ANIL BISWAS ON THE FOUNDATION DAY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY

No Barrier Exists Between Class Struggle & Development

Anil Biswas addressing the gathering at Promode Dasgupta Bhavan in Kolkata

THE foundation of the Communist Party in India was remembered at a convention held at the Promode Dasgupta Bhavan in Kolkata where state secretary of the Bengal CPI(M), Anil Biswas was the sole speaker.  State secretariat member of the CPI(M), Raghunath Kushari presided over the meeting that had the assemblage packing the spacious auditorium full to the overflowing, and spilling right on to the corridors and the courtyards.

Anil Biswas began on a sombre note and recalled how 85 years back, in 1920 to be exact, the Communist Party of India was formed on the soil of the Soviet Union at Tashkent, as indeed were dozens of other communist parties of colonies groaning under the imperialist sceptre.  The ComIntern headed by V I Lenin, stressed Anil Biswas, had played a stellar role in encouraging the formation of communist parties in these countries.

EARLY DAYS

From those early days, iterated the speaker, the Communist Party had a glorious role to emote. It played a leading role in the freedom movement calling for a full independence.  It included the working class in the freedom struggle. 

The Communist Party also set up a wide base of mass organisations across the country, the first political party to do so in an organised fashion, driven by ideological and political considerations.  Since then it has never deviated in any manner from the goal of setting up socialism in India, traversing a complex route filled with cross roads, twists, and turns. 

From those early days, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), declared Anil Biswas, ‘has emerged to become the leading political formation in India in terms of ideological stance, political outlook, courage, and conviction, with a mass base that has gone on expanding across the land.’  It is the Party of the working class in India, added the CPI(M) leader.

The CPI(M), pointed out the Polit Bureau member, rejected out-of-hand the formulation the European Left of the moment about the inexorableness of capitalist globalisation and about the inevitability of the course of having to go in for reforms acknowledging the overbearing presence of capitalism, and that finance capital was ‘not dangerous.’  This is a deviation of the worst kind.

The 18th congress of the CPI(M), recalled Anil Biswas, had posited that capitalism would never be able to solve the basic problems facing the people and that the alternative was socialism. The CPI(M) believes that the central contradiction is the one between socialism and capitalism.

DEVIATIONS

Here, Anil Biswas pointed to another set of deviation making the rounds in certain circles in today’s world.  That deviation stemmed from the complete inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to understand and appreciate the world situation. ‘There is this blind, driven, non-ideological hatred of capitalism without subscribing to the ‘reasons why’ or even without taking recourse to a raison d’etre. 

More alarmingly, the proponents of this point of view would get ahead airing their views without even trying to convince and involve the mass of the people in the endeavour. They would not take the mass along. “This is anarchism and nothing else, and anarchism can be destructive in the sense that it serves to blunt the political-ideological edge of the attack of the Communist Party against capitalism, and imperialism”, was how Anil Biswas put it.

“We are not enamoured of capitalism, and our opposition to it is political-ideological, and in opposing capitalism we try and carry the mass of the people along in the form of struggles, movements, and such other mass actions”, declared Anil Biswas.

Turning to the resolutions of the 18th congress of the CPI(M), Anil Biswas pointed to the fact how the Party congress had spoken about the critical condition of the national economy following the ‘new’ economic policy of liberalisation with the state sector being allowed to become weak. 

However, that never meant that the CPI(M) would stand in blind, faithless opposition to foreign investments. The crucial question was where would the investments be allowed to be made and under what conditionalities.  Such private investment was necessary in the sense that the state sector was being crucially dismantled.

A PRO-PEOPLE PERSPECTIVE

Preservation of national sovereignty, pro-people, especially pro-poor development, nature of the projects that would follow, and protection of the rights of the working class were some of the considerations that would find priority here, said the secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M).  The core sectors were not to be touched, and state leadership was to be in full presence in such areas as health and education.

Recalling the recent past, the speaker said that the CPI(M) had had a crucial role to play in making interventions with the UPA union government. And it could, along with the Left, prevent disinvestment of BHEL, increase in the price of cooking gas and kerosene, and bring round the union government into making a positive step towards the guaranteeing of rural employment over the period of five years.

The contradictions remained as exemplified in the instances of the UPA government’s stand vis-à-vis the WTO and the imbroglio over Iran.  Not for a moment would the CPI(M) let slip of the fact that Congress, which leads the UPA, was a representative of the bourgeois-landlord interest of the country.

The stay in office for all of 29 years of a Left Front government in Bengal, continued Anil Biswas, was convincing of the fact that such elected Left Front governments, a far cry from the Left and Democratic Front that the CPI(M) speaks about programmatically, could stay beyond the dimension of an institution offering temporary interim relief to the people.

The task of organising development was not alienated from the concept of class struggle since the task was to identify the target group for whom the developmental tasks were being orchestrated and mark out the process of development itself. 

Anil Biswas brought in here the question of strategy and tactics and said that the overall strategy remained people’s democratic revolution and then onto socialism.  The tactics concerned the pro-people developmental imperatives. Quoting the ComIntern, Anil Biswas reminded the appreciative audience that strategy minus tactics led to sectarianism whilst tactics devoid of strategy led to opportunism.  The task is to base the tactics on the strategy that has been decided upon.

The industrial policy adopted by the CPI(M) back in 1994, was certainly effective in Bengal in reversing the stagnation of de-industrialisation that had been thrust upon the state by successive union governments.  Liberalisation gives rise to jobloss growth, low wages, and absence of rights of the working class. 

The path of pro-people development ensures an overall growth without wage cuts and with full security to the TU rights.  “The crucial factor here is class considerations: in other words, development for whom?”

“From the days when it was underground to the days when it leads the struggle for emancipation of the people from class domination, the CPI(M)”, said Anil Biswas, “has come a long, long way.”  He concluded to say that the days ahead would be difficult as a path criss-crossed with twists and turns was being travelled, and with the ultimate goal of socialism held firmly in view, the CPI(M) would struggle boldly ahead staying deep amidst the masses, and with a pro-people perspective, thwarting all conspiracies of the forces of right reaction and left sectarianism. (B P)