The Hour has Struck

When a country has failed to keep in step with world developments and its normal political and social growth has been arrested due to the intervention of extraneous forces, then its arrested historical development gives rise to numerous political fetishism. In the false mirror of its atrophied historical destiny the classes are reflected in their false perspectives and wrong dimensions.

The colonial countries with their unfinished national revolution (bourgeois revolution) furnish us with the best examples of political fetishism. They prove conclusively how the arrested historical growth leads to the wrong estimation of the respective role of the classes.

In India, the bourgeoisie has been hailed as national revolution furnishes the best possible mask for the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and their reactionary fellow-travellers.

The Indian bourgeoisie has been hailed as the determining force of the national revolution, not only by the bourgeois leaders of the Congress but also by the Stalinists, the Royists, the Congress Socialists and the Forward Blocists, at one time or the other.

This has in the past led to a wrong estimation of the character of India’s national revolution. All sorts of “theories” were invented by the petty-bourgeois radicals whose intellectual myopia made it impossible for them to see that in the epoch of the sunset of imperialism, the Socialist Revolution alone can complete the tasks of the unfinished and unaccomplished bourgeois revolution.

Whatever causes might have been there for such confusion the past, we expected that the ‘Independence’ (!) that is in the process of being bestowed to India by British imperialism will clear up confusions and dispel all illusions. Unfortunately, our expectations have been belied. The “Leftist” fellow-travellers of the Indian bourgeoisie, such as the Hindusthani Socialists (the Congress Socialists in their latest camouflage) are still clinging illusion, as is clear from their loyal support to the reactionary Interim Government.

These “Leftists” do not seem to realise that neither the industrialisation of India nor the agrarian revolution in the countryside is possible if the present social order persists. The Indian industries walk on stilts of protective tariff and governmental subsidies. They have not the ghost of a chance of success in the competitive market against the European and American industries. Industrialisation in Europe and America took place in the dawn of capitalism and continued to develop in the period of capitalist ascendancy. In India, on the contrary, it has begun in the period of world crisis of capitalism and that of Socialist Revolution. It has, therefore, to face competition from the highly organised large-scale industries of Europe and America on the one hand and the ever-increasing pressure of the rising tide of Socialist Revolution on the other. On the basis of the existing capitalist relationship of production, the industrialisation of India has, therefore, hardly any future.

Then, who does not know that all the talk about the abolition of landlordism is just a political stunt of the bourgeois Congress and the League and of the petty-bourgeois hangers-on of these two parties! The abolition of landlordism with compensation means nothing but the robbing of the peasantry once more for compensating the robbers—the zamindars. Moreover, the agrarian reforms in the countryside cannot be carried out by just making the bourgeois state the zamindar, while leaving intact the old basis of land taxation. In one word, the re-organisation of the rural economy and the genuine industrialisation of India, both of these are wholly unrealisable within the framework of India’s existing social order. And it is exactly this very social order that the Interim Government and the imperialism-sponsored Constituent Assembly are busy protecting and strengthening. Already the Interim Government has let loose an unheard-of terror against the masses, evidently with the idea of giving the masses a pre-vision of the shape of things to come after June 1948. Moreover, as a result of the plan of economic collaboration so altruistically drawn up by both the Indian and the British bourgeoisie for the industrial development of India, she will remain in the vicious grip of British imperialist exploitation even after she has become ‘independent’.

No, the national revolution in India is not only far from being complete; it has not begun as yet. It is the sabotage of the national revolution that is being planned and worked out by the Congress, the Muslim League and those pseudo-Leftists, who since long are in the service of the bourgeoisie.

Political freedom and economic emancipation, the real essence of national revolution, can only be realised by the seizure of the state power by the masses and by the establishment of the Mazdoor-Kisan-Panchayat Raj the—Democratic Republic of Workers and the Peasants.

The preparation for this must be started at once. At all cost we must frustrate this devilish conspiracy of the Indian and the British bourgeoisie to suck the last drop of blood from the heart of the masses of India under the cover of ‘independence’, ‘national government’ and ‘economic development’.

The hour has struck for the preparation of the Socialist Revolution and for setting the stage for the final struggle for India’s independence.

Fighters for India’s freedom, comrades, carry this message to the masses and prepare them for the final struggle.

Saumyendranath Tagore

TOILERS’ FRONT
MAY 12, 1947.