Left Front Govt And Bengal's Industrialisation

Benoy Konar

IT is in the background of the onslaught of imperialist globalisation and liberalisation – with India's ruling classes succumbing to imperialist pressures resulting in the endemic closure of traditional industries – that some possibility of industrial development seems to have opened up in West Bengal. The industrial revolution in advanced capitalist countries had taken place on the basis of plunder of the colonies and control over the market mechanism. Cottage industry of India was, for instance, destroyed to meet the demands of industrial revolution. In 1840, Charles Trivlen arrogantly declared in the House of Commons in England, “We had swept away manufacturing from India.”

Industrial revolution also accelerated capitalist development in agriculture. The laws of capitalist competition replaced small cultivation by giant capitalist farms utilising modern science and technology. But the peasants uprooted from land were absorbed by the rapidly developing industry and they could, through their struggles, make their lives somewhat better than their life as a peasant.

In US, which has an abundance of agricultural land, only 1.5 per cent of population is engaged in agriculture and only 1.5 per cent of the national income comes from agriculture. Agricultural farms equipped with most modern technologies absorb very few persons. Even the workers employed in agriculture are vastly different from our agricultural workers. They do not toil bare-foot, bare-body in water and dirt. They work on the farms well dressed and depending upon their skills, they earn between $7.5 to $9 an hour. That is, if they work eight hours daily for 26 days in a month, their monthly income would be in terms of rupees between 55,000 to 70,000. Even though the cost of living in US is more expensive, there cannot be any comparison between them and our agricultural labour. Because of high productivity of labour due to advanced science and technology and partly with subsidies from the State, the farm owners in US are able to realise the wages they pay their workers, while the latter are still exploited. As for the gap between the highest and the lowest income groups in that country, which is much more than here, the solution is not in the division of big farms into small holdings but, as Marx said, in their socialisation.

We in our country had no such industrial revolution, because this was not possible without mobilising large masses into a struggle against imperialism, feudalism and monopoly capital. Industry has developed here in a fragmented way. Capitalist relations have grown on the foundation of feudalism in agriculture. Even though small cultivation is still pre-eminent in our country, competition is displacing it. Imperialist globalisation process is further accelerating this process. The Central Agriculture Commission says that in the last ten years over 30,000 peasants, who were ruined due to unequal competition, committed suicide. The sluggish industry is not able to accommodate the growing labour power due to larger population as also the displaced labour power from agriculture. The traditional industry is unable to cope up and many of the units are closing down. The pressure of the population on agriculture is on the rise. A significant 21 per cent of the national income is coming from agriculture whereas almost 60 per cent of the population is depending on agriculture. Agricultural labourers do not get job for more than 130 days on an average in a year and the wage paid is quite meagre. The working conditions are also inhuman.

BENGAL SCENARIO

This is the all India perspective in which the Left Front government in West Bengal is working. Here, by way of peasants’ uprising, land reforms have been achieved as far as possible in a capitalist-landlord State. Feudal concentration of land is gone. Enthusiastic participation of peasants in panchayats has resulted in the expansion of irrigation and intensity of cropping. West Bengal is in the forefront so far as the rate of increase in agricultural production is concerned. Purchasing power in the rural areas has increased. Communication has improved a lot, and trade and commerce and non-agricultural sectors have also developed. During the period 1991-2001, people engaged in non-agricultural works have increased by 12.3 per cent and in the same ratio, the number of those engaged in agriculture has decreased. Still, the pressure of population is the highest here. Whereas the average population in the rest of India is just about 223 people per square kilometre, West Bengal averages a whopping 948 people per square kilometre. Hence, unemployment is acute. The children of the agricultural labourers, who have acquired some degree of education, now do not want to go through the often inhuman toil and hardship of an agricultural labourer. It does not take an expert in economics to know and understand this. Anyone knowing elementary economics would also agree that technological advances would slowly and gradually reduce the employment in agriculture; and that the advance of any society depends upon the growth of its industries. Even the growth of agriculture depends upon the growth of modern industries.

Building on this very thread of understanding, the Left Front government had tried to initiate the process of industrialisation in the 1980s, but due to the then central government’s policies of licensing and freight equalisation, it could not proceed. The obstacles created and the struggle waged for setting up Bakreshwar electricity project and Haldia petrochemicals project is known to all. After these hurdles were removed, the Left Front government once again initiated the process under the leadership of chief minister, Jyoti Basu, who announced the industrial policy in 1994. The current Left Front government is carrying forward that very legacy. The market has expanded in the agricultural sector. Infrastructure and electrification has improved considerably. We have a conscious, disciplined, able, intellectual and general labour force, political stability, an honest cabinet of ministers etc. Also, West Bengal is the door to entire East Asia. The inflow of capital has started. Industries cannot be set up without land. But today those very people who were once the sworn enemies of the peasants, the close confidants of the landlords – the very people who had tried to drown the land movement in streams of blood, and had unleashed a semi-fascist regime of terror on the farmers who had participated in the movement – have suddenly become peasant-lovers and are today crying themselves hoarse to protect the land of the peasants! Actually, they have no alternative. Just as in the case of the land reforms, any advance in industrialisation is a threat to their very existence.

MISPLACED OPPOSITION

What is most saddening is the fact that a section of people who are known to be Marxists are opposed to the Left Front government’s industrial policy. Yes, we are opposed to the market economy controlled by imperialist globalisation. What we mean by “market economy” is an economy over which the government does not have any control in any form; where no subsidies are provided to control prices or safeguard the interests of the weaker sections; where the government does not hold itself responsible to fulfil the basic needs of its people like food, education health, drinking water, housing etc; where everything is left to the mercy of the market. This section of Marxists question as to why there should be market friendly production in West Bengal, which is ruled by the Left Front government, when Marxists are fighting against imperialist globalisation. They accuse that it is hypocrisy. They wishfully hope that the capitalists would come to West Bengal to produce products that cannot be sold in the market!  Communists fight for socialism, but under capitalism they undertake collective bargaining through trade union struggles. Communists want the abolition of private property but when it comes to land reforms, they want the farmers to own the land. Then would that also be hypocrisy? Do these people suggest that even Marx, Engels and Lenin were also hypocrites? Had they been alive, they would have suffered from remorse after witnessing this consequence of their teachings.

Marxism is not a dogma or mantra. It is a system of dialectical reasoning, a science of universal as well as social motion. While the basic strategy and aim remain the same, the essence of Marxism is to chalk out concrete decisions and tactics taking into consideration the stage of development and the correlation of class forces in a given situation. Lenin had said, “It is not enough to be revolutionary and an adherent of socialism or communism in general. You must be able, at each particular moment, to find the particular link in the chain which you must grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link; the order of the links, their form, the manner in which they are linked together, their difference from each other in the historical chain of events are not as simple as those in an ordinary chain made by a smith.” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, pages 112-113)

These critics say they could somehow accept the establishment of market friendly industries, but they cannot accept the invitation to private capitalists like Tatas to set-up industries in the state as it is promotion of pure capitalism. They are shocked to see that the Left Front government, the Communists are building capitalism! According to them, after the debacle of socialism, we are destroying the fundamental tenets of socialism. Marx, in the chapter, ‘Historical tendency of capitalist accumulation’ in his book, Capital, has defined the theoretical basis of socialism. He stated – ‘when the small producers will be displaced from agriculture and industry when the big capitalists with their giant production capacity, acquired due to advances in science and technology, would displace innumerable small producers and concentrate the entire wealth in the hands of a handful people when the whole of production would turn into social production, the means of production would develop to the extent that unless used collectively, they cannot be used, when the productive forces would tear off the production relations, then the expropriators would be expropriated. And to achieve this, bourgeois state has to be replaced by a working class state’. It means, in the developed capitalist countries, the working class would take the State power by revolution and establish socialism by bringing the privately-owned giant social production under social ownership. Does the situation in West Bengal resemble in any way, the above? Then how are we deviating from Marxism?

ILLUSIONS ABOUT LF GOVT

Actually, they have created this illusion about the West Bengal Left Front government and this suits them to confuse people. West Bengal is not a sovereign country. It is a province within a capitalist-feudal State. There has been no revolution in West Bengal. West Bengal does not have a socialist or a people's democratic government. The West Bengal government is a democratic government which has to work within the socio-economic framework of the capitalist-feudal State. Its main responsibilities are to realise the fullest potential of growth for its agriculture and its industries, to safeguard the interests of its working people, to provide some relief, to extend democracy and to make the people aware of the existing anti-people socio-economic system through their practical experiences and to project an alternative policy. Leave alone the LF government; let us recount the experience of the November revolution about capitalist development. In spite of being called the socialist revolution, Lenin had to say that in reality it was a working class-peasantry revolution, which means in real sense it was a democratic revolution under the leadership of the working class, whose task was to reach socialism after completing the task of bourgeois-democratic revolution. In China, similar revolution was called new democratic revolution. We have called it the people’s  democratic revolution in our program. While writing on materialistic outlook on history, Engels had written, “From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.” (Utopian and Scientific Socialism, emphasis by Engels)

Echoing the same, Lenin had also written, “Born along on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm, rousing first the political enthusiasm and then the military enthusiasm of the people, we expected to accomplish economic tasks just as great as the political and military tasks we had accomplished by relying directly on this enthusiasm. We expected – or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed without having given it adequate consideration – to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong.” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 33, page 58)

Further, basing upon the experience, he said, “Socialism is inconceivable without large scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worthwhile wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the left Socialist-Revolutionaries).” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 32, page 334) Unfortunately, even after 85 years of Lenin saying so, we still have to contend with such forces. While adopting the New Economic Policy, the so-called “true” Marxists, in Lenin's word, had alleged that Lenin was compromising with capitalism. Lenin had replied, yes we are compromising. And he cited the example of one of the world’s greatest generals of those days: Japan’s Nogi, who was defeated again and again by a more powerful enemy, when he was directly attacking them to free Pearl Harbor. He ultimately won the cause by adopting the tactics of a long drawn blockade. Similarly, he said we have committed mistake by directly attacking forces of capitalism, which are stronger than us; we have to compromise, keep patience, gather strength to achieve victory; we have no other alternative. Talking about the people's song ‘this is the final struggle’, he said, although we sing it, it is not true. We need to fight at many stages. Can we say that Lenin was not a Marxist?

“PURITY” OF MARXISM?

To ensure the industrial development of the state, the Left Front government is giving various proposals to the big industrial houses of the country, and bargaining hard to strike various deals. On this, the Left critics are very prompt to ridicule: why are we so appeasing and trying so hard to get them here? Such critics perhaps would have been happy, if Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee did remain sitting in the throne with an indifferent mood and the capitalists – in their own bourgeois-landlord state – crawl towards him, as the devotees do before their gods to gain his blessings! Maybe, therein lies their “purity” of Marxism! It is worth noting what Lenin had said after the revolution,  “Concessions to foreign capitalists (true, only very few have been accepted, especially when compared with the number we have offered) and leasing out enterprises to private capitalists definitely mean restoring capitalism, and this is part and parcel of the New Economic Policy” (Vol 33, page-64) “You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundred per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating along side you. Let them. Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. Since we must necessarily learn quickly, any slackness in this respect is a serious crime. And we must undergo this training, this severe, stern and some times even cruel training, because we have no other way out.” (Vol 33, page 72) He further said, “We communists shall be able to direct our economy if we succeed in utilising the hands of the bourgeoisie in building up the economy of ours and in the meantime learn from the bourgeoisie and guide them along the road we want them to travel.”

Therefore there is no genuine reason for these so-called Marxists to be so upset.

Questions are also being raised: well Tata is OK but why Salim group? Its Indonesian origin and friendly relations with Suharto, whose hands are soaked with the blood of communists, is their concern. But Marx was always concerned about the character of capital, not the character of the capitalist. Capital is a relation. Marx in his work, Capital said, “Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Marx had quoted T J Dunning in his work to describe how the capital behaves with the percentage of profit, “…with 300 per cent profit, there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.” Didn’t Chiang Kai Shek slaughter millions of communists? In spite of that, wasn’t he forced to join hands with the communists in the anti-Japan movement? And what about the Congressmen? Aren’t their hands too stained with the blood of our comrades? In that case, should we bring down their government at the centre, and let the BJP come to power? So, if by joining hands with a local enemy for a greater cause in politics is Marxism, then why is it not so, in the case of economic policies? America is responsible for the cold-blooded murder of millions of innocent Chinese and Vietnamese. Do they now reject American capital? Did not Cuba desire for American investment? In this context, let us go back to Lenin. While talking about British capitalist and most counter-revolutionary, Urquhart, Lenin had said, “And it is for the sake of relearning, I think, that we must again firmly promise one another that under the name of the New Economic Policy we have turned back in such a way as to surrender nothing of the new, and yet to give the capitalists such advantages as will compel any state, however hostile to us, to establish contacts and deal with us. Comrade Krasin, who has had many talks with Urquhart, the head and backbone of the whole intervention” (Speech at the plenary session of Moscow Soviet, November 20, 1922 -- emphasis by author) 

He had said all this after the end of the bloody revolution, when the working class state was established. West Bengal is a federal state in a capitalist feudal country. What its government has done is just a miniscule step compared to what Lenin was forced to do, even after the revolution. If this is what upsets these “true” Marxists so much, we request them to stop living in their imaginations and step into the real world.