at loggerheads for control over the central organs and committees of the Party.
Far from
dwelling into or debating the issues facing the working class and the socialist movement
in India and over the globe, the two groups pondered over the common concern
how to embrace the bourgeois left more closely.
The Congress
took place amidst acute crisis of the Stalinist left in India. Stalinists, the
longtime allies of bourgeois political establishment, were wiped out not only
at national level in Parliamentary elections of 2014, but also from their long
held citadels in West Bengal and Kerala in 2011.
Unprecedented
electoral defeats were suffered by the Stalinist left parties as a backlash to
their political crimes, they had continued to commit for long, in a whole series
of betrayals to the workers and toilers. The Stalinist left front, led by the
CPM, not only helped the minority right wing governments led by Congress, the
largest bourgeois party in India, and other casteist and regional parties, to
keep in power, ever since 1989, but also adopted and implemented the very same
neo-liberal and pro-investor economic policies, , that it itself criticizes, in the states where it had come
to power. The pinnacle of its reactionary policy were
the repressions of Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal under its rule, where it
employed savage force to seize upon the peasant lands in favour of big
business.
The left front
of four parties- CPI, CPM, RSP and Forward Bloc, had also taken CPI ML
(Liberation) and the SUCI (C) under its wings, since last year. The SUCI (C),
alongside the CPI (Maoist) had openly supported the rabid right-wing TMC under Mamata
Banerjee to capture power in West Bengal, while RSP is still a partner in
Congress led United Democratic Front in
Kerala. The six of them had recently supported the reformist Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)
in run up to Delhi Legislative Assembly.
All
Stalinist parties have a checkered history of shameful alliances with bourgeois
parties of all hues, through whom they keep the workers, toilers and the youth
that follow them, shackled to the bourgeois political establishment.
However,
despite their repeated all-out endeavour to rejoin forces with Congress and
other regional bourgeois parties, in the recent past, their receded vote share
has prevented such new alliances. Dangling on a limited, reformist program, the
Stalinists had suffered a huge setback as the bourgeois reformist AAP succeeded
to takeover this agenda from Stalinists.
Discarded
and isolated, the Stalinist parties have started rubbing shoulders among themselves
to forge a left-platform enabling themselves to go for collective bargain with prospective
bourgeois opposition alliances.
The 21st Congress
of CPM has debated the political strategy it has implemented for the last
quarter century since dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. The Congress
has ratified and approved the most shameful past of the Stalinist Party in last
25 years, where not only it had remained adhered to one or the other bourgeois camp,
under the garb of promoting ‘left and democratic unity’ purportedly to counter communal
forces, but has directly collaborated with bourgeois establishment to suppress
the working class and toilers to facilitate its drive to make India a platform providing
cheap labour and natural resources, to world capitalism. This pernicious adherence
and collaboration has proved to be the chief source of political debacle that has
isolated the left under Stalinists and brought extreme rightwing BJP to power.
Stalinist left front has shrunk to one of the smallest state of Tripura in far
flung north-eastern region in the country.
The ‘Draft Review
Report on the Political and Tactical Line’, the document presented by the
outgoing Polit Bureau under Prakash Karat, comprises the basis of strategic orientation
that CPM has followed since 1990. Agreeing broadly with the same, the rival
faction of Sitaram Yechury, however, disputes the stance of CPM in breaking away
from the United Progressive Alliance in 2008, on the issue of ‘Indo-US Civil Nuclear
Treaty’, as a ‘political blunder’. Arguing for restoring the proximity with
Congress, the Sitaram faction has succeeded to garner some support from Kerala
Committee also, alongside the West Bengal Committee where it already holds
majority support.
The gist of
deliberations and disputes inside the CPM, as they surfaced in the 21st
Congress, is thus centered around the limited point as to whether the present
policy of alliances with right-wing bourgeois parties, pursued for the last
more than 25 years be continued or be substituted by even closer alliances with
Congress and other bourgeois parties. While Karat faction favours the present
policy, the faction under Yechury proposes a more right shift.
Reeling
under a spiralling political-organisational crisis, especially since the fall of
left front in West Bengal and Kerala in 2011, followed by total marginalization
in Parliamentary elections of 2014, dissipating support among the working class
and evaporating voter base, the perplexed Stalinist leaders seek a beating of retreat,
back under the wings of broader alliances led by bourgeois parties.
The report
by Prakash Karat has been accepted and adopted by the 21st Congress, with forty
amendments to the same, that are of no real significance.
The draft
report has ratified the policies of Stalinist Party, where it had continued to support
the Congress led minority UPA government that had integrated itself into strategic
political-military establishment under US imperialism and has faithfully carried
out and implemented the economic policies promoted by the IMF and World Bank.
Stalinists had continued this support when the neo-liberal economic regime was
creating suffocating living conditions for the workers and poors in the cities
and a whole agrarian crisis in the countryside resulting in rampant suicides by
farmers. Stalinists supported the bourgeois governments as they brutally suppressed
the opposition to these pro-rich policies.
The
reiterated call by the Stalinist leaders for “left and Democratic Alternative” must
be seen and understood in context of their past track-record. The Stalinist
leaders have repeatedly used this slogan, never to mount a combined offensive of
working class against the political regime of capitalists and landlords, but to
forge electoral alliances with sections of bourgeois establishment, embracing
therein the right-wing capitalist parties like Congress, SP, BSP, JD (U), JD
(S), INLD, RJD, TDP, AIADMK, DMK, and so on.
Through this
alliance in the name of 'left democracy', the Stalinist leaders, in fact, offer
to close ranks with sections of bourgeois and constitute a left-wing of
bourgeois democracy in association with them.
Failing to
draw any lesson from their crushing defeats and their shameful past, the
Stalinists have simply reiterated the strategic line adopted at 20th Congress.
The proclamation taking an apparent turn away from the project of forging a ‘Third
Front’ with bourgeois parties, is nothing but the desperate musing of these
leaders as for the time being they stand completely isolated.
As their consistent and desperate efforts to forge a third front with regional bourgeois parties are rebuffed by these parties, the Stalinists take to volte-face in miserable claims like ‘present situation
does not permit such fronts’. Instead, the Stalinist leaders are seeking a
front among themselves, to enable them to pressurize the bourgeois parties to
enter into collaboration with them.
Indicating that
despite all demagogy, the doors would still remain open for alliances with
bourgeois parties, the Congress resolution declares in no unclear terms, “Given
the danger posed by the communal forces, we should strive for the broadest
mobilization of secular and democratic forces. Joint platforms are necessary
for a wider united movement against communalism.”
In face of crushing
electoral defeats, the Stalinist leaders have started to fall back upon the old
rhetoric of ‘mobilisation of masses’ to divert attention of their own cadres
from these defeats. Through this ‘mobilisation’, the Stalinist leaders, however
want to regain and reclaim their lost glory, their seat share in Parliament and
assemblies, that puts the requisite political
legitimacy and power at their disposal, to chain and hold back the workers and
toilers, and to raise the bills to the ruling bourgeoisie for this ‘great service’.
Stalinists
have played crucial role to keep the bourgeois regime intact in power.
Deceiving the workers and toilers with the red flag and false rhetoric of
revolution and socialism, these leaders are chiefly responsible for the whole
chain of defeats after defeats of the working class in the last century.
As these
leaders get exposed, they are marginalized and isolated, amidst the defeats of the
working class, they had sown and nurtured. These leaders incapable to launch
any offensive against the successive capitalist governments, against their pro-rich
policies, price hike, food crisis, farmer suicides, rising unemployment and spiralling
income gaps etc. had integrated themselves firmly into the regime under
capitalists, as its left wing.
As the
bureaucratic apparatus, under these Stalinist leaders, that rested upon the
support of governments under them, gets shattered, their forces start to
fritter away. While the honest cadres seize upon the opportunity to undertake a
serious review of the politics of Stalinists and derive strategic conclusions
from it, the opportunist rubble drifts to bourgeois parties like TMC or even
BJP.
The program
of Stalinists, based upon ‘bloc of four classes’ proposed by Stalin, falsely imparts
a progressive and radical character to the capitalist class in backward countries
like India and advocates for unity between workers and capitalists. This
program is chiefly responsible for the defeats and debacles suffered by the
working class in the last century. It is the collaboration with capitalist
parties and leaders, into which Stalinists have forced the youth and workers, instead
of fighting against them, that has harnessed the conditions in which the
extreme right-wing BJP could ride to power.
While the
Congress and other regional bourgeois parties themselves have closely collaborated
with extreme right-wing BJP, with many of them being partners in the political alliance
of NDA under BJP, the Stalinists subordinated the workers and youth to these
parties and forged alliances with them, paving way for the rise of BJP to
power.
Also see: http://workersocialist.blogspot.in/2012/04/20th-party-congress-of-stalinist-cpm.html
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