Date: Sat, 6 Apr 1996 10:48:48 +0200
Subject: Re: Red Spain - and India


Responding to Rahul's charming offer in another place:

>>I would gladly discuss this phenomenon [lack of revolutionary clout
>>in India], historically in general and with regard to the prewar years
>>specifically, with anyone who had even half an independent thought based on
>>a quarter of an iota of knowledge.

Doug H wrote at another time:

>Actually I know next to nothing about India, something that
>embarrasses me and which I'd like to correct. Any advice on
>what to read?

You'll find an excellent historical primer in the Progress Publishers
anthology Marx and Engels 'On Colonialism', containing a lot on India and
China and some interesting things about Ireland. About India there are a
lot of articles covering the Mutiny of 1857.

To get a feeling for the seething vitality of the situation in the
subcontinent, Salman Rushdie's novels are excellent - Midnight's Children,
Shame (most particularly), and The Moor's Last Sigh.

An interesting book you might not have at your fingertips (I wonder how
much of an 'iota of knowledge' it represents for our arrogant Olympian
Rahul?) is

        Capital Accumulation and Workers' Struggle
        in Indian industrialisation
        The Case of Tata Iron and Steel Company 1910-1970

        by Satya Brata Datta, Almqvist & Wiksell International,
        Stockholm 1986


Others will be able to recommend other stuff.

In connection with theses put forward to the Second Congress of Communist
International in 1920 by the Indian revolutionary Manabendra Roy, Lenin
makes the following remarks in his Report of the Commission on the National
and the Colonial Questions July 26 (Sel Works III, p 459-460, Progress Pub
1967):

        The question was posed as follows: are we to consider as
        correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of economic
        development is inevitable for backward nations now on the
        road to emancipation and among whom a certain advance
        towards progress is to be seen since the war? We replied in
        the negative. If the victorious  revolutionary proletariat
        conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet
        governments come to their aid with all the means at their
        disposal - in that event it will be mistaken to assume that
        the backward peoples must inevitably go through the
        capitalist stage of development. Not only should we create
        independent contingents of fighters and party organizations
        in the colonies and the backward countries, not only at once
        launch propaganda for the organization of peasants' Soviets
        and strive to adapt them to the pre-capitalist conditions,
        but the Communist International should advance the
        proposition with the appropriate theoretical grounding, that
        with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries,
        backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and,
        through certain stages of development, to communism, without
        having to pass through the capitalist stage.

        The necessary means for this cannot be indicated in advance.
        These will be prompted by practical experience. It has,
        however, been definitely established that the idea of the
        Soviets is understood by the mass of the working people in
        even the most remote nations, that the Soviets should be
        adapted to the conditions of a pre-capitalist social system,
        and that the Communist parties should immediately begin work
        in this direction in all parts of the world.

        I would also like to emphasize the importance of
        revolutionary work by the Communist parties, not only in
        their own, but also in the colonial countries, and
        particularly among the troops employed by the exploiting
        nations to keep the colonial peoples in subjection.


Cheers,

Hugh




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