People's Democracy

The Agrarian Question Is The Main Question

Confronting The People’s Democratic Revolution 

                                     Benoy Konar

LONG LIVE THE ALLIANCE OF WORKERS & PEASANTS

Painting by S Karpov

THE programme of the CPI(M) states, “unlike in the advanced capitalist countries where capitalism grew on the ashes of pre-capitalist society, which was destroyed by the rising bourgeoisie, capitalism in India was super-imposed on the pre-capitalist society.” It further states, “Neither the British colonialists during their rule nor the Indian bourgeoisie assuming power after Independence attempted to smash it, which was one of the most important pre-conditions for the free development of capitalism….therefore …. it has thus fallen on the working class and its Party to unite all the progressive forces interested in destroying the pre-capitalist society and to consolidate the revolutionary forces within so as to facilitate the completion of the democratic revolution and prepare the ground for the transition to socialism.”

Historically, the task of emancipating the peasantry as well as the society from the pre-capitalist or feudal exploitation rests upon the bourgeoisie since this is imperative for the very development of capitalism. The bourgeoisie of Europe accomplished this task. ‘Down with monarchy and feudalism – Land to the tiller’ – this slogan was first raised by the bourgeoisie. The peasantry remained under the ideological enslavement of the feudal order. The priests and philosophers could make the peasantry believe that the whole universe and its rhythm were all ordered by God; the king, the landlords, the aristocrats and the commoners – all were created as desired by God; men were born high or low as destined by God; the church was the abode of God, hence the sermons of church were the message of God; to challenge the king and landlord, the creations of God, amounted to challenging God himself and so it was a sin. When Galileo shattered the age-old belief of ‘the universe revolving around the earth’ and proved his famous heliocentric theory, he was put to jail because he could not find a place for God within his enunciated system as demanded by the king. This was so because the acceptance of his theory would shatter the entire uniform structure of omnipotence of God. It would not only negate the long believed role of God in the movement of universe but also would endanger the false belief that the king and landlords were the creations of God and to challenge them was a sin.

The industrial workers were yet to be born. The vast majority of the people were peasants and artisans who were deeply under the influence of feudal ideology. It was therefore not possible for the rising bourgeoisie to gather sufficient strength for coming to power by defeating feudalism without emancipating this mass of people from the aforesaid fortress of feudal narrowness and obscurantism and without rousing them with revolutionary ideas. So the bourgeoisie had to not only raise the slogan of ‘land to the tiller’ but also play a revolutionary role in the sphere of ideology or philosophy. They had to wage war against blind-faith, obscurantism etc. and instead to uphold logic, reasoning and scientific outlook and to declare that for every effect there is a cause behind and that every human being is born equal. They had to remove God from the material and social life of people and put him in the prison of church. In history all these go by the name of Renaissance or New Enlightenment.

SOCIALISM AS AN ALTERNATIVE

PRIOR to the advent of capitalism, people had no idea about the capitalist mode of exploitation; escape from feudal exploitation was taken to be the end of all sorts of exploitation. Capitalism inevitably gives birth to working class, and simultaneously with the growth of capitalism, grows the number of workers. The crude and cruel method, that the capitalists resorted to in the early stages for the quick accumulation of capital basing on the then prevailing undeveloped productive forces has been heartrendingly described by Marx in his Capital. The resistance of the working class also started growing. In the light of learned experiences, Marx and Engels jointly brought out in 1848, the declaration of the working class known as the ‘Communist Manifesto’. It was an epoch-making event. With this ‘Manifesto’ the working class started moving organisationally in the world stage with separate philosophy and politics of its own. The bourgeoisie was alerted. In the years 1848-50, the working class of France swept the land by its tempest of struggle and in 1864 the International of the working class was established. This sent shivers down the spines of the capitalist class. The first attempt by the working class to seize power, known as Paris Commune, was made in 1871. The bourgeoisie got increasingly worried. History passed through 1886 and 1905 and in the background of the First World War resultant to the crisis of capitalism came the world-shaking October Revolution, the greatest-so-far event in the history of human civilisation. The bourgeoisie felt a tremor in its heart. (Though October Revolution has been defeated in the nineties due to lack of requisite experiences of class struggle for building socialism, it has left such evidences of unbelievable advance by making impossible possible and achieved so much by social ownership instead of private ownership that it has strengthened the conviction that there is no alternative to socialism.)

The contest between feudalism and capitalism is solely on the form of exploitation but that between the bourgeoisie and the working class involves the question of the very existence of the former. So, the more the movement of the working class and forces of socialism posed a danger, the more the bourgeoisie lost its earlier revolutionary character and united with the feudal reactionaries in the rear for its defence against the greater enemy in the fore and the October Revolution has permanently incapacitated the bourgeoisie from leading the peasantry in the democratic revolution. That is why the bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries, including ours are seen friendly to the feudal forces so evidently.

ROLE OF THE PEASANTRY

THE peasantry is not a basic class of modern times bound by homogeneous interest. In fact it is a category of the pre-capitalist society which is inevitably bound to split up into bourgeois farm-owners and agricultural labourers with the development of capitalism. In Lenin’s words – capitalism not only ruins the peasantry but also splits it up. Today’s peasants are the unified existence of the future bourgeoisie and working class. It is for this reason that the peasantry can have no distinct philosophy, ideology and politics of its own. The peasantry as a category of feudal society has to be guided by the ideology and politics of either of the two basic classes of future society – the bourgeoisie or the working class. In today’s context, the bourgeoisie has ceased to be capable to lead the peasantry to liberation. The working class alone has to now take that responsibility. The working class is bound to take up this task, not for any generosity towards the peasantry, but for its own emancipation. Capitalist exploitation is the latest form of exploitation. Except without saving the people from all sorts of pre-capitalist exploitation, the working class cannot redeem itself. Unless the working class can liberate the peasantry – the largest contingent of the people – from the influence of the bourgeoisie and make them their own ally, it cannot liberate itself. It is no divine sermon; this theory was evolved during the course of working class movement itself. While analysing the defeat of the working class in France during 1848-50, Marx wrote in his work Class struggle in France, 1848-50, “The French workers could not take a step forward, could not touch a hair of the bourgeois order, until the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, against this order, against the rule of capital, and had forced them to attach themselves to the proletarians as their protagonists.” In the same vein Engels said in 1868 in his address to the International that unless the proletariat, in its fight against the rule of capital, is able to unite with the peasantry and the petty bourgeois, it will not be able to even touch the hair of the bourgeoisie.” After the collapse of Paris Commune in 1871, Marx mentioned as one of the main causes behind the collapse, the failure of the working class to win over the peasantry from the camp of the bourgeoisie. For the same reason, the Russian revolution of the working class in 1905 also failed. Contrarily, the revolution of the Russian peasantry in 1902 collapsed due to the failure of the working class to lead it. All these experiences were given a concrete shape by Lenin. His work To the Rural Poor was in essence a political appeal of the working class to the peasantry. This experience was successfully put into practice in the October Revolution. Stalin in his work Foundation and problems of Leninism said, “Some think that the fundamental thing in Leninism is the peasant question ……this is absolutely wrong. The fundamental question of Leninism, its point of departure, is not the peasant question, but the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the question under which it can be achieved, of the condition under which it can be consolidated. The peasant question, as the question of the ally of the proletariat in its struggle for power, is a derivative question.”

To emphasise, the working class which wants to capture power for liberating itself from the bondage of ‘wage-slavery’, a ‘so-called dignified wage slavery’, is bound to take up the causes of the peasantry as its own.

SITUATION IN INDIA

IN the light of the above truth, we have to analyse the situation in our country. The bourgeoisie of our country has also not only been unable to lead the peasantry to demolish feudalism, on the contrary it has shared state power with the latter. The bourgeoisie not only refused to combine the anti-feudal struggle of the peasantry with the anti-imperialist struggle, it has actually opposed and suppressed those struggles. Far from siding with the numerous struggles of the peasantry like the Telengana peasant upsurge, the Tebhaga movement of Bengal, the Bataidari movement in Bihar, the Worli adivasis’ movement in Maharashtra, the peasant movement of Surma Valley in Assam etc., the bourgeoisie stood against and suppressed all those movements. Growing class-consciousness among the working class and the peasantry was taken as a future danger for the bourgeoisie. By refusing to unite the class movement with the anti-imperialist movement, the bourgeoisie failed to revolutionise the anti-imperialist movement. The divisive forces thus raised their heads by disrupting the unity of the people and consequently the bourgeoisie, instead of fighting the imperialists to finish, had to agree with the communal division of the country and compromise with the imperialist power. After independence, the bourgeoisie has not only refused to undertake any land reform measures, it has also doggedly opposed even measures of partial land reform within the limitations of the constitutional framework. As a result, no land reforms were effected. At independence, 60 per cent of the total land was in the hands of 10 per cent of the land-holders. That means, if only this 10 per cent, who were obviously big landlords, were touched, 240 million acres of land (out of the total 400 million acres) could have been available for distribution among the landless or land-poor peasants. Even after much fanfare, not more than 5 million acres of land could be available for distribution, which again came mostly from West Bengal, Kerala, Tripura under Left Front rule and in Jammu & Kashmir where land reforms was effected during early National Conference rule. In India, the capitalist mode of production is being super-imposed upon the feudal land relations or the earlier feudal landlords are being transformed into capitalist farm-owners with feudal characteristics. Consequently, the small peasants, having been defeated in unequal competition, are losing their small parcels of land which are being used to enlarge the size of the big farms. At the advent of capitalism, the rising bourgeoisie in the west, by way of plundering the colonies as well as by cruelly exploiting the yet-to-be-organised working class, could fast accumulate capital and effect industrial revolution, which could absorb the surplus agri-population. But the Indian bourgeoisie, in the era of crisis of capitalism and in compromise with the imperialistic capital and feudalism, could not earn capacity to effect such industrial revolution as in the west. Hence, here, the agri-population rendered surplus because of capitalist development, including mechanisation, far from being absorbed in industry, are getting further swelled due to industrial recession. Unemployment is fast rising. In addition to feudal exploitation, the exploitation by the imperialistic, monopoly and usurious capital pervades the agrarian scenario. 

Our bourgeoisie have compromised with the feudal forces not only in the economic and political spheres, but also on the ideological and cultural question. There has been no renaissance as was in Europe. Science and technology have more and more been utilised for making profits, but the bourgeoisie has remained alert so that the science-consciousness among the people does not grow. All rubbishes like blind faith, obscurantism, astrology, incantation, amulet-wearing, evil spirit, mysticism, magical enchantment, women-repression, deifying ‘sati’ etc. have full sway over the society, particularly the rural society. That ‘man is born equal’ is not yet recognised, so untouchability and caste-repression is rampant in most areas. Religion has been spread out of the temples, mosques or the likes to rule the social and political arena. Democratic values are at stake. There prevails in the rural society – which constitutes 70 per cent of the population – a pathetic and melancholic life with poverty, inequality and hopelessness. 

ESSENTIAL TASK BEFORE THE PARTY

 Who is there to chalk-out the path for their emancipation? If the working class does not take upon itself this task, a task abandoned by the bourgeoisie, then the working class far from being able to liberate itself, would not even be able to safeguard its rights earned so far in this era of all-round universal offensive against it. If the agony of the peasants does not move the workers and employees, how the attack on the latter is expected to vibrate the minds of the former? The main source of the weakness of the Left and democratic movement in our country is the weakness in rousing and organising the peasantry. The first sentence with which the 1967 document titled ‘Tasks on the Kisan Front’ began was, “The biggest weakness in the present Indian situation is manifested in the extremely poor state of the kisan movement and its organisation at different levels”. It may be noted that in places where the Left forces are somewhat powerful, the organisation and consciousness of the peasantry has its role behind it. If the working class and its Party fail to organise the peasantry – constituting 70 per cent of the population, and who are poor and victims of deprivation and social repression – and win them over from the camp of bourgeois-landlord combine, the working class movement will not be able to grow and defend itself from the scorching attack of the reactionaries.

 Clause 6.2 of our Party Programme says, “while adhering to the aim of building socialism in our country, the Communist Party Of India (Marxist), taking into consideration the degree of economic development, the political ideological maturity of the working class and its organisation, places before the people as the immediate objective, the establishment of people’s democracy based on the coalition of all genuine anti-feudal, anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist forces led by the working class on the basis of a firm worker-peasant alliance.”

This means that the basis of the aforesaid coalition or front would be ‘worker-peasant alliance’. Thus, this task of building up the alliance rests upon the working class and its Party.