Communist Histories Volume 1

257 Pages·2016·1.908 MB·English

by  Vijay Prashad

Communist Histories

VOLUME I

Edited with an Introduction by

VIJAY PRASHAD
Published in July 2016 by
LeftWord Books
2254/2A Shadi Khampur
New Ranjit Nagar
New Delhi 110008
INDIA
LeftWord Books is the publishing division of
Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
leftword.com
ISBN 978-93-80118-37-6 (e-book)
Individual essays © respective authors, 2016

This collection © LeftWord Books, 2016

Table of Contents
Vijay PrashadIntroduction: Communist Histories
Suchetana ChattopadhyayBeing ‘Naren Bhattacharji’
Fredrik PeterssonThe ‘Colonial Conference’ and Dilemma of the
Comintern’s Colonial Work, 1928-29
Margaret StevensCuba and the Red International, 1934
Elisabeth ArmstrongIndian Peasant Women’s Activism in a Hot
Cold War
Archana PrasadThe Warli Movement and its Living Histories
Lin ChunThe Lost International in the Transformation of Chinese
Socialism
Contributors
Vijay Prashad

Introduction: Communist Histories
HISTORY WITH THE COMMUNISTS LEFT OUT
As the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and
1991, the debate over the past and future of Communism rose to a fever
pitch. New archives in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe opened up
to allow scholars to assess not only the history of these regions, but also of
the Communist movement elsewhere. In particular, the Communist
International (Comintern) archives possessed material that would shine a
light on Communist activities from 1919 to 1943, the period when the Left
coalesced into the Communist movement in many parts of the world. A
flurry of books on Communism, particularly on these decades of the
Comintern, emerged.[1] The tenor of these books was generally unkind to
the Communist movement – although it is better to have them than no
history at all. The general suggestion was that Communists from the United
States to Indonesia operated as puppets of the Soviet Union. They had no
autonomy from Moscow, and indeed survived largely due to Moscow Gold.
Since the Soviet Union had now fallen – went the argument – it was time
for its satellites to all fall into the black hole of history.
In Italy, for example, the new leadership of the Communist Party (PCI)
began to reassess its past, particularly the role of Palmiro Togliatti (its
leader from 1930 to 1934 and then from 1938 to 1964). Togliatti was not
only the pillar of the PCI, but he was also, as Justice Minister, one of the
key drafters of the Italian Constitution of 1947.[2] Elected to the leadership
of the PCI in 1988, Achille Occhetto denounced Togliatti’s support for
Joseph Stalin and his policies. It was Stalin who deformed Communism,
Occhetto argued, and produced the mockery of what had come to be known
as comunismo reale, de facto communism, not ideal communism.[3] The PCI
collapsed a few years later, and re-appeared as the Democratic Party of the
Left (PDS) – dressed entirely in Social Democratic rather than Communist
garments. Occhetto was its first leader. He realized quickly that the attack
on Togliatti had opened a can of worms against the Left tradition and any
Left party – even one avowedly anti-Communist. ‘We have squared our
accounts with the past. But if there is anybody who says that we no longer
have the right to exist as a party because of our past, then our answer is: you
are not looking for historical truth; you are instigating a shameful
persecution’.[4]

Corruption scandals dented both the Christian Democrats and the
Socialist Party, which opened the door for the PDS to lead an Alliance of
Progressives to victory in 1994. This prospect drew Silvio Berlusconi from
his boardroom to the streets. He galvanized the Right as the Pole of Liberty,
which included the fascist parties. Since they had shielded their history
from attack, Berlusconi went after the Left. ‘Left-wingers pretend they have
changed’, he said in his opening speech, ‘they claim that they are liberal-
democrats now, but it is not true, they are the same as before, their
mentality, their culture, their deepest beliefs and their behaviour are just the
same as before’.[5] The attack at the historical role of the Communists was
not merely a historiographical debate; it was one that was used to discredit
the Left as rooted in Soviet history and therefore anachronistic in the new
age. The fascists, on the other hand, did not need to stand to account for
their views. Berlusconi rode this attack on the Left to victory. The Left was
largely wiped off the face of the Italian political landscape. From coming
close to power in 1994, they fell to the lure of moderation. The Democratic
Party, now in power, is the remnant of this collapse.
In India, the story – much the same – took place a decade earlier. From
the margins of Indian politics, the Extreme Right began to make its
appearance on the main stage. Rechristened as the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), the Extreme Right won only two seats in the Indian parliamentary
elections of 1984. But this was an aberration. Its leadership mounted their
chariots for the Ramjanambhoomi campaign to build a temple to Ram on
the site of an old mosque in Ayodhya. The BJP believed that this campaign
would consolidate a ‘Hindu vote bank’ in its favour. By 1996, the BJP
would become the largest party in the Indian parliament. It was a
spectacular rise. At the same time, the Left rose from thirty-three seats in
parliament in 1984 to fifty-two seats in 1996. If this is any indicator of
political strength, the Left appeared buoyant. It played a decisive role in the
formation of the United Front government in 1996, which kept the BJP out
of power for two years. An attack on the Left, therefore, was not
idiosyncratic. It was politically essential.
In 1984, economist and journalist Arun Shourie wrote a series of
articles in the Illustrated Weekly of India. The series went after the Left for
its role in the Freedom Movement. The event that allowed Shourie to
condense all his calumnies against the Left was the role of the Communists
in the Quit India struggle of 1942. The Communists, Shourie wrote, took
their orders from Moscow to support the Great Patriotic War and thereby to
ignore the ‘Do or Die’ cry of the August 9 Quit India agitation. This is the
betrayal of the communists. Shourie would later expand these articles into a
book – Only Fatherland: Communists, Quit India and the Soviet Union
(1991). The attack on the Left allowed Shourie to do three things. First,
Shourie’s jeremiad distracted attention from the Right’s marginal role in the
Freedom Movement – and, in terms of the 1942 uprising, to shift the focus
from V.D. Savarkar’s campaign to strengthen the British war as early as
1941 and Savarkar’s order to the Hindu Mahasabha, on September 4, 1942,
to ignore the Quit India movement and ‘stick to their posts and continue to
perform their regular duties’.[6] Second, it allowed Shourie to ignore the
fascist complicities of India’s Extreme Right.[7]

Third, Shourie’s slash and burn critique attempted to undermine the
communist’s considerable role in the fight for independence. Historian
Sumit Sarkar pointed out that Shourie’s use of historical materials was
shoddy – using statements without context, making gross generalizations
without the humility of the historian’s craft.[8] For Shourie, the Communists
were marionettes of Moscow. When Moscow said that the war of 1939-41
was an imperialist war, the Communists nodded; when Moscow said that
the war from 1941 was a people’s war, the Communists nodded. At no point
did Shourie take seriously the Indian communists – neither the CPI’s own
assessment at the CPI’s 2nd Congress in 1948 nor the words of its leadership
in oral history interviews conducted by the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library’s deputy director Hari Dev Sharma.[9] S.S. Mirajkar, one of the
founders of the CPI, told Sharma that the jailed party leadership debated the
attitude of the communists against the Nazis. Before the Nazi invasion of
the Soviet Union, the Indian communists understood the virulent nature of
Nazi ideology and militarism (a position shared with the Congress leader
Jawaharlal Nehru). Even after the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty in
August 1939, the CPI held the belief that the best way to defeat fascism was
to fight for socialism in India. ‘The war crisis’, noted the CPI leadership,
‘brings out in the sharpest manner and intensifies thousand-fold the conflict
between the British government and the Indian people.’ This crisis ‘opens
up the perspective of the transformation of imperialist war into a war of
national liberation’.[10] The CPI called for a general strike on 2 October
1939, a few days after the declaration of war. Ninety thousand workers
participated in this strike, which was the first anti-war protest in the entire
international labour movement.[11] Debate amongst the leadership over a
six-month period led to the conclusion that the communists must support
both the Soviet Union against the fascist attack and continue to fight for
freedom in India. The People’s War thesis, Mirajkar said, ‘was the result of
our own thinking’.[12] Part of the communist leadership understood, as B.T.
Ranadive wrote in 1948, that the war for the future was going to be fought
at Stalingrad. It was here – from 1942 to 1943 – that the Soviet Union wore
down the Nazi war machine at the cost of over a million Soviet lives.[13]

Did the CPI betray the Indian freedom movement, as Shourie alleged?
The evidence shows that at no point in 1942-43 did the communists operate
as informers against others, and in many cases, the communists continued
to fight in the freedom movement at the same time as they assisted in the
war effort. In Bengal’s Midnapur district, for instance, communists such as
Haren Mitra and Rabi Mitra of Kespur ‘took a leading part of the [Quit
India] movement’.[14] After the Quit India struggle, many of its leaders,
ended up in the Communist party – people such as Nana Patil, Bapurao
Jagtap, Jharkhand Rai, Sarjoo Pandey and of course Aruna Asaf Ali. They
knew that the Communists had played a leading role in the freedom
movement, and, would – in 1945-48, lead a series of important rebellions
from Punnappra-Vayalar in Travancore to Telengana in Hyderabad, from
the Warli struggle in Maharashtra to the peasant struggle in Tanjore, as well
as provide key support to uprisings such as the RIN Mutiny, the Tebhaga
struggle and the working-class strike wave that went from Bombay to
Madras. None of this enters the ledger of the Extreme Right, which at that
time cultivated hate amongst its adherents in preparation for the communal
riots of the same period. If the measure is taken on betrayal, there is little
question that the Extreme Right sits heavily on the scale.
Shourie’s jeremiad did not come from nowhere. Despite the importance
of Marxist thought in the Indian academy, intellectuals pilloried the
communist movement along similar lines. Romesh Thapar, one-time
member of the CPI, used his journal – Seminar – in 1974 to dismiss the
movement with piercing sarcasm. ‘The history of the communist
movement’, he wrote in a special number dedicated to Marxism and India,
‘as the main purveyor of Marxism in the country, reveals a vacillation
between blunders and irrelevancies, both accompanied by unique courage’.
[15] In that volume, historian Bipan Chandra writes that the communists’
‘record of failure is rather long, for at no stage during the last fifty years
have the Indian Marxists succeeded in achieving more than a small part of
what was historically possible’.[16] Chandra previews here what he would
say in a collection he edited nine years later.[17] What grouse united these
writers – from Romesh Thapar to Bipan Chandra – was that the communists
should not have broken with the Congress. Indeed, if the communists had
properly tethered themselves to the Congress, then the latter would not have
been able to drift so rapidly rightwards. This is a judgment shared in our
times by the historian Ramachandra Guha.[18]

From the 1920s, the communist movement debated its relationship with
the Indian National Congress. Before the 1940s, the Congress was not an
electoral party, but the vehicle for the Indian nationalist movement. The
debate in those three decades (1920-1950) allowed the communists to refine
their own theory of struggle – to fight to build an alternative modernity to
that of capitalism and colonialism. Anti-colonialism was shared across the
Congress, but not anti-capitalism. The communists rightly worried that if
they liquidated themselves into the Congress there would be no anti-
capitalist force left. Debates with the Comintern on the relationship to the
Congress mirrored debates there on how the Chinese, Vietnamese and
Indonesian communists should treat their own national movements. War
destroyed the bourgeois national forces in China and Vietnam, opening the
door for the communists to deepen their roots in society and in the political
world. No such opportunity afforded Indonesia and India, where the
bourgeois nationalists maintained their hegemony through the anti-colonial
movement. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), despite the difficult
circumstances, grew to be a significant force in the country. As a threat, it
was cut down by a brutal military coup in 1965, backed by Australia and