Political India had been in a ferment for some time before Naxalbari acted as a catalyst twenty-five years ago.
The rule of imperialism's front men, Indians whom it had groomed and to whose 'friendly and reliable hands' it transferred power in 1947, has been a long agony for the basic masses. No social revolution preceded or followed the transfer of power. The classes-the big comprador bourgeoisie and the feudal class which had been the props of colonial rule-became the ruling classes of India. The rule of imperialism, the essence of which lies in the subordination of a country's economy to its interests and in the exploitation of that country's resources, has continued under the new signboard of freedom and independence. In the name of building an independent, self-reliant and advanced economy, they have made it more dependent on the capital (direct investment as well as loan capital) and technology of imperialist countries. In the name of development and industrialization, they have helped the comprador big bourgeoisie to develop rapidly, strengthened the stranglehold of imperialist capital on all spheres of Indian economy, and have not made any essential change in feudal relations in the countryside, which are a festering sore. In the name of non-alignment in foreign policy they pursued a policy of bi-alignment with Anglo-American and Soviet social-imperialist powers. In the name of democracy and equal opportunities for all, they have trampled upon the democratic rights of the people and tried to stifle the struggles of the various nationalities of India for autonomy and freedom. By 1966 these policies of the ruling classes matured into a political and economic crisis.
During these years, particularly since 1951, those who strutted about as leaders of India's Communist movement made it their task to prettify the ruling class policies and keep the people under subjection by means of all kinds of ideological deception. Their deep-seated opportunism, their long history of tailism behind the Congress leaders, their loyalty to Nehru and his kin instead of to Marxism-Leninism and the people, their never-failing hostility to Mao Tsetung Thought, their addiction to the peaceful path, the ideological-political position they took during and after India's China War, the formation of the CPI(M) and its ideology and politics, their betrayal of people's struggles, the ganging-up of both factions of the so-called communists with all other non-Congress opportunist elements to save the anti-people regime when the influence of the Congress was declining, the ministry-making in West Bengal with the CPI(M)) as a major partner-all these and more had disenchanted the Communist ranks about these agents of the alien classes within the Communist movement.
The momentous events that were taking place on the international front-the historic struggle of the Marxist-Leninists led by Mao Tsetung against modern revisionists headed by the Soviet leaders, the victorious march of national liberation struggles in Vietnam and elsewhere, the beginnings of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and so on - richly contributed to the ideological-political ferment that was going on in India. Mao Tsetung's clarion call "It is right to rebel against reaction" was rousing the Communist ranks in India as elsewhere. In such a situation the spring thunder of Naxalbari burst over India. Naxalbari helped the Communist ranks to draw a sharp line of difference between revolutionary Communism and opportunism that had so long masqueraded as Communism. A turning-point in history was reached.
Naxalbari itself was the application, however imperfect, however modest, of Mao Tsetung Thought to the conditions in India. The first attempt to implement Mao's strategy of revolution in colonies and semi-colonies was made on Indian soil by the revolutionaries of Telengana and great success followed. But the revisionist leadership of the CPI betrayed the revolutionary cadres and peasants of Telengana and forced them to surrender arms to Nehru's armed mercenaries. And they tried to smother the politics of Telengana with their endless revisionist verbiage.
In Naxalbari in 1967, the revisionists of both the factions, the CPI and the CPI(M), who had knocked together a 'United Front' with other reactionary elements and formed a ministry in West Bengal, sent armed hordes to suppress the peasant uprising. They were able for the time being to put it down but they could not suppress the politics of Naxalbari-the politics of armed agrarian revolution. It spread and those who believed in revolutionary Communism rallied from different parts of India behind the revolutionaries of Naxalbari. They joined hands, organized themselves, and broke with the opportunist tradition of the revisionist agents of reaction.
Guided by Mao Tsetung Thought, Charu Majumdar had provided leadership to the cadres and peasants of Naxalbari. It was Charu Majumdar who had given the call for revolt against reaction and revisionism and most of the cadres of the Siliguri subdivision of the Darjeeling district responded to his call and tried to implement the teachings of Mao Tsetung. Naxalbari was the result.
After Naxalbari, the Indian communist movement has not remained the same as before. The teachings of Mao Tsetung about the revolution in colonies and semi-colonies sank into the consciousness of the revolutionary comrades. Since India's China War in 1962, especially since 1964 when the CPI (M) was formed, intense debates and discussions had been going on on ideological issues and on the questions of the strategy of the Indian revolution. But these discussions were confined within groups of political workers. It was Charu Majumdar who not only upheld the Maoist strategy but tried to put it in practice. It was he who for the first time in India stressed the importance of wide dissemination of Mao Tsetung Thought among the people and made revolutionary communists conscious that without following Mao's teachings there can be no Indian revolution.
Naxalbari solved certain crucial questions of the strategy of the Indian revolution. Among other things, it upheld the Marxist theory that 'force is the midwife of the old society pregnant with a new one'. It rejected the peaceful, parliamentary path or parliamentarism supplemented by extra-parliamentary economic struggles. This broke the long spell when the revisionist theory of 'peaceful transition' had dominated and emasculated the communist movement. Second, its leader, guided by Mao Tsetung Thought, emphasized that the Indian revolution would be a protracted one. Because of uneven development-economic, social and political-power could not be seized through urban insurrection nor could there be a countrywide insurrection-simultaneous uprising of workers and peasants all over the country. Power could be seized only through protracted people's war-creation of liberated bases in the rural areas where objective and subjective conditions were more favourable than elsewhere, and gradual expansion of them culminating in the conquest of power throughout the country. Third, he also emphasized the importance of the role of the peasant in the Indian revolution, the main content of which would be agrarian revolution, and pointed out that under the leadership of the working class the peasantry would be the main force of the revolution. He stressed that the petty bourgeois intelligentsia could play a revolutionary role by integrating themselves with the toiling people.
All these have today become a part of revolutionary communism in India. And there is no going back though there appear and will appear from time to time within the revolutionary communist camp new breeds of revisionists, and revolutionary communism will have to advance through struggle against them at every stage. After Telengana, there was a break in the continuity of revolutionary struggle: after Naxalbari there have been setbacks but no break, no lowering of the flag. If there has been a setback in one area, the struggle has flared up elsewhere.
The fighters of Naxalbari, Srikakulam, Birbhurn and other areas of struggle did not have the benefit of the lessons that Telengana could teach The revisionist leadership of the communist movement in India not only betrayed the heroic fighters of Telengana but saw to it that Telengana became only a fading memory. Only in the seventies, after the torch of Telengana was rekindled in Naxalbari, Srikakulam and many other places that the revisionist chieftains like Rajeswar Rao and Sundarayya hastened to write on Telengana only to distort the story of that great struggle. They preached that it had been wrong for the peasants of Telengana to carry on armed resistance against Nehru's uniformed marauders who entered Telengana in 1948. Significantly, Nehru's friend and U.S. ambassador Chester Bowles, wiser after the U.S. defeat in China, wrote in his Ambassador's Report that despite " rapid patrolling by armoured cars" and concentration camps and "police outposts every few miles," the guerrilla struggle of the Telengana peasantry could not be suppressed [1]. It ended only when rank opportunists posing as communists withdrew it unconditionally in October 1951 in order to enter the pigsty of parliament in a semi-colony, saw that arms were surrendered and revolutionary cadres and people were left to the tender mercies of the enemy. The path of Telengana, the path illumined by Mao Tsetung Thought, the path that a revolution in a colony or semi-colony must follow in order to achieve victory, was abandoned.
During the last twenty-five years since Naxalbari, a new generation of comrades-leaders and cadres-has arisen and is carrying forward the struggle. Their battles today are much intenser, their areas of struggle much wider. But the documents and other writings which clarify the line and policies and practices of the previous generation of comrades are hardly available to them. Not many copies of Liberation have survived the joint raids and mopping-up operations by the police and paramilitary forces. We are publishing this Anthology so that the documents and other important writings of a significant period of our history are not lost.
Why do we resurrect the past? In preparing this Anthology we are not interested in the past for its own sake. We are interested in it as we want it to serve the present and the future. As the French historian Jean Chesneaux said, "our knowledge of the past is a dynamic factor in the development of society, a significant stake in the political and ideological struggles of today, a sharply contested area. What we know of the past can be of service either to the Establishment or to the people's movement. History is linked to the class struggle. It is never neutral never above the battle." [2] We believe that the Anthology will help comrades in their ideological and political struggles against reaction and revisionism.
The articles in this Anthology have been selected for their representative character. It is our aim that, besides presenting the line and policies, this Anthology should recapture as faithfully as possible the spirit, the mood, of the revolutionary comrades in those days- 1967 to early 1972-the hope and daring and defiance, the revolutionary zeal and self-sacrifice of the comrades as well as their romantic optimism and refusal to treat the enemy from the tactical point of view as a real tiger. The documents and other writings are not intended to conceal either the positive or the negative aspects of the line and policies followed during those days. When something new emerges out of struggle against the old, it is not wholly new. Some remnants of the old cling to it and can be overcome or eradicated through conscious ideological struggle. It would be utopian to expect that the policies and practices of those tumultuous days were completely free from negative aspects, however correct were the ideology and the broad strategy. It is for the revolutionary comrades of today to examine these documents and other writings critically, uphold, cherish and improve upon what was positive and reject all that was negative.
Immediately after the Naxalbari uprising had taken place, comrades from different parts of India, from neighbouring Bihar and Orissa to Tamil Nadu and Kerala, began to contact Charu Majumdar at Siliguri and Sushital Roy Choudhuri and other comrades in Calcutta. The need was felt for an all-India organ, an organ which would convey the ideology and politics of Naxalbari to revolutionary comrades outside West Bengal and prepare the groundwork for their unity. Deshabrati, our Bengali weekly, had started appearing from early July 1967 and received an enthusiastic welcome from revolutionary comrades and sympathizers.
At a meeting in September 1967 of either the editorial board of Deshabrati or the West Bengal State Coordination Committee (most probably the formed), it was decided to bring out an organ in English-Liberation. The name was suggested by Saroj Datta and I was entrusted with the task of editing it.
The first issue of Liberation came out on 11 November 1967 with "the pledge to wage an uncompromising fight against the imperialists and native reactionaries including the revisionists and neo-revisionists." [3]
On the same day a mass rally was held on the Shahid Minar maidan in Calcutta under the auspices of the Naxalbari and Krishak Sangram Sahayak Committee. The last of the speakers was Charu Majumdar who spoke only a few words. On the next two days, 12 and 13 November, comrades from seven states Tamilnadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Orissa and West Bengal met and set up the All India Coordination Committee of Revolutionaries in the CPI(M), which was renamed All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) at the next meeting of the Committee in May 1968.
Sushital Roy Choudhuri, who was Convener of the West Bengal Committee, became also the Convener of the All India Committee. Liberation became the central organ of the AICCCR and, afterwards, of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Messages greeting Liberation came from Marxist-Leninist Parties in countries like Sri Lanka, Britain and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Articles, reports on struggles or extracts from them and from editorials were frequently broadcast by the Peking Radio and reproduced by the Hsinhua News Agency in its bulletins.
Deshabrati and Liberation were followed by Deshabrati Hindi and then by Lok Yuddh, our Hindi weekly published from Calcutta, and several other journals in different Indian languages like Puratchikanal in Tamil.
The formation of the AICCCR was a historic step, a necessary step, towards building a genuine Communist Party. As its first Declaration said, its purpose was to lay the foundations of such a party. It undertook as its main tasks to propagate Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, unite all communist revolutionaries on this basis, wage an uncompromising struggle against revisionism, develop and coordinate the revolutionary struggles of the peasants, workers and other toiling people and prepare a revolutionary programme and tactical line.
The AICCCR made certain formulations which are of historic significance. It described the Soviet Union under the modern revisionists as a neocolonial power in its May 1968 Declaration, perhaps before other fraternal Marxist-Leninist Parties had so characterized it. And it stated that "US imperialism, Soviet revisionism, the big Indian landlords and the comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie are the main enemies of the Indian people." At the same May 1968 meeting the AICCCR declared that in the present era bourgeois parliamentary institutions "have become a positive impediment to revolutions in semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries like India," pointed out that the parliamentary path is counterposed against the revolutionary path by reactionaries and revisionists and gave a call for 'boycott of elections.'
The AICCCR tried and succeeded to a great extent in uniting communist revolutionaries in different parts of India. State Coordination Committees were formed in Bihar, Tamilnad, Kerala, U.P., Orissa, Karnataka, Punjab, Assam, Delhi, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tripura, etc. The district and lower units of the West Bengal State Coordination Committee, which had been set up earlier, were formed. It is true that some groups of communist revolutionaries stayed outside the AICCCR and functioned separately. In West Bengal one important group of communist revolutionaries did not join the AICCCR or the CPI(ML) after its formation.
The politics of which Naxalbari was the symbol spread to many parts of India and peasant struggles were organized under the banner of the AICCCR in many states-Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Tamilnad, Kerala, Assam, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Tripura and other states. Some peasant struggles were led by other groups and some broke out spontaneously, as in Chota Nagpur, under the impact of Naxalbari. Naxalbari also enthused workers in many industrial centres, and workers rallied under the banner of the AICCCR in many places like Calcutta and other towns of West Bengal. So did tens of thousands of students and youths, many of them eager to integrate themselves with the peasants and workers.
Revolts were brewing within the CPI(M). A large majority of the members of the CPI(M) State Committee in U.P. had severed their links with the CPI(M). So did an overwhelming number of members of the State Committee and other units of the CPI(M) in Andhra Pradesh. The entire Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Conference, which had been functioning as a State unit of the CPI(M), broke with it as Naxalbari tore the mask off the face of its revisionist leadership. Large numbers of comrades in Kerala and other states repudiated the CPI(M) leadership. Many such comrades formed or joined AICCCR units.
The armed peasant struggle that had developed in Srikakulam reached a higher stage-the stage of guerrilla struggle in the early months of 1969. The time seemed ripe for the formation of the long-awaited Party which would organize and lead numerous struggles of the peasants, workers and other toiling people and students and youth, many of which had already broken out. A decision was taken unanimously by the AICCCR at its meeting held early in February 1969 to form the Party.
The AICCCR again met for a few days in April 1969, and on 22 April, Lenin's hundredth birthday, the CPI(ML) was founded on the basis of a Political and an Organizational Resolution and a Central Organizing Committee formed with Charu Majumdar as Secretary. After these decisions were taken unanimously, the AICCCR dissolved itself.
With the formation of the CPI(ML), a new wave of hope and enthusiasm spread and there was fresh upsurge of struggles, especially armed peasant struggles.
Liberation tried to remain true to its pledge. It carried on the ideological-political struggle as best as it could. Original writings as well as reprints from the journals of fraternal parties sought to cover all relevant subjects-ideological issues, national and international politics, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao Tsetung's philosophical contributions, national liberation and other struggles of the people in India and other countries, US and Soviet exploitation of and aggression against different nations, the bargain of 1947 called India's attainment of freedom, the nature of parliamentary democracy in India, the character of the Indian big bourgeoisie, the nature of Soviet 'aid' to India, the language question in India, the class analysis of villages and so on. It tried to unmask in various writings the revisionist face of the so-called communist parties of India, especially the CPI(M), whose object was (and is) to cooperate with the ruling classes in the suppression and exploitation of the people and to try to stabilize the present regime while mouthing opposition to ruling-class policies and loyalty to Marxism-Leninism in order to deceive the masses. Liberation carried reports on the struggles of the national minorities like the Nagas, Mizos and Kashmiris and championed their right to self-determination. Some chapters of the history of the Congress and of the history of the CPI formed subjects of several articles.
Liberation started publishing "A New Assessment of the History of the CPI" by Promode Sen Gupta (who wrote under the pseudonym of Bande Ail Khan ) serially from February 1968. Sen Gupta came to have differences with most other members of the West Bengal State Coordination Committee on the question of boycott of elections. The Committee, of which he was a member, had prolonged discussions and an overwhelming majority of members were in favour of boycott. Then, at its May 196& meeting, the AICCCR unanimously adopted a resolution boycotting elections. Soon after, Sen Gupta dropped out of the organization. He continued to contribute instalments of "A New Assessment " until July 1968 and then stopped writing for Liberation.
The 'Deshabrati Prakashani' office and press, which printed and published Liberation and its sister-journals as well as a large number of books and pamphlets, were raided and ransacked by the police on 27 April 1970. Like Deshabrati, Liberation was forced to go underground. Between November 1967 and April 1970 Liberation appeared regularly every month but, after April 1970, its publication became irregular owing to difficulties of its underground existence. The quality of its earlier issues could not also be maintained.
The last legal issue of Liberation had a circulation of 4000 copies while that of Deshabrati 40,000.(The figure about the circulation of Deshabrati that I gave in a writing of mine in 1974 is not correct). At one time several hundred copies of Liberation went to subscribers and sympathizer agents in other lands Hongkong, Britain, Ireland, Canada, the USA, etc.
This Anthology is mostly a selection of the writings that were published in Liberation from its inception to early 1972, when appeared the last issue before Charu Majumdar's incarceration and martyrdom. The Anthology has six sections: 1) AICCCR and CPI(ML) Documents, 2) Select Articles by Indian Comrades, 3) Some Writings of Comrades of other lands, 4) Select Editorials, 5) Reports and Reviews of Struggles and 6) Appendices.
The Anthology contains almost all AICCCR and CPI(ML) documents. An important document that does not appear here is a resolution adopted at the meeting of the AICCCR in May 1968 on trade union work. We have no copy of this resolution but there is a version of it in a book by Parimal Das Gupta. Sushital Roy Choudhuri Convener of the AICCCR, wrote that Parimal Das Gupta had been entrusted with the task of drafting a resolution on the basis of a long discussion on trade union work at a meeting of the AICCCR. But, according to him, after the draft was adopted, Das Gupta tampered with it without the knowledge of others, and this fact came out after the circulation of Das Gupta's 'resolution'.[4] We are not reproducing this version as we have grave doubts about its authenticity.
Another document which we have failed to trace is the Party Constitution adopted at the Congress of the CPI(ML) in 1970. Instead, we are publishing as an appendix the Draft Constitution which was circulated among Party units by the Central Organizing Committee of the Party before the Congress. This draft was adopted by the Congress with very minor amendments.
Besides the Political Resolution, the AICCCR adopted an Organizational Resolution before it dissolved itself in April 1969. There is no extant copy with us but a version of it is printed in Naxalbari and After: A Frontier Anthology, edited by Samar Sen et al, Vol. II (Calcutta, 1978). No source has been mentioned but we think that it is authentic and we are reproducing it as an Appendix.
We have included among the documents a resolution adopted at a convention of revolutionary peasants of the Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phansidewa areas, for it reflects the growth of an important political trend.
Besides the Draft Constitution of the Party and the Resolution on Organization, the Appendices include some other important writings and notes not published in Liberation: articles by Charu Majumdar and Saroj Dutt, a Note purporting to be Comments on the Party Line by Chou En-Lai and Kang Sheng, the second Birbhum Report, a comprehensive but concise Report on Struggles led by the AICCCR and CPI(ML), etc.
Each of the two volumes of the Anthology is divided into these six sections. Writings in each section have been arranged chronologically.
Most of the articles by Charu Majumdar and a few other writings like those of Sushital Roy Choudhuri and Saroj Dutt appeared first in our Bengali journal Deshabrati and then translated into English. In case of doubt we have verified the translations with the Bengali reprints as they appeared later.
Where found necessary, some verbal changes have been made in an article but utmost care has been taken to see that the meaning is not affected.
The footnotes which have been added are printed in italics while those originally in Liberation are in Roman type. Unfortunately, for lack of space we have been unable to include in this Anthology a number of writings which would otherwise find a place in it. Space has been an important consideration that has guided our selection.
An Index for both the volumes will appear in Vol. II.
The Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, founded after the great October Revolution led by Lenin, has recently disintegrated. The reactionary classes and their hired scribes all over the world are jubilant and depict this event as the demise of Socialism. They expect that the people have a short memory. But they are mistaken. The. people remember that long ago, in the early sixties, the Communist Party of China under the leadership of Mao Tsetung and revolutionary communists all the world over declared that there had been a reversal in the Soviet Union, that capitalism had been restored in that country. As noted before, the AICCCR, in its declaration of May 1968, described the Soviet Union under the rule of the bourgeoisie as a capitalist, imperialist country and as one of the four main enemies of the Indian people. Numerous writings in Liberation exposed the social-imperialist character of the Soviet Union. The defeat of Socialism in the Soviet Union and the East European countries took place decades ago and is no recent event.
When Soviet Russia broke away from the world capitalist system it was hailed by the toiling people all the world over as the dawn of a new era. The workers and other working people of Russia performed miracles of heroism and defeated the native counterrevolutionaries and the foreign imperialist powers, chief among which were Britain, France, the USA and Japan, who tried to strangle the new toilers' state at its birth. In this struggle the revolutionary people received invaluable support from the workers of the imperialist countries who raised the slogan "Hands off Russia". Though surrounded by hostile states, the working people of the USSR, relying on themselves, also performed miracles of construction during the twenties and the thirties and transformed a backward country into a highly industrialized one. The USSR was not only free from the horrors of the devastating economic crisis of 192933, which destroyed vast productive forces in the capitalist world and brought in its train mass unemployment and hunger, but also made spectacular advance in different spheres, including education and culture, at a rate never before attained anywhere. Again it was the Soviet people who made immense sacrifices and displayed wonderful bravery to turn the tide of the Second World War. They were the main contingent of the world's forces that saved the world from German fascism.
But the fact is, Socialism was never consolidated in the Soviet Union. "The production relations", Mao Tsetung pointed out, "include ownership of the means of production, the relations among people in the course of production, and the distribution system". The ownership of the means of production by the whole people and by the collectives lays the basis of Socialism, but for Socialism to be consolidated, revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat must be carried forward in the relations among people in the course of production and in the distribution system. For reasons, national and international, such a revolution did not take place in the Soviet Union A new bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which called itself 'communist' to deceive the people, gradually gained in power and seized it after the death of Stalin. Maintaining in the main the facade of state ownership of the means of production, the bureaucratic bourgeoisie dominated the party, the organs of the state, the factories and other production units and so on and controlled state property for its own aggrandizement. The Soviet party became a fascist party and the Soviet state a fascist state. While prating of having completed the stage of Socialism and of building Communism, the Khrushchevs, Brezhnevs and their successors ruthlessly exploited and oppressed the Soviet peoples as well as other peoples and earned their intense hatred. Now, under the weight of inner contradictions, the "socialist" facade has crumbled down. A big section of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and a new class of capitalist entrepreneurs that has amassed fortunes through collaboration with foreign imperialist capital have pulled down the facade and are doing away with the restrictions which it imposed and going all-out for full-blown capitalism relying on foreign imperialist capital and technology. The fascists -the Yeltsins-have changed their signboard instead of calling themselves 'communists', they masquerade today as 'democrats' and 'liberals' engaged in 'reforming' the economic and political systems. Seeking to dominate their respective territories, the bourgeoisie of the different nationalities have broken up the Soviet Union and are hitching their wagons to the star of foreign imperialist capital. The road from centrally planned economy controlled by the 'communist' bourgeoisie to traditional capitalist economy is strewn with corpses. The change means for the peoples chaos-spiralling prices, joblessness, hunger and cold. The same fate has overtaken the peoples of the East European countries which belonged to the Soviet empire.
In China, too, reversal took place and capitalism was restored. Since liberation in 1949, especially since 1957, when private property was abolished in China in the main, there has been a ceaseless struggle between the proletarian revolutionaries headed by Mao Tsetung and the capitalist-roaders within the Communist Party of China. The class struggle outside was reflected within the CPC. Fighting the determined opposition of many Party bosses, Mao, who upheld the theory of uninterrupted revolution, tried to revolutionize the relations in the course of production and the distribution system as well as the superstructure-education, culture and so on. The Commune movement, the Socialist Education Movement, the Anshan Charter, the May 7 directive, etc., were intended to restrict and ultimately do away with the three differences - the differences between intellectual and manual labour, between the worker and the peasant and between the city and the country. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which Mao Tsetung initiated, sought not only to combat the Party bosses who were taking the capitalist road but to remould the world outlook of the Chinese people, prevent capitalist restoration and consolidate Socialism. He warned against reversals and repeatedly pointed out that it would take several cultural revolutions and several centuries to realize the goal. In 'Where Do Correct Ideas Come From ?" (1963), Mao said:
"In social struggle, the forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect but because, in the balance of forces engaged m struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of reaction; they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to triumph sooner or later."
The revolutionaries who take "a farsighted view of world events" (to use Mao's phrase) will learn from the setbacks and failures in building Socialism despite immense sacrifices and immense achievements, and avoid such failures in future.
Today, the capitalist sharks, foreign and native, are trumpeting the 'benefits', the 'joys', the triumph and the 'permanence' of capitalism. What joys, what benefits, can capitalism offer to the people? They are joblessness, starvation and a degraded, subhuman existence for the great majority of the world's people-and mass slaughter, of which there is no end so long as capitalism exists. In India, the path of dependence on imperialist capital that India's ruling classes and their political managers have pursued since 1947 has today landed the people in a situation when tens of millions will have no work and prices of essential things will spiral higher and higher, when starvation and misery will be even more widespread than before. India's sovereignty has always been a myth; it is even more so today when every dictate of the imperialists, coming directly or through the IMF and the World Bank, affecting the vital interests of the people, has to be carried out. Economically, politically and militarily, imperialist fetters will bind India more tightly than before and the imperialist sharks, the native compradors and political and other pimps will be the only beneficiaries. Liberation carried many articles exposing the dependent character of India's model of 'development' and the high-pitched rhetoric of 'independence' and 'self-reliance'.
Only a great social revolution, of which Naxalbari was the dawn, can smash the imperialist shackles, overthrow the enemies and bring a new life to our long-suffering people. For the revolution to triumph in India, which is likely to have a decisive impact on several other countries and on the world as a whole, India awaits communist theoreticians who, integrating with the revolutionary workers and peasants and learning from practice, present and past, will contribute to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. Vast changes have taken place in recent decades-in economy, politics, science and technology and so on. Communist revolutionaries today need new theories to guide them through the mazes of the complexity that the Indian and the world situation present. Mao said that the works of Marx and Lenin are "necessary reading. That comes first. But communists of any country and the proletarian philosophical circles of any country must create new theory, write new works, produce their own theoreticians to serve the political tasks facing them." "No nation", Mao said, "can at any time rely on what is old. Having Marx and Engels without Lenin's Two Tactics and other works could not have solved the new problems of 1905 and afterward. Having only Materialism and Empirio-Criticism of 1907 would not have sufficed to cope with the new issues that arose before and after the October Revolution. To meet the needs of that time Lenin wrote Imperialism, State and Revolution and other works." [5]
Addressing the Soviet All-Russian Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East in November 1919, Lenin had said that the solution of the problems the communists of the East faced would not be found in any communist book: "relying upon the general theory and practice of Communism", they would "have to tackle that problem and solve it through your own independent experience." [6]
Mao Tsetung created new theories and wrote a number of books to solve the problems of revolution in colonies and semi-colonies. His On Practice, On Contradiction, On Protracted War, The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Park, On New Democracy, On the People's Democratic Dictatorship, to name only a few, constituted a new development of Marxism-Leninism. When China entered the period of Socialism as well as when the Soviet Union degenerated into a capitalist state, Mao formulated new theories to meet the needs of the time. His writings, talks and directives - "On the Ten Major Relationships", "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People", Long Live Mao Tsetung's Thought (two volumes, of which A Critique of Soviet Economics published from New York in 1977 is only a fragment), On Khrushchev's Phoney Communism and its Historical Lessons for the World, etc. - solve many problems of socialist construction and are a guide to revolutionaries about how to carry forward the socialist revolution and prevent the restoration of capitalism.
But, as time passes, a host of new problems arise and cry for solution. Theory must grapple with them, correctly interpret the present world and our society (or societies), the concrete conditions and class contradictions, and point the way of how to resolve them. To meet the new needs, India's communist theoreticians will have to formulate new theories and write new works which will be fresh contributions to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.
Not the Bushes, the Yeltsins and the Raos but the people shall have the last word. Communism represents the highest aspirations of the people- their dream of a world free from oppression and exploitation, free from hunger and poverty. a world with new values, new social relations and new culture which will make men truly free and happy. The experience of the working of Socialism, however imperfect, in the USSR and China for brief periods of time has proved beyond doubt that Socialism is no mere dream, that it does work and promises a radiant future for all mankind when human values will predominate over the lust for profits and when capitalist cannibalism will be a nightmare of the past.
16 February 1992
SUNITI KUMAR GHOSH