May Day and the Struggle on the Ideological Field
This year’s May Day follows the Indian state’s deadline to eliminate Maoism “of the pen and the gun.” And it succeeded in neither; Marxism-Leninism-Maoism survives in India, both of the pen and the gun. Like a rabid dog of Imperialism without a leash, the Indian state has lashed out against all revolutionary masses and communist…
Whoever has been beaten down must rise to his feet!
Whoever is lost must fight back!
Whoever has recognized his condition – how can anyone stop him?
Because the vanquished of today will be tomorrow’s victors
And never will become: already today!Bertolt Brecht, In Praise of Dialectics.
This year’s May Day follows the Indian state’s deadline to eliminate Maoism “of the pen and the gun.” And it succeeded in neither; Marxism-Leninism-Maoism survives in India, both of the pen and the gun. Like a rabid dog of Imperialism without a leash, the Indian state has lashed out against all revolutionary masses and communist forces that refuse to cower, even at the cost of their lives. Trapped as it is, in its role as a subordinate comprador intermediary of imperialism, its standing rising and falling against competing South Asian states vying for the same favours, the state moves to clear all resistance, armed or unarmed, that might push it further into the mounting external and internal economic strain it already faces.
The internal aspect of this life and death class struggle of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, one that confronts the revolutionary movement not from without but from within it, is the line of Opportunism-Liquidationism-Revisionism (OLR). It is the domain of those who, driven by despair, cannot grasp the causes of setbacks, who bluster where they cannot think, find no way out but to raise a hue and cry about “changing times”, as if it could justify abandoning the most basic precepts of Marxism. On the contrary, for the left-line, the fundamental lessons of Marxism are only affirmed in times of setbacks. Rather than proving the precepts of Marxism wrong, the changing times and setbacks prove them right, and the task at hand is precisely to elevate them to the present situation. Treachery, betrayal, and deception of the International Proletariat, such has been the path of those who tread the path of surrender and liquidating the CPI(Maoist). Our magazine has, in the past, repeatedly helped expose to our readers the treachery of such elements, and clarified with regard to the Maoist position, constructed in continuity with the best lessons of the revolutionary history of communism, the sheer inanity of these trends.
But we must go further and expose the common refuge of those who, having soiled themselves at the tasks confronting the International Proletariat, have fled its ranks. What do these traitors seek? Having abandoned Marxism, they now stand with an insidious smile, shoulder to shoulder with the very butchers who have bled the working masses dry, raising high the document that “does not even have the value of a toilet paper for the vast majority of the Indian people.”1 Constitutionalism, Legalism and Pragmatism, often represented by the parliamentary pigsty, is where our Liquidationists have landed.
