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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/37-100-years-of-communist-movement-in-india/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/37-100-years-of-communist-movement-in-india/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Not Just an Orchard, Not Merely a Field, We Demand the Whole World: The Thirty-Seventh Newsletter (2020).</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">September 10, 2020 - Vijay Prashad<br></div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_27069" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/06_-Telangana-Mallu-Swarajyam-Copy-co%CC%81pia-9.jpg" alt="Caption: Mallu Swarajyam (left) and other members of an armed squad during the Telangana armed struggle (1946-1951). Credit: Sunil Janah / Prajasakti Publishing House." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="444" height="277"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-27069" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Sunil Janah, <i>Mallu Swarajayam and other members of an armed squad during the Telangana armed struggle, 1946-1951</i>.</span></p></div>
<p>Dear friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="http://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>When news of the revolution in the Tsar’s empire filtered into
British-dominated India in 1917-1918, the reception was universal: if
they could overthrow the Tsar, then we can overthrow the British Raj.
But the temperature had risen beyond merely the removal of the British;
the barometric pressure had increased in the direction of a social
revolution. A liberal newspaper in Bombay wrote, ‘The fact is Bolshevism
is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product
of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of
ill-requited toil in order that a few thousands may revel in luxury’.
That economic system – capitalism – had created great wealth but it
could not improve the condition of the billions of people who produced
that wealth.</p>
<p>Spurred on by the October Revolution of 1917, Indian workers went on
strike after strike, eventually creating the All India Trade Union
Congress in 1920. The energy generated by the October Revolution and the
strike wave produced the conditions for the creation of the Indian
communist movement a hundred years ago. Revolutionaries in exile from
Berlin to Tokyo and revolutionaries inside India looked towards Tashkent
(in the Soviet Union), where their comrades formed the Communist Party
of India on 17 October 1920.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/20200831_Dossier-32_TT.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="444" height="233"></p>
<p>Our <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-32-communist-movement-in-india/">dossier</a> no. 32 (September 2020) is a tribute to the <i>One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India</i>.
It is not easy – in this brief format – to summarise the sacrifices and
challenges, the struggles and advances of the millions of Indian
communists over these hundred years; this dossier provides an
introduction to a complicated and resilient world of revolutionary
activism in a country that recently had – in one day – more COVID-19
cases than China has had during the entire pandemic.</p>
<p>Introducing the role of communists into the conversation in our time
can raises eyebrows, as some question the relevance of the tradition.
Meanwhile, despite the pandemic, in factories and fields, in call
centres and office buildings across India, workers continue to produce
the goods and services under the same oppressive conditions. Capitalism
dances between a major contradiction: between social production and
private property. Capital – namely Money that thirsts to make more Money
endlessly – organises all the forces of production into one effectively
organised social process that generates maximum profits to the owners
and minimum possible wages to workers. The remarkable network of social
production ties workers in one part of the world to another, brings
commodities from there to here. This network promised to link people
together and to allow humans to enjoy the fruits of each other’s labour.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_27079" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/07_-Samyukta-Maharashtra-Samiti-co%CC%81pia-2.jpg" alt="Caption: Members of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti headed by communist leader SS Mirajkar (third from right, wearing dark glasses) who was then the Mayor of Bombay, demonstrating before the Parliament House in New Delhi, 1958. Credit: The Hindu Archives." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="444" height="375"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-27079" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Members
of the Samyukta Maharasthra Samiti headed by communist leader SS
Mirajkar who was then the Mayor of Bombay, demonstrating before the
Parliament House in New Delhi, 1958.</span></p></div>
<p>The problem, however, is that the immense productivity of capitalism
stands on the foundation of private property. Capital is restless and
must always seek a profit. It is through the control of the production
process that capital exploits labour and draws out surplus value.
Private capital controls the system of social production, and
appropriates the social wealth produced, with little share to the actual
producers.</p>
<p>The control of capital over the production process prevents the
flowering of the creative power of human labour; the pressure of profit,
the fruit of private property, seeks to draw more and more from the
workers whose own resourcefulness is stifled by the demands of routine,
obedience, and conformity enforced by the social relations of
production.</p>
<p>Poverty is not an unfortunate manifestation of this system, but its
necessary product. To eradicate poverty – which is a shared human dream –
requires us to do more than seek welfare and charity. Charity and
welfare might lighten the immediacy of suffering, but they cannot do
more than that. To the early Indian communists, it was not enough to
remove the British from India and allow Indian capitalists to rule the
country; their philanthropy would be insufficient against the
reproduction of generations of poverty. The producing classes needed to
be organised to overthrow the system of private property and to found a
system based on socialist principles. That is what has motivated
generations of Indian communists, whose story is in our dossier, and
that is what motivates the left around the world in our time.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_27049" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/04_-Chittaprosad-Bhattacharya-page-from-the-only-surviving-copy-of-the-self-published-Hungry-Bengal-Bombay-1945-repr.-in-facsimile-by-DAG-Modern-New-Delhi-2011.jpg1440x1440-8.jpg" alt="Caption: A page from Hungry Bengal (1945) by Chittaprosad. Copies of the book were seized and burnt by the British; this drawing is from the only surviving copy (reprinted in facsimile by DAG Modern, New Delhi, 2011). Chittaprosad's drawings on the Bengal Famine were published in the Communist Party of India's journal People's War, helping to intensify popular anger against the British colonial regime." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="444" height="333"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-27049" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Chittaprosad, <i>Hungry Bengal</i>, 1945.</span></p></div>
<p>In July 1921, the Communist International formulated rules and advice
for communists around the world. Most of these rules are
straightforward. But one particular statement stands out: ‘For a
communist party, there is no time in which the party organisation cannot
be politically active’. This advice was useful seventy years later,
when the USSR collapsed, and the world communist movement suffered
greatly from its demise. History, it was said, is over: capitalism has
proved that it is now eternal and cannot be superseded.</p>
<p>Since 1989, the capitalist system has lurched from crisis to crisis,
unable to face its deeply rooted contradictions and unable to offer
solutions to endemic social problems. Marxism remains an essential
framework to analyse a system that continues to operate by its centuries
old rhythms. Capitalism has no doubt changed in many different ways,
developed a greater role for finance for instance; but it remains
governed by the system of social production and private gain, by
capital’s immense power over the system of production and accumulation.
Harsh conditions of work and life, the fight over labour time and
intensity, the pressures of unemployment and hunger illuminate the
centrality of class exploitation in our social order. This situation
calls upon the left to be ‘politically active’, to extend, to deepen,
and to unify the myriad struggles for concrete demands into a larger,
stronger movement. As each struggle develops, it provokes a response
from the capitalists and the state. And each response – often violence
by the police – has the potential, when combined with political
education, to clarify the political fight that must be waged by the
workers not for this or that reform alone but for the transformation of a
system that continues to generate poverty. The capitalist system, by
its nature, produces diabolical levels of poverty; the future does not
seem possible within the system.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_27039" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/03_-Godavari-Parulekar-7.jpg" alt="Caption: Circa 1946: Godavari Parulekar, leader of the communist movement and the All India Kisan Sabha, addressing the Warli tribals of Thane in present-day Maharashtra. The Warli Revolt, led by the Kisan Sabha against oppression by landlords, was launched in 1945. Credit: Margaret Bourke-White / The Hindu Archives." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="356" height="444"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-27039" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Margaret Bourke-White, <i>Godavari Parulekar addresses an All India Kisan Sabha gathering in Thane, 1945</i>.</span></p></div>
<p>A better way has to be possible. That is the great possibility of
socialism, the great hope that we can go beyond a system that
immiserates billions of people. For the 1983 film <i>Mazdoor</i> (Worker), Hasan Kamal wrote a song that captures the essence of this sentiment:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Hum mehnat-kash is duniya se jab apna hissa maangenge</em><br>
<em>Ek baagh nahin, ek khet nahin: hum saari duniya maangenge.</em></p>
<p>When we labourers demand our share of the world.<br>
Not just an orchard, not merely a field: we will demand the whole world.</p></blockquote>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/20200909_Julian-Assange_Square-e1599667994532.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="444" height="444"></p>
<p>The extradition hearing for Julian Assange opened in London on 7
September. Assange is wanted by the United States of America for
‘computer-related offences’; but the US government really wants him for
exposing US war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere (as I <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/09/01/the-us-is-determined-to-make-julian-assange-pay-for-exposing-the-cruelty-of-its-war-on-iraq/">detailed</a>
recently). The persecution of Assange has had a chilling effect on
whistle-blowers and on investigative journalism. It is the outcome
desired by the powerful.</p>
<p>Confidence does not return because of the courage of individuals. It
is when people such as the communists of India take to the streets in
the millions that ideas of peace become vital. That is why we stand with
publishers and journalists who – given courage by the mass movements –
reveal the terrible secrets of the powerful.</p>
<p>Warmly, Vijay.</p></div></div></div>
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