CPI-ML on the way forward for the Indian left
BALASUBRAMANIAN SIVARAMAN, politburo member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (Liberation) (CPI-ML) and editor of the party's monthly journal, Liberation, attended the Marxism 2000 Asia-Pacific Solidarity and Education Conference in Sydney in January. He spoke to Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly's EVA CHENG about the tasks and challenges ahead for the Indian left.
The CPI-ML evolved from a split within the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) in the late 1960s, after the CPI-M West Bengal state government's brutal suppression of land struggles. At first, the CPI-ML pursued an armed struggle. A late-1980s' review of this strategy resulted in the party abandoning its largely underground existence.
Since that time, the CPI-ML has developed into India's third largest left formation with an active mass base in both urban and rural struggles. Despite having 90,000 members, Sivaraman calls the CPI-ML "a very small left party".
India's current political landscape is shaped by the 1998 rise to central power of the Hindu-fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its re-election late last year. The BJP rose to power, according to Sivaraman, because it successfully undermined the base of the main bourgeois party, Congress, and the non-Congress bourgeois parties.
These other parties — a mixed bag of liberal bourgeoisie, Congress split-offs, representatives of intermediate castes hostile to both Congress and the BJP's upper-caste hegemony, and forces representing regional interests — gained significantly from Congress's defeats in 1977, 1989 and 1996. In 1996, they combined to form the United Front coalition government.
But when the UF government fell in 1998, the right-wing BJP benefited enormously, while the "mainstream left" — the CPI, formed in 1925, and the CPI-M, which the split from the CPI in 1964 in opposition to its pro-Soviet policies — failed to register gains. Sivaraman attributed this to the mainstream left's "organic dependence" on Congress, especially since 1998. Worse still, he said, many of the moderate capitalist parties went over to the BJP, helping it to gain office.
Because of the left's dependence on Congress, Sivaraman pointed out, it has failed to transform the repeated mass upsurges and mobilisations against the neo-liberal policies of successive governments into a force that can challenge capitalist governments.
Opportunism
So what does this failing tell about the politics of the CPI and CPI-M? Opportunism, said Sivaraman, is their central flaw. It is expressed in wide-ranging areas, such as their policies towards parliament, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, as well as their style of functioning.
Sivaraman stressed that it was not enough to write off the CPI-M and CPI as potential collaborators of the revolutionary left. They remain significant left forces with strong followings in strategic Â鶹´«Ã½ of the working class. The CPI-M has a membership of about 1.7 million and the CPI 850,000.
The CPI-M, through the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, and the CPI's All India Trade Union Congress have a major presence in the public sector, the banks, telecommunications, on the docks and increasingly in the railways. These parties' political impact, Sivaraman told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, is far greater than their size, which is a minority of the 2% or so of the unionised work force (controlled mainly by the BJP and Congress).
"In terms of political culture, tradition, public perception and self-perception of the ranks, these are communist parties, part of the international communist movement", said Sivaraman. "Even their leaders have to give their opportunist and class collaborationist line Marxist-sounding explanations and have to talk in Marxist terms."
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, the CPI leaders openly advocated changing the party's name to reflect their declining interest in Marxism, according to Sivaraman, but the move failed because of pressure from the ranks.
This co-existence of an opportunist leadership and a militant working class base has meant that the CPI-ML must deal with them with tactical flexibility. The CPI-ML collaborates on specific issues and projects while continuing to struggle politically against them.
In Sivaraman's opinion, the CPI and CPI-M have done little to ideologically arm the workers against the neo-liberal government attacks of recent years. The parties lack a coherent agenda for social and democratic struggles.
"They didn't block those policies in parliament", despite holding seats for decades, securing 35 seats between them, last October. "In fact, they were part of the government in some cases, and didn't try to influence the policies at all except on one or two minor issues of a populist nature ... But even this minimum opposition has encouraged working-class resistance."
Sivaraman has little doubt that if the left went on an offensive, "it can make its impact and give a different dimension to class struggle in India".
Trade unions
The CPI-ML began activity trade union late because of its previous dismissal of workers' bread and butter struggles as "day-to-day economism", Sivaraman said. That changed after an internal "rectification" process in 1978. Mindful not to "divide the working class", he said, the party confined its intervention to organising open "political forums" to group the "thinking Â鶹´«Ã½ of the workers".
That apprehension was removed following a subsequent debate, prompting the CPI-ML to organise its own unions in 1985, at first avoiding the CPI's and CPI-M's turf. But by 1987, that concern was gone and two years later, the CPI-ML founded its own trade union arm, the All India Central Council of Trade Unions. Today, the CPI-ML's strongest working-class base is in Tamil Nadu, Assam and Bihar.
Peasants
Sivaraman also explained the importance his party has given to organising and mobilising petty commodity producers and propertyless labourers in the countryside. The first layer, he stressed, is vast, producing the bulk of agricultural produce. For example, grain producers who own less than 10 acres of land, even after discounting what they consume, account for 70-80% of all grain produced in India.
Sivaraman noted that "this huge petty-bourgeois middle layer" is difficult to politicise. "There's differentiation, pauperisation, but not proletarianisation, politicisation or political organisation."
Moreover, widespread small-scale landlordism (boosted by rich peasants renting land from poor peasants) and semi-feudal practices by this layer has an impact its existence and class consciousness, he said. "The peasants, therefore, have to fight the landlords and rich peasants on the one hand and the state on the other, facing the double yoke of capitalism as well as feudal remnants.
"These peasants always exhibit dual tendencies, having aspirations to become bourgeois but constantly being frustrated by their objective class conditions. Many of them have radical ideas as well as feudal prejudices ... Some of them went along with the kulak [rich peasant] parties, despite the contradictions. However, where our party is strong, we have been able to win these peasants over."
The CPI-ML mobilises the peasants primarily on the question of land reform and political power, "not necessarily directly for socialism in a concrete sense, but on the basis of a kind of socialism, called 'new democracy'."
The aim, said Sivaraman, was to achieve a "democratic revolution" which, despite socialist aspects and a large role for the working class, would mean that post-revolution production continues to be dominated by capitalism for a period.
In terms of their revolutionary potential, Sivaraman stressed, the differences between the radical peasantry and liberal bourgeoisie must be drawn out. The latter will be an enemy and the coming revolution will be led by the workers, backed significantly by peasants. In addition, he said, the CPI-ML also recognised the need to mobilise a range of democratic forces and "new middle classes" around various democratic demands in the struggle for socialism in India.
Unity in struggle
To maximise the left's impact, the CPI-ML seeks, wherever possible, to build fronts with other progressive forces. Some recent examples were the joint initiatives of the CPI-ML with the CPI and CPI-M in November's national strikes against privatisation in the insurance industry and the BJP government's general neo-liberal offensive, and a huge rally in Bihar in December, initiated by the CPI-ML, in which the state secretaries of the three left parties shared a platform against the Hindu right and their "communal fascist" agenda.
Despite these positive collaborations, political collaboration among the central leaderships of these parties remained difficult, said Sivaraman. "Sometimes political collaboration becomes impossible, say when they are in alliance with ruling bourgeois parties or are in government", he said.
Sivaraman added that the central leaderships of the CPI-M and CPI don't seem to be keen to take these collaborations beyond collaboration at the level of the mass organisations. "They want to isolate the CPI-ML in this way."