CPI(Maoist): a Marxist-Leninist Assessment
CHAPTER - II
Commentators have romanticised, deified and demonised 'Maoism' in many superficial ways; the point however is to appropriately assess this important trend and develop a correct political approach to it.
The Indian State’s and the ruling class’ attempts to demonise Maoists as ‘terrorists’ must certainly be vigorously resisted by the revolutionary left as well as by democratic opinion. It must also be recognised that among Maoist ranks there are undoubtedly many committed and courageous activists, including those who have developed from among adivasi people, who have risked lives to work in remote and neglected areas. The debate we seek to take forward is not over the character or commitment of Maoist ranks; rather it is over the assessment of Maoist strategy, tactics and practice in the context of the Indian revolution as well as current political challenges.
Strategy and Tactics Messed Up
To begin with, let us hear what Maoists themselves have to say about their strategy and tactics.
According to the document Strategy and Tactics,
“In the concrete conditions of semi-colonial, semi-feudal India where bourgeois democratic revolution too has not been completed and uneven social, economic and political conditions exist, the objective conditions permit the proletarian party to initiate and sustain armed struggle in the vast countryside.
“... No peaceful period of preparation for revolution is required in India, unlike in the capitalist countries where the bourgeois democratic revolutions were completed and armed insurrection is the path of revolution.”
Now, “semi-colonial, semi-feudal” – is this an immutable category with a set prescription for revolution applicable equally to pre-revolutionary China and present-day India? Don’t you see the enormous changes in Indian countryside – let alone urban areas – since Naxalbari, not to speak of the differences with China as it was some 70-80 years back?
“... No peaceful period of preparation is required”! On what ground do you base this assessment? And how do you propose to work in towns, cities and easily accessible plain areas which have strong networks of the state, and where the masses, while engaging in ‘drab everyday struggles’, are not yet ready for an armed showdown with the state? You really have no answer to this, and that is why you do not and cannot work in these areas.
In your schematic understanding, nationwide armed insurrection is prescribed for countries which have completed the democratic revolution, and the path of protracted war for countries where this revolution has not taken place and which are characterised by strong feudal survivals, uneven development etc. Now, many -- though not all – of the latter features were present in Russia (e.g., democratic revolution was not completed before February 1917) but Bolsheviks went in for insurrection. Can’t you think of an Indian path of revolution which may have ingredients of revolutionary experiences in Russia, China and maybe other countries but based mainly on the present characteristics of Indian society and polity?
Your General Secretary says in an interview in Open magazine, October 2009, “...it is true that our movement is stronger in the forests than in the plains and urban areas. This focus is linked to our path … of protracted people’s war. ... But, it is not correct to say that we have ignored the plain areas.” Would you please tell us in which “plains and urban areas” you have a “movement”? Why can’t you honestly say that your party line of singular emphasis on armed struggle does not provide any scope for such work?
In your opinion “boycott of elections, though a question of tactics,” (this is your concession to old-fashioned Leninism) “acquires the significance of strategy in the concrete conditions obtaining in India” (here you develop Leninism to the higher stage of your Maoism!). In other words, permanent boycott in a permanent revolutionary situation! It is futile to engage in serious theoretical debates with you; however we must put the historical record straight.
First, Lenin showed in Left Wing Communism – An Infantile Disorder that the question of participation or boycott is in no way related to the “degree of reactionariness” (to borrow a phrase from Lenin) of a particular parliament. Incidentally, the Russian Duma, which the Tsar convened and disbanded at will and which was as a rule dominated by Black Hundreds and other reactionary elements (thanks also to the patently anti-poor curia system) was arguably much more reactionary and impotent than our parliament.
Second, Lenin showed in the above pamphlet as well as in numerous other works like Against Boycott that under normal circumstances participation is almost obligatory for communists. It should also be noted that, out of about a dozen occasions, Bolsheviks boycotted elections only twice: once correctly (1905) and on the other occasion (in 1906) it was a small tactical mistake (as Lenin reckoned later). On all other occasions, even during the high tide before November Revolution and immediately after (in the elections to Constituent Assembly), they participated.
Third, the argument that participation in elections and parliaments have led to degeneration of many parties invites the retort that espousal of armed struggle too is known to have had the same effect on many armed groups/parties in India and abroad. Blaming a particular form of struggle for degeneration betrays a very superficial way of looking at things and has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism.
We know you are in no mood to listen to all this ‘revisionist’ logic. We also know what you actually do during election times. About that, later on.
In sum, the whole thrust of your strategy and tactics and therefore your activities is premised on the illusion that as in China during 1930s and 1940s, here too “armed revolution is confronting armed counterrevolution”. You visualise a permanent revolutionary situation. You do not know how to build approach roads to revolution, how to work patiently among the masses, taking their existing level of consciousness and activism as your point of departure and step by step raising that level through all forms of struggle, mainly extra-parliamentary but not excluding parliamentary forms, so as to gradually change the balance of class forces, which invariably gets reflected in people’s heightened consciousness and organisation, towards a mature revolutionary situation. You are ignorant of the essence of revolutionary tactics:
“Marxist tactics consist in combining the different forms of struggle, in the skilful transition from one form to another, in steadily enhancing the consciousness of the masses and extending the area of their collective action, each of which, taken separately, may be aggressive or defensive, and all of which, taken together, lead to a more intense and decisive conflict.” (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 20, P 210)
Incapable of grasping such revolutionary dialectics of the proletariat in theory, Maoists can only indulge in petty bourgeois left opportunism in their practical activities, as we shall now see.
Maoist Boycott: Participation by Other Means
Lenin opposed “passive rejection, abstention, evasion of elections” and advocated “active boycott... as a declaration of open war against the old regime, a direct attack upon it”, immediately adding, “unless there is a broad revolutionary upswing, unless there is no mass unrest which overflows, as it were, the bounds of the old legality, there can be no question of the boycott succeeding.”
Really, there is no question of the boycott tactic succeeding – in a Leninist sense -- in conditions generally obtaining in present-day India. But our clever friends have found a way to claim success. They want us to believe that the passive abstention of a large section of the people from elections shows that their boycott slogan is correct, conveniently forgetting that people who do not go to the polling booths are not generally involved in any “broad revolutionary upswing”. Going by their logic, the weapon of boycott would seem to be more successful in those advanced capitalist countries where polling percentages are even lower!
However, to themselves they concede that the importance of Parliament and State legislatures as the seat of political power cannot be wished away and that they too have a stake in which party forms government. So they cannot avoid taking part in electoral politics. But they do so in their own distorted ways: indirectly, secretively, conspiratorially, usually by supporting one reactionary party against some narrowly conceived “main enemy” -- another reactionary or “revisionist” party.
This tactic-turned-strategy was most ‘successfully’ implemented in Andhra Pradesh in the 2004 assembly elections. They enforced one-sided boycott on TDP and BJP while canvassing in favour of Congress candidates and the ‘success’ lay in the fact that Chandrababu Naidu, whom they had earlier tried to eliminate by pure ‘Maoist’ means, was now removed from power by parliamentary means and a friendly Congress government installed. It is another matter though that after some apparent progress in the talks that ensued, the friend suddenly turned hostile and launched a repressive campaign even more ferocious than that of Chandrababu Naidu.
In Bihar, during the Lalu era Maoists were widely known as “RJD during the day and Maoists by night”. In many places they used to mobilise votes and manage booths in favour of RJD candidates while trying to damage the prospects of rival contestants, ML nominees in particular. Acting in collusion with the then ruling RJD and the local police administration, they attacked the CPI(ML) office at Paliganj, Bihar, in August 2004 -- barely 6 months before the February 2005 assembly elections -- killing five comrades in their sleep at the dead of night and officially justified the killings.
In Jharkhand, where the erstwhile MCC already had a long and nasty record of killing our comrades, CPI(Maoist) squads allowed themselves to be utilised by the ruling BJP and the notorious SP of Giridih in gunning down comrade Mahendra Singh during election campaign in January 2005.
Such examples in their stronger areas have been replicated even in West Bengal in a somewhat different manner in the very different conditions obtaining there. They have had clandestine local level deals with both the CPI(M) and the Trinamool Congress (mostly with the latter) in different areas at different times to suit their own convenience. But the Maoists have also gone beyond such ‘local deals’ to express their open preference for Mamata Banerjee in no uncertain terms. In September 2009 Kolkata’s Ananda Bazaar Patrika and some other dailies published Politburo member Kishenjee’s detailed views on why he thought Mamata Banerjee was the fittest person to replace Budhhadev Bhattacharya as the Chief Minister. In recent months Ms Banerjee, now that her purpose has been served and she finds herself within striking distance from the coveted seat of power in West Bengal, has started distancing herself from Maoists; but that only proves her cunning – not any principled position on the part of CPI(Maoist).
Even if we set aside the aspect of secretive, indirect participation, abstention from politics – particularly from participation in elections – always boils down to subordination of the working people to bourgeois politics and constitutes a basic feature of anarchism. This is so because you just cannot cut yourself off from crosscurrents of dominant politics of the day, which can only be bourgeois politics in present conditions. And this subordination can happen in either of two ways: when the masses are left to the mercy of bourgeois electoral propaganda alone (since the ‘revolutionary party’ is absent from the scene) or when the latter, rather than fielding its own candidates and contesting independently, supports parties like RJD or Congress with an eye to some temporary gains for itself. The Maoists are masters of both methods.
The utter Maoist indifference to the task of combating bourgeois politics with revolutionary politics, especially in the arena of elections, can also be seen in the emerging phenomenon of ‘ex-Maoists’ joining the electoral fray in Jharkhand. It started initially as Maoists contesting the polls as independent candidates before Kameshwar Baitha, an erstwhile commander contested on BSP ticket from Palamau LS (SC) seat in a by-poll in 2006. Baitha finished second in that election and in 2009 he contested as a Congress-backed JMM nominee and won the polls. The Assembly polls in November-December 2009 saw a whole contingent of Maoist leaders contesting the polls in the state, most notably in the Palamau region, and almost all of them are JMM nominees. In the 2009 LS election we had put up a former Maoist leader from the Chatra LS constituency, but by the time of Assembly election we found him migrating to the RJD!
The CPI(M) too caters to the same subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics by means of all sorts of pacts with the latter, but they do so often with a different set of logic, like defeating the ‘main enemy’ and securing a few seats in the process, whereas Maoists want quid-pro-quo with dominant local leaders/major state parties/state governments. Subordination to bourgeois politics thus expresses itself both as social democratic parliamentary cretinism and anarchist “boycottism” (to borrow once again from Lenin, who said ‘left’ phrase mongers reduced the politics of Bolshevism to this narrow concept),with the CPI(M) taking pride in having the longest-running state government or the biggest contingent of left MPs (never mind the recent reversals) and the CPI(Maoist) complimenting itself for upholding what is commonly perceived as one of the most distinct hallmarks of pure, unadulterated Naxalism.
But this is a patently superficial and one-sided perception. Depending on assessment of situation, Charu Mazumdar advocated utilization of elections for the sake of revolutionary advance and he called for a boycott when that assessment changed radically. In the penultimate article of his celebrated Eight Documents written less than six months before the Naxalbari uprising he asked revolutionary communists “to take advantage of these elections to propagate our politics ... the politics of New Democratic Revolution... of worker-peasant unity under working class leadership, of armed struggle ...”
After the first UF government was formed, he wrote: "communists may join an alternative government with only one purpose – to create conditions for launching movements, and not to protect or uphold constitutional obligations. But if, instead of advancing along this path, calls for struggle are given on one hand and on the other the owning classes are assured that they have nothing to fear, the whole perspective of the struggle gets lost. The target of struggle itself gets blurred. This line inevitably leads to the path of class collaboration.”
It was only before the mid-term elections that was held after the implosion of the first UF government, that CM advanced the slogan of boycott. In late 1968, with the CPI(M) spreading constitutional illusions under the slogan of another UF government and communist revolutionaries longing for a direct assault on the state in a context of rapid upswing of revolutionary peasant movement, the question of choice of the path of struggle assumed decisive importance. The latter, much like Russian Bolsheviks in 1905, felt it necessary to fight constitutional illusions “with the utmost demonstrativeness. And that meant refusing to take part, abstaining oneself and holding the people back, issuing a call for an assault on the old regime instead of working within the framework of an institution set up by that regime.”
“In the present era when imperialism is heading towards total collapse, revolutionary struggle in every country has taken the form of armed struggle; Soviet revisionism, unable to retain its mask of socialism, has been forced to adopt imperialist tactics; world revolution has entered a new higher phase; and socialism is marching irrepressibly forward to victory ... the slogans ‘boycott elections’ and ‘establish rural bases and create areas of armed struggle’ ... remain valid for the entire era.”
Boycott elections and build base areas/areas of arms struggle – this integrated call was clearly premised on the assumed existence of a whole era of worldwide revolutionary upswing and rapid advance of socialism. This arguably proved to be a case of overestimation, but the lesson that must be learnt here is that the tactic of boycott is premised on the assessment of situation and employed not negatively but as a positive weapon so as to lead the people along a more direct course of action towards seizure of power. But to delink the boycott tactic from these basic conditions or to imagine that such conditions obtain permanently in a country like India is a clear travesty of Marxism-Leninism. Ostrich like, our Maoist friends bury their heads in the sands of the past because they lack the political courage to wield the difficult weapon of parliamentary struggle and continue to play with the great Leninist tactic of boycott.
This does not mean that communists should opt for the polar opposite – the parliamentary path. It is entirely possible and absolutely imperative to keep up the revolutionary spirit and uphold the revolutionary perspective even while participating in elections and waging parliamentary battles, as Lenin observed after the failure of the first Russian Revolution of 1905: “since the accursed counter-revolution has driven us into this accursed pigsty [the Duma – AS], we shall work there too for the benefit of the revolution, without whining, but also without boasting.”
It is in this spirit that true heirs to the legacy of undivided CPI(ML) has been developing a principled policy framework for parliamentary struggle: (a) take parliamentary forms of struggle as supplementary and subservient to extra-parliamentary forms, (b) participate in elections for the basic purpose of organizing powerful political campaigns with a view to projecting alternative policies in different spheres and heightening the political assertion of the working people as an independent force, (c) measure success mainly by our ability to integrate our election campaign with the basic movement of the people and raise the level of popular mobilization (d) where elected, raise the voice of popular movements within these bodies (from panchayats up to the parliament) and play the role of revolutionary democratic opposition vis-a-vis higher authorities, (e) reserve the boycott tactics for exceptional circumstances marked by, inter alia, an unmistakable upswing in revolutionary struggle.
Left Sectarian Concept of Mass Organisations and Mass Movements
Right from comrade Kanai Chatterjee in late 1960s through comrade Seetaramaiya in early 1980s to the present leadership of CPI(Maoist), this stream has repeatedly stressed the importance of mass organizations and criticized the undivided CPI(ML) for neglecting these. The MCC for example, organized the Nari Mukti Sangh, the Revolutionary Peasants Committee etc in late 1970s; but these never developed beyond being rather decorative appendages to the parent body, observing a few commemorative days like the International Women’s Day, Workers’ Day or November Revolution Day etc. The CPI(ML) PW made a more promising start by developing powerful mass movements under banners like the Rayathu Kuli Sangham (an organization of the rural poor), the Radical Students Union and so on. Through these it developed a broad mass base and a strong cadre force, but the good practice was aborted before long. As K Balagopal later pointed out, in the face of repression they underwent a political shift that would prove fatal. They made armed squads “the focal point of the activity” instead of “exposing the anti-poor bias of the government and extend[ing] their mass activity to a point that would have given their aspiration for state power a solid mass base”. One consequence of this was “The people for their part have come to look up to the squads as a substitute for their own struggle for justice. This has, on the one hand, created more enemies – victims of revolutionary arbitrariness – than they need have made, and, on the other, corrupted the masses into receivers of justice rather than fighters for it.”
The theoretical foundation of such lapse into anarchism is to be found in the Maoist document Strategy and Tactics. It talks of a wide array of mass organizations from “strictly underground revolutionary mass organizations” to “legal democratic organizations” to “cover organizations”, but only from a narrow militarist standpoint:
“While recognising the importance of mass organisations and mass struggles, we have to also keep in mind that in the revolution as a whole, it is war or armed struggle against state, that will be the main form of struggle and the army the main form of organisation. ... from the very beginning, our orientation, perspective and the method of building mass organisations and mass struggles should be to serve the war directly or indirectly.”
Well, perhaps such perception would be valid in pre-revolutionary China, but superimposing it on present Indian conditions betrays an obsession with war, i.e., partisan armed action against the state and/or the ruling party isolated from the natural objective course of peasant struggle and other popular movements. This has been most glaringly borne out in Lalgarh.
The CPI(Maoist) admits that the people’s movement in Lalgarh was a spontaneous one and the party “played the role of a catalyst.” [Ganapathy’s interview in Open magazine, October 2009.] Ganapathy also said “The people of Lalgarh had even boycotted the recent Lok Sabha polls, thereby unequivocally demonstrating their anger and frustration with all the reactionary ruling class parties.”
This second claim is totally unfounded. The adivasis, like people in Nandigram, were eager to vote, but without allowing the hated police in their villages. So, on their behalf the People’s Committee proposed that booths must be set up outside the villages where police boycott was still on. The government had to concede this demand and the people voted en masse, with the authorities providing free transport.
And what was this “role of catalyst”?
Like peasants in Singur and Nandigram who rose in arms against state-sponsored corporate land grab, adivasis in Lalgarh revolted against police atrocities demanding apology from and punishment for guilty officials. As in Nandigram, tens of thousands of women and men with their traditional weapons actively created their own liberated zone of sorts, very different from Maoist guerrilla zones that exist on the strength of firearms of guerrilla squads. It is this mass dimension that placed Lalgarh in the proud category of Singur and Nandigram and earned for it great support from all corners of India and abroad. What Maoists managed to do was to take over the reins of the movement from the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA) and mark it with typical Maoist features like serial killings, often with barbaric features such as murdering a teacher in front of schoolchildren, leaving the body of a slain CPI(M) cadre to rot under the sun for days together; and so on. In the process, much of the movement’s broad democratic appeal was lost and its distinct political voice muted, while the state government found what it was looking for: a pretext for launching the crackdown. The valiant adivasi masses are still carrying on their struggle against the state-centre joint para-military campaign, but unless the movement can free itself from the Maoist stereotype and find its independent political voice, we are afraid it stands the risk of being eventually subsumed by the ruling class agenda, whether in the name of “restoration of law and order” or “delivering development and good governance”.
Destroying the spontaneous dynamism of the masses in the name of armed struggle goes against Mao’s revolutionary mass line and constitutes the root cause why Maoists can never build real broad mass organizations; Lalgarh proves this once again.
Modus Operandi: Politics Commanded By the Gun
Of late, we are hearing a lot about Maoist development work. For example, in Dandakaranya region of Chhattisgarh they have helped the poor build irrigation tanks and wells. Such work has been compared to Gandhian constructive work/work of “good NGOs” and bestowed with generous praise from well-meaning reformist quarters and official circles (see "Report of an Expert Group to the Planning Commission", April 2008). However, this particular strand cannot be judged separately from Maoist praxis as a whole, and surely the main thrust or USP (unique selling point) of Maoist politics is not grassroots development work but sensational actions -- the kidnappings, political killings, raids on police stations, destruction of soft targets like unguarded railway stations and tracks and so on. This brand of politics runs, and can only run, on a vast network of extortion economics. Huge levy or tax is regularly collected from all kinds of sources in their areas of operation: from contractors and brick kiln owners to tendu leaves merchants and other industrialists and businessmen, from illegal forest product dealers and coal and iron ore miners to corporate houses and bureaucrats. With manifold increase in flow of funds into rural areas for various development schemes, Maoists now find it convenient to share a slice of this development cake too. The dependence on big amounts of money runs contrary to the cardinal revolutionary principle of reliance on the people, a key tenet in the example set by the CPC under Mao’s leadership in the course of the victorious Chinese revolution.
Even if the big amounts gathered through extortion is sought to be legitimized as ‘tax’, the problem is, by paying ‘tax’ the vested interests earn a license to loot and exploit, and a patron-client relation often develops between them and the ‘tax’ collector, and the masses are inevitably discouraged, even restricted, from launching movements against the exploiters.
Theory: Caricature of Mao Zedong Thought
The Communist Party of China (CPC) started its journey with the Russian Revolution as a model to be followed and constructed the Chinese path of revolution through trials and tribulations over a long period of time. Mao Zedong led and epitomized this collective endeavour in theory and practice, which he described as integration of the universal or general truth of Marxism Leninism with the concrete (historically evolved) conditions of China. Later the CPC coined the word Mao Zedong Thought to describe this process of integration and incorporated it as part of its guiding ideology along with Marxism-Leninism (not as a replacement, as the ‘Maoists’ have done). So did communist revolutionaries the world over, who seized upon this as the most advanced weapon for fighting modern revisionism during the international great debate of early and mid-1960s. Never – not even during the heyday of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – did the CPC found it necessary to ‘elevate’ it to the level of an “ism” at par with Marxism-Leninism. The same was true for comrade CM, recognised by friends and foes alike as the most ardent protagonist of Mao Zedong Thought in India and his cofounders of CPI(ML), who did not opt for the “Maoist” tag.
Not content with this whole tradition, the CPI(‘M’) has adopted “Maoism” as “the Marxism-Leninism of today”. However, it is not so much the use of the term per se, as its actual implications – as manifested in their theoretical deliberations and practical activities – that compel us to see the ideology and politics of this group as a poor parody of Mao Zedong Thought.
But are they not, with their effective stress on armed struggle, upholding what is most distinct, most fundamental in the teachings of Mao Zedong? Did not Mao famously said, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"? And was not the first phase of the CPI(ML) movement built on this very foundation?
The quotation mentioned above, like Marx's famous comment about religion being the opium of the people, is almost always used out of context to convey an absolutely distorted meaning. Those words find place in the article Problems of War and Strategy. After discussing the fundamental differences between bourgeois democracies and China, which “has no democracy” (being ruled by feudal warlords) and “no national independence” (being directly oppressed by different imperialist powers Mao elaborates on a “peculiarity of China’s” – literally every party or grouping, from Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang and the Progressive Party to extremely reactionary parties, have to have their own armies. In this backdrop and particularly in the context of national war of resistance to Japan, he wrote:
“.... Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.”
Our ‘Maoists’ forget these peculiar contexts of time and place, gloss over the huge differences between Indian and Chinese conditions and generalise the particular. By upholding and absolutising one part of Mao's teachings (political power growing out of a gun) in isolation from the other part (party, that is ideology and politics, commanding the gun), they in effect turn the whole thing upside down. Similarly, from the rich experience of the application of Mao Zedong Thought in Telangana and Naxalbari-Srikakulam, they have isolated the armed dimension (the element of squad activities) from the mass dimension (the element of broad peasant movement). Whereas CM was no advocate of isolated and exclusive armed actions – for him the two key phrases were “integration with the landless rural poor” and “politics in command” – our Maoist friends have delinked the whole question of arms from this essential context and have thus moved beyond the purview of the CPI(ML). Perhaps this was why they found it necessary to choose new names to describe their ideology and organization.
With their dogmatic adherence to the Chinese path, the CPI(Maoist) actually negates the very essence of Mao’s method. Mao had to conduct a firm struggle against Chinese dogmatists, who despite severe losses were bent upon blindly copying the Russian model in Chinese conditions. The famous formulation of Mao on the integration of the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete conditions of China arose only in the course of this struggle. In our country a similar struggle has to be waged, and is being waged, against the self-proclaimed Maoists by those who sincerely try to integrate Mao Zedong Thought with the concrete conditions of India.
Anarcho-Militarism Masquerading as Maoism
The outline sketch of India’s Maoism attempted above leads us to characterize it as a negation of Marxism-Leninism, a caricature of Mao Zedong Thought, and a deviation from the revolutionary legacy of CPI(ML) – as anarcho-militarism. We believe this characterisation traces so-called “Maoism” back to its basic ideological roots (anarchism) and at the same time brings out its most important specific feature or manifestation (militarism). Here anarchism is understood in the sense or senses in which founders of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought encountered it in their practical work, that is in course of organising the working people for revolution, and hence also in theory, as outlined earlier.
Anarchism, broadly defined as a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state or compulsory government to be unnecessary and/or undesirable, has been in existence within and without the arena of working class movement for a very long time. The most influential proponent of anarchism within the International Working Men's Association (First International) was Russia's Bakunin. He held that abolition of the bourgeois state was the immediate task, which the workers were to carry out not by forming a workers’ party, not by political struggle, but by ‘direct action’. In the words of Engels, “... since for Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing must be done which can keep the state... alive. Hence complete abstention from all politics. To commit a political act, especially to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle....” (Engels to Theodor Cuno, 24 January 1872)
After the historic defeat it suffered at the hands of Marx and Engels in the First International, it was no longer possible for anarchism to reappear as a wing of the working-class movement in its pristine countenance. But in newer forms it continued to resurface again and again as a disruptive trend that negates or neglects the role of protracted mass political work as a condition for the attainment of a revolutionary goal.
In Russia for example, anarcho-syndicalists rejected “petty work”, especially the utilisation of the parliamentary platform, and held that workers could capture factories and seize power through trade unions without a disciplined proletarian party. Other ultra-left trends also got mixed up with anarchism to produce various shades of “petty bourgeois semi-anarchist (or dilettante-anarchist) revolutionism” and Lenin summed up the experience of his lifelong struggle against such trends in Left-Wing' Communism -- An Infantile Disorder. One of the most concise descriptions of anarchism is to be found in his theses contrasting anarchism against Marxism (see box).
In China as in Russia, the Communist Party found itself engaged in a continuous “struggle on two fronts” -- against both right and ‘left’ opportunism or in other words against “rightist pessimism” and “left impetuosity”. In the article On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party Mao writes about “various non-proletarian ideas”, the first and fore-most being “the purely militarist viewpoint”. This viewpoint, says he, “regard[s] military affairs and politics as opposed to each other and refuse to recognize that military affairs are only one means of accomplishing political tasks. Some even say, ‘if you are good militarily, you are good politically; if you are not good militarily, you cannot be any good politically’ -- this is to go a step further and give military affairs a leading position over politics....
“Anarchism is bourgeois individualism in reverse.... Anarchism is a product of despair. [It is the] psychology of the unsettled intellectual or the vagabond and not of the proletarian ... Failure to understand the class struggle of the proletariat. Absurd negation of politics in bourgeois society. ...Failure to understand the role of the organisation and the education of the workers. ...Panaceas consisting of one-sided, disconnected means. ...Subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics in the guise of negation of politics.”
-- Lenin, Anarchism and Socialism, Collected Works, Volume 5
“The sources of the purely military viewpoint are... a low political level... the mentality of mercenaries... overconfidence in military strength and absence of confidence in the strength of the masses of the people...” (emphases added; notice the similarity with our ‘Maoists’)
Mao also takes note of alien ideas like “subjectivism”, “disregard of organisational discipline”, “the ideology of roving rebel bands” and “remnants of putschism”. The most important manifestation of putschism, he says, is “blind action regardless of subjective and objective conditions”, adding that “in its social origins, putschism is a combination of lumpen-proletarian and petty bourgeois ideology.”
This is how, in different ways in different climes and times, “petty bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism, or borrows something from the latter” (Lenin in Left-Wing Communism) tends to get mixed up with other alien tendencies and crop up “in somewhat new forms, in a hitherto unfamiliar garb or surroundings” (ibid), posing ever newer challenges to revolutionary Marxism. In the peculiar historical and social setting of our country, anarchism has evolved with a pronounced militarist overtone, compelling us to call them anarcho-militarists.
This characterization does not in the least deny that the CPI(Maoist) strikes a chord of sympathy and support among a section of students and intellectuals with revolutionary leanings. As Engels pointed out, anarchist propaganda “sounds extremely radical and is so simple that it can be learnt by heart in five minutes; that is why the Bakuninist theory has speedily found favour in Italy and Spain among young lawyers, doctors, and other doctrinaires. But the mass of workers will never allow itself to be persuaded...”
This is about the general political content of anarchism. As for the concrete manifestation in the form of militarism, it appears and reappears, in the full glare of media publicity, as a series of sensational military actions and, in theory, as feudal-bourgeois warmongering in reverse, as an exclusively militarist understanding and articulation of the whole gamut of strategy and tactics, as a doctrine of subordination of everything to a war in permanence.
Overall, the most crucial characteristics noted by Lenin in the boxed quotation should be easily discernible to anyone familiar with Indian Maoists: individualistic work style of dalams and federative nature of the organization (much like anarcho-syndicalism, where sections of workers and their trade unions worked under separate controls) with state and regional units operating autonomously in matters of extortions, executions etc, leading to frequent cases of “mistakes” admitted later by top leaders (as in the case of Francis Induvar murder in Jharkhand and attacks on polling officials in Chhattisgarh); reckless actions causing unnecessary inconvenience, even death, to common people
But did not the CPI(Maoist) evolve from within the revolutionary communist movement? Yes it did, and only through a process crystallized into the present shape of fully fledged anarcho-militarism trend. We shall now take a look at the course of this evolution.