Saorsa
26th April 2010, 03:26
A comradely critique.
http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/4197
Nepal
The recent experiences in Nepal bear out the analysis of the CWI and our approach to guerrillaism, peasant war and the stages theory which are usually linked together by the supporters of guerrilla struggle and peasant warfare as the primary means of struggle.
For more than a decade a peasant war in the countryside was waged by the PLA and CPN –M and conquered over 75% of the countryside. A country where 92 different languages are spoken and the population made up of 59% Hindus, 31% indigenous Janajatis and 5.5% and 4.3% Newars and Muslims, Nepal was one of the poorest countries in the world where only 15% of the population lived in urban centres.
Yet even here the working class was to play a the decisive role as the CWI anticipated in contrast to some others on the left who dismissed the potential of the working class in such countries. In March 2006 the Pakistani section of the CWI, Democratic Socialist Movement Pakistan, published the Urdu edition of this book on Che Guevara. In an introduction to that edition we argued that in Nepal the working class, although small in number had grown and was destined to play a crucial role. The percentage of the workforce working in manufacturing had grown from 1.1% in 1971 to 8.8% in 2006. Those employed in industries other than manufacturing had grown from 0.1% to 4.5%. Add to this those employed in the public sector and the working class was larger, in percentage terms, than in pre-revolutionary Russia -albeit in much smaller work places.
I’ll make a brief point here. It’s good that the CWI noted the size of the workplaces, as while it is technically true (in percentage terms) that there are more proletarians in Nepal than there were in Russia, the nature of the Nepali proletariat is totally different. Russia had centres of modern medium and heavy industry. Nepal does not. There is no Putilov in Nepal, and it’s industrial economy is well behind what Russia had in 1917. The important thing about large factories like the Putilov works is the way they allow large numbers of workers to come together, talk and share ideas, organise collectively and take action at the point of production. Nepal doesn’t have this. As compared to Russia with it’s enormous metalworks, Kathmandu is scattered with small metal fabrication workshops that are little more advanced than your average mediaeval blacksmith. So while the Nepali proletariat is a greater percentage of Nepal’s population, it is far weaker organisationally than Russia’s was, and is operating in a country far more backward.
In April 2006 a massive general strike broke out. Many of the elements of a classical revolutionary situation existed. This movement eventually resulted in the Maoists emerging as the largest parliamentary force.
I’m aware that the CWI was writing the intro to a book, which requires brevity. But to sum up the second Janaandolan and the subsequent emergence of the Maoists as the most popular party in the country in these two sentences is just ahistorical and inaccurate. I’ll make a few points here;
1. The Janaandolan was much more than just a general strike. To describe it as that, the CWI implies that it was primarily a movement that emerged when workers in Kathmandu downed tools. This would fit in with the CWI analysis and would be very convenient, if only it were true... but it isn’t. The Janaandolan encompassed most of the country and much wider sectors of society than just Nepal’s small urban proletariat, although admittedly the focus was always on Kathmandu, the power centre. Strikes and bandhs played a crucial role in the Janaandolan as a tactic, but to describe it as a general strike and leave it at that is very misleading. This incredibly important historical event deserves more in depth analysis than that.
2. The second Janaandolan did not just ‘break out’. Again, this is extremely misleading language. The Janaandolan was a political movement called and brought into existence by the Maoists and the Seven Party Alliance (the alliance of the banned bourgeois democratic parties). The Maoists and the SPA announced a general strike and the trade unions affiliated to them, along with the other wings of the various parties involved, prepared the ground for it and enforced it. The masses responded with great enthusiasm, but to say a ‘massive general strike broke out’ implies that this was a spontaneous wave of workplace strikes. That is not the case.
3. While the focus of the Janaandolan was in Kathmandu, as previously mentioned it was not limited to there. And a very important point which many people fail to understand is that a very large percentage (it is impossible to know the exact numbers) of the protesters in the streets of Kathmandu were not residents of Kathmandu, but were from villages in the nearby valleys and surrounding countryside who had been bussed in by the Maoists. This was a massive operation – in many of the liberated areas, it has been reported that the Maoists requested one member of each household to travel to Kathmandu. So to imply that the People’s Movement in the cities emerged independently of the People’s War is simply ahistorical. The Maoists had Kathmandu blockaded. They lifted the blockade in order to flood the city with their supporters from around Nepal. The King was overthrown by the Maoists, not by a spontaneous proletarian movement that had nothing to do with them.
4. While it is true that many elements of a ‘classical revolutionary situation’ existed, many crucial elements did not. The 2006 movement was similar in many ways to the current situation in Thailand – society was radically polarised, the masses were fighting in the streets to defend democracy, but the working people (particularly those in the cities) had not yet come to the conclusion that outright revolution to smash the state was necessary. There is no way of getting around this. Many foreign leftists have assumed that the only reason the 2006 uprising didn’t lead to an outright revolution is because of Maoist treachery. In fact, it is more accurate to say that the 2006 uprising only had the success it did thanks to the organisational capacity and support base of the Maoists, and their alliance with the bourgeois parties against the monarchy. At a time when they were able to split the parties from the King and together eliminate the main obstacle to revolutionary change in Nepal, the monarchy, why would they have forced the bourgeois parties back into the monarchist fold? The Congress, the UML, the various other bourgeois parties still had support. They still had political bases, particularly in Kathmandu and other urban areas. The Maoists did not want to force their authority on the masses at the point of a gun, and did not feel they could conquer Kathmandu militarily without causing an absolute bloodbath and inviting foreign intervention. So they changed their tactics and have spent the past four years manoeuvring the bourgeois parties into isolation from the masses and working to split the army. The masses in the cities were too politically divided and had not yet come to the conclusion that it was necessary to smash the state, rather than to ‘preserve democracy’. This was the Maoist analysis of the situation, and their work for the past four years has been devoted to changing this and preparing the masses for a revolt.
5. It is simply not the case that the Janaandolan ‘eventually resulted in the Maoists emerging as the largest parliamentary force’. It implies that their success in the Constituent Assembly elections was due to events during and after 2006, and that they somehow overcame their previous lack of support to worm their way into power. In actual fact, the Maoists have used parliament as an arena of struggle for their entire existence, with success from the start. In the early 90s, the Maoists were organised in a party called the CPN (Unity Centre), the predecessor of the CPN (M). It had an above ground front called the United People’s Front. The UPF took part in elections and won in places like Rolpa and Rukum, underdeveloped and horrifically poor districts of the country. On the basis of this popular support, the Maoists initiated radical social programs in these areas, which were met with fierce resistance by the local elites. In the 1991 elections, the UPF became the third largest force in parliament despite the bloody repression of its cadres. In 1996, when the Maoists presented their 40 demands and launched the armed struggle, they had comrades in parliament. And of course, the Maoists earned their popular support through the People’s War. They transformed Nepal, and the poor peasants flocked to the cause in their thousands. It was this movement that led to the Maoist success in the elections. They were already the most popular party in the country before the Janaandolan, it just took the elections for the rest of the world to realise it.
The 2006 People’s Movement is often brought up as ‘proof’ that the People’s War was a wrong strategy that didn’t lead to the overthrow of the monarchy, and it is often implied that the Janaandolan emerged independently of the People’s War. This is simply not the case. The Janaandolan exploded precisely because of the advance of the PW and the crisis it created for the ruling class.
Gyanendra dissolved parliament because of the advances of the People’s War, which had by that stage liberated 80% of the rural areas. And there are many suspicious things about the palace massacre that led to Gyanendra coming to power in the first place, which lead a lot of Nepalis to doubt the official version of events (that the crown prince went on a drug fuelled rampage) and to suspect that Gyanendra had the royal family murdered to facilitate him taking the throne. There is some basis for this. Gyanendra and King Birendra represented different factions of the ruling class, which was divided over how to deal with the Maoists. Gyanendra called for the army (generally seen as ceremonial) to be unleashed on the rebels, while Birendra resisted this and insisted it was a police matter. History is full of plenty of examples of warring factions within the ruling class engaging in violent conspiracies against each other. The significance of this is that Gyanendra’s rise to power and his subsequent actions were entirely due to the success of the Maoist rebellion, whatever you believe about the palace massacre. The Janaandolan took place because of and in the context of the People’s War.
However, rather than basing themselves on this movement and taking it forward to its ultimate conclusion and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government which would overthrow landlordism and capitalism they entered an interim government. They defended the Stalinist “stages” theory. Firstly, it argues it is necessary to establish a capitalist parliamentary democracy and develop the economy on a capitalist basis and only when this is achieved in the future move towards a socialist alternative.
They have already overthrown landlordism to a large degree, and are in practice overthrowing it more all the time. The land seizures never stopped. It should also be noted however that in most of Nepal, there are not many large landed estates with landless peasants working on them. The country is too poor and the land produces too little surplus to sustain a parasitic landlord class in much of the country. Instead, the contradictions are between loansharks and peasants, government agencies and peasants, and between different castes and ethnicities.
This paragraph claims that the Maoists seek to establish a capitalist parliamentary democracy and develop the economy only on a capitalist basis. This is not the case. The Maoists have been quite clear that what they are fighting for is a People’s Republic, not a bourgeois parliamentary republic, and that the contradiction between those two things is the primary contradiction in Nepal today. I can provide plenty of quotes to illustrate that point, but you’ve probably seen them all before so unless they are specifically requested I won’t bother for now. I don’t think this is a case of the CWI deliberately distorting the facts, rather that the CWI is seeing Nepal through eyes distorted by an outdated analysis. To argue that Prachanda’s approach in Nepal is just a rerun of Stalin’s line on Spain, or China, or whatever is not a historical materialist approach. The CWI divides the workers movement into Trotskyists and Stalinists (a division which is becoming increasingly nonexistent) and having applied the label Stalinist to the UCPN (M), the CWI is forced to analyse their tactical manoeuvrings with a preconceived faith that what they are doing is being done with the intention of institutionalising capitalist parliamentary democracy. The Maoists retain a parallel state structure – they still operate People’s Courts in the countryside, the YCL acts as a second and competing police force and they have over the past year done a lot of damage to Nepal’s parliamentary democracy! They prevented parliament from sitting for over half a year, they have unilaterally announced autonomous states for the oppressed nationalities... their practice has been the exact opposite of a party seeking to ‘establish a capitalist parliamentary democracy’.
And while I have no intention of starting a discussion about socialism in one country... I thought it was impossible? Which would surely make your talk of Nepal moving towards a socialist alternative somewhat unrealistic? The Maoists will do the best they can under the circumstances, but that will require a transitional form of society with both capitalist elements and socialist elements coexisting as Nepal struggles to advance further down the revolutionary road. If you have an alternative, suggest it. World revolution doesn’t seem to be on the cards at the moment.
Yet the experience of the Russian revolution demonstrated that the development of the economy, solution to the land question and the development of the society cannot in the modern epoch be achieved in countries like Nepal or the neo-colonial world by landlordism and capitalism. These tasks are linked together with the question of the socialist revolution and developing the revolution to other countries - in this case, countries like India, Pakistan and others in Asia. Through the establishment of a democratic socialist federation of these countries it would be possible to democratically plan and integrate the economies. On this basis it would be possible to develop the economies and societies and eliminate the grinding poverty and destitution which exists as a consequence of landlordism and capitalism and exploitation by the imperialist powers.
Well yeah, that would be wonderful. And the Maoists are very internationalist – they have done a number of things to support revolutions in their neighbouring countries, such as forming the Coordinating Committee of Maoist Parties of South Asia, and proposing that as revolution spreads their various countries could amalgamate into a regional federation. The Maoist leaders recognise the seriousness of this problem, with senior leader Bhattarai having this to say recently:
This question of socialism in one country is a theoretical question to be debated. This is the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. Imperialism always consists of uneven and unequal development, so revolution within a country is not only a possibility, it is a must, because revolution won’t break out all over the world at the same time. That’s impossible as long as imperialism remains and uneven development is there. This is a basic tenet of Leninism which still holds true and we should grasp it.
But in the specific case of a small country like Nepal, sandwiched between the big countries of India and China and being dictated over by US imperialism all over the world, if you don’t have support, international support, or there is no strong revolutionary movement, it will be very difficult to sustain the revolution. It may be possible to carry out the revolution to capture state power, but to sustain the state power and develop in the direction of socialism and communism we will need support from the international proletarian movement. That way the level of international support and international proletarian solidarity is important. After the growing influence of so-called globalisation, imperialist globalisation, the reaches of the imperialist power have gone to every corner of the world. If there is no strong international proletarian organisation to fight against imperialist intervention and domination, it will be difficult to sustain the revolution in one small country.
Keeping this in mind, we must however make revolution in our country, this is a must. But to sustain it and develop it further we need the backing of the international proletarian forces. For that we have to give more importance to internet work and the international community. This need is more important in the case of small countries like Nepal. In fact, in recent months we have been discussing this issue. To complete the revolution in Nepal and sustain it and develop it further, at least in the South Asian context, we need to have strong revolutionary solidarity and we need the backing from the international proletarian movement. We feel the events of the international proletarian movement worldwide and some of the institutions that are being developed are all important, like the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), the Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties in South Asia (CCOMPOSA) and the World People’s Resistance Movement (WPRM). These type of organisations are very important for the success of the revolution and to gather support at the international level for the success of our revolution.
But while what the CWI is saying here is true and the revolution does need to spread, this will not be achieved through willpower and wishful thinking. The revolution will spread abroad when the objective conditions are suitable for it to do so. A revolution in Nepal will not magically trigger one in India, however much we may want it to. The Trotskyist notion that revolution will spread like wildfire unless it is betrayed by evil Stalinoid leaders is without basis in reality.
The failure of the “stages theory” is now being tragically demonstrated by events in Nepal. As a consequence of this policy Nepal remains in crisis and is currently stuck in a cul-de-sac. The Maoist Prime Minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as Prachanda, and the United Communist Party of Nepal –Maoist, UCP-M, have, resigned from the government, leaving a right-wing 20 plus party coalition in power. Any party of the left which joins a capitalist coalition will eventually have to choose between attacking the workers and the poor or being removed. The resignations followed the refusal of the President Ram Yadav, to dismiss the Nepalese army chief, General Rookmangud Katawal who had refused to incorporate the guerrilla forces into the standing army and who remains one of the former Royalist elite.
I take it that the CWI believe the resignation of the Maoists from government, which refused to attack the workers, the poor and the nation, proves that they are very much a ‘party of the left’? Either way, I’ve explained the Maoist entry into government here. It is not in any way proof of the failure of some mythical ‘stages theory’ – rather, it was a tactical move on the part of the UCPN (M) to dispel illusions in the parliamentary system and prepare the ground for the struggles to come.
Following their entry into the “interim government” the Maoists saw some erosion of their support as the revolution failed to advance.
This is not accurate, and there is no evidence to suggest this whatsoever. All the evidence points towards the Maoists having significantly increased their support in the urban areas in recent years, and while it is difficult to ascertain their exact levels of support in the countryside, there is no evidence to indicate they’ve shrunk. The Maoists recently organised massive demonstrations in every single district of the country. They are currently shutting down every single private high school in Nepal. At the last by elections, they started with two out of six seats and ended with three. Workers are switching from UML unions to Maoist unions in the few places where Maoists unions aren’t completely dominant. This is an assertion without any basis in fact.
They are now having to send some of their cadres back to the countryside to try and rebuild their support and are threatening to launch a further rural struggle having lost the opportunity to complete the revolution which broke out in 2006.
These cadre aren’t going back to rebuild lost support, they’re going into the countryside to prepare for the ‘final battle’ and the ‘decisive struggle’ to come. They’re conducting military training, organising donation drives and preparing the party cadres for a massive movement in the streets. They haven’t lost the opportunity to complete the Nepali revolution, and there was never a revolution which ‘broke out’ in 2006. There was a series of massive demonstrations that led to the King resigning from power, but these demonstrations emerged out of the struggles that preceded them, not out of thin air.
In the rural areas some of their forces are now being subject to attack in areas like Tarai through the emergence of armed groups like the Tarai Liberation Front.
True. However they have taken steps to deal with that, forming armed self-defence committees in the Terai and training their cadre in military methods across the country.
This is partly in response to some of the methods used by the Maoists during the civil war and also their wrong approach towards dealing with some of the national groups like the Tarai peoples.
In response to the Maoist’s methods? What does that even mean? The armed struggle has finished, and I very much doubt that many of the mercenaries attacking their cadre are acting in revenge for what they suffered during the People’s War. And even if they are, that would make them a landlord or a reactionary, in which case I find it hard to argue against whatever brutality they received at the hand of the masses. Most peasants aren’t aware of the Geneva Convention. But that aside, this is a strange thing to say and requires some proof to back it up.
As for the second claim, it would be nice to see some elaboration on what this ‘wrong approach’ was and why it was wrong. Groups like the Terai Liberation Front and the various other armed gangs in the Terai at the moment are not authentic liberation armies. They are death squads of the landed elite, set up either by India or the Nepal Army, and they target the Maoists because of the UCPN (M)’s commitment to class struggle between the peasants and the landlords. The Terai is the most agriculturally productive area of Nepal and is one of the few areas with real peasant/landlord contradictions.
The main criticism these groups have of the Maoist approach to the national people’s of the Terai (Madhes, Limbuwan, Kochila, Tharuwan etc) is that they give too much self-determination to the groups of the Terai. These Terai gangster organisations that are currently attacking the Maoist cadre tend to be of Madhesi origin. Madhesis are the largest nationality in the Terai, but by no means the only one. Some Madhesis support the concept of ‘One Madhesh, One Pradesh” which translates as a demand for a single Madhesh state encompassing the entire Terai. They accuse the Maoists, who have supported the rights of the other previously mentioned groups to self-determination and declared them autonomous states, of seeking to divide the Terai and attack Madhesis. This is essentially a conflict between Maoism and it’s commitment to self determination for all people’s, and Madhesi chauvinism. So to assume from the fact that some ethnic sounding groups are attacking the Maoists that the Maoists have taken a ‘wrong’ approach to the Terai is, to put it bluntly, bad journalism.
The erosion of their support escalated following their entry into the “interim government”. The “stages theory” and methods used by the Maoists forces have taken the Nepalese struggle into a dead end. The on going social and political crisis however will certainly mean new social explosions can erupt again.
As I’ve pointed out, there is no evidence to indicate an erosion of support. After all, the CA elections took place well after the Maoists entered into the interim government, and they did pretty well in them! Time will tell whether their strategy is a dead end.
Trotskyism and New Discussions
The crisis, in Nepal, and dead end of the “stages theory” and Maoist ideas have begun to open discussion about the lessons of the struggle. Significantly, reflecting its growing relevance, the question of Trotskyism has been raised in this discussion. A leading Maoist, Baburham Bhattarai, a member of the politburo of the UCPN (M), and former Minister of Finance, has invoked the question of Trotskyism. Writing in July 2009 in the UCPN (M) journal ‘The Red Spark’ he commented: “In this context, Marxist revolutionaries, should recognize that in fact in the current context, Trotskyism, has become more relevant than Stalinism to advance the cause of the proletariat”.
We shouldn’t read too much into this. For one thing, I don’t believe there is a journal called the Red Spark. There’s the Red Star, but no spark. This should indicate some of the translation issues here. Bhattarai almost certainly didn’t say that in Nepali. But even if he did, this doesn’t indicate that the UCPN (M) is preparing to adopt Trotskyism or anything like that. What it indicates is that Bhattarai is a very well read guy who’s engaged with a wide variety of ideas. He’s quote Rosa Luxembourg a number of times before – does this indicate that Bhattarai is a council communist? This single quote is not very significant at all.
Bhattarai has not drawn the correct conclusions or understood the essence of Trotsky’s ideas. He has distorted them and used them to justify a more right-wing social democratic position. However, it is extremely significant that a Maoist leader should invoke Trotskyism. Genuine Trotskyism stresses the need to break decisively with capitalism as well as feudalism-monarchism, even in a poor, neo-colonial society like Nepal. Only by taking such measures would it be possible to develop Nepal economically and socially and break the constraints imposed on it by imperialism, capitalism and land-lordism.But to defend and implement a revolutionary socialist agenda, of nationalisations under workers’ control, radical land reform, full equality and self-determination for the national minorities, a workers’ and poor peasants’ government in Nepal would have to appeal to the exploited masses and especially the proletariat of India, China and the entire world, and to spread the revolution globally. This is a completely different conception of the tasks facing the movement in Nepal compared to Bhattarai, who seeks to lower his followers’ expectations and confine the struggle to ’bourgeois democracy’.
Bhattarai does not seek to confine the struggle to that at all, and it is extremely misleading to put ‘bourgeois democracy’ in quotes as if you’re quoting from somewhere that he does advocate that.
Bhattarai recently summed up his views on how democracy should be practiced after the revolution:
The practice of democracy in imperialist counties is a form of bourgeois democracy, a ritual that deceives the masses of people and perpetuates the rule of their class state. But what we are talking about is not organising elections within the bourgeois state, we are talking about after the revolution in a New Democratic or socialistic framework, where there will be certain constitutional provisions whereby the reactionaries, imperialists and criminal forces will not be allowed to participate. Only the progressive forces, the democratic forces and people will be allowed to compete. That is the competition within the New Democratic or socialist framework we are talking about. This is a basic difference. After the revolution, the first thing we will do will be redistribution of property. There will no longer be rich and poor, a big gap between the haves and the have-nots. That way when we organise competition there will be an equal chance for people to compete. But in the given framework of the imperialist and bourgeois democratic system there is a huge gap between the propertied and property-less working class. The competition is so uneven that the property-less working class can never compete with the propertied, the bourgeois and imperialist class. That way, only after carrying out this redistribution of property in a socialistic and New Democratic manner can you organise political competition where there will be a fair chance of everyone to compete on an equal footing. Our idea of competition in a New Democratic and socialist framework is therefore fundamentally different from the formal competition and practice in a bourgeois democratic and imperialist state. The difference in the class nature of the state should be appreciated.
http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/4197
Nepal
The recent experiences in Nepal bear out the analysis of the CWI and our approach to guerrillaism, peasant war and the stages theory which are usually linked together by the supporters of guerrilla struggle and peasant warfare as the primary means of struggle.
For more than a decade a peasant war in the countryside was waged by the PLA and CPN –M and conquered over 75% of the countryside. A country where 92 different languages are spoken and the population made up of 59% Hindus, 31% indigenous Janajatis and 5.5% and 4.3% Newars and Muslims, Nepal was one of the poorest countries in the world where only 15% of the population lived in urban centres.
Yet even here the working class was to play a the decisive role as the CWI anticipated in contrast to some others on the left who dismissed the potential of the working class in such countries. In March 2006 the Pakistani section of the CWI, Democratic Socialist Movement Pakistan, published the Urdu edition of this book on Che Guevara. In an introduction to that edition we argued that in Nepal the working class, although small in number had grown and was destined to play a crucial role. The percentage of the workforce working in manufacturing had grown from 1.1% in 1971 to 8.8% in 2006. Those employed in industries other than manufacturing had grown from 0.1% to 4.5%. Add to this those employed in the public sector and the working class was larger, in percentage terms, than in pre-revolutionary Russia -albeit in much smaller work places.
I’ll make a brief point here. It’s good that the CWI noted the size of the workplaces, as while it is technically true (in percentage terms) that there are more proletarians in Nepal than there were in Russia, the nature of the Nepali proletariat is totally different. Russia had centres of modern medium and heavy industry. Nepal does not. There is no Putilov in Nepal, and it’s industrial economy is well behind what Russia had in 1917. The important thing about large factories like the Putilov works is the way they allow large numbers of workers to come together, talk and share ideas, organise collectively and take action at the point of production. Nepal doesn’t have this. As compared to Russia with it’s enormous metalworks, Kathmandu is scattered with small metal fabrication workshops that are little more advanced than your average mediaeval blacksmith. So while the Nepali proletariat is a greater percentage of Nepal’s population, it is far weaker organisationally than Russia’s was, and is operating in a country far more backward.
In April 2006 a massive general strike broke out. Many of the elements of a classical revolutionary situation existed. This movement eventually resulted in the Maoists emerging as the largest parliamentary force.
I’m aware that the CWI was writing the intro to a book, which requires brevity. But to sum up the second Janaandolan and the subsequent emergence of the Maoists as the most popular party in the country in these two sentences is just ahistorical and inaccurate. I’ll make a few points here;
1. The Janaandolan was much more than just a general strike. To describe it as that, the CWI implies that it was primarily a movement that emerged when workers in Kathmandu downed tools. This would fit in with the CWI analysis and would be very convenient, if only it were true... but it isn’t. The Janaandolan encompassed most of the country and much wider sectors of society than just Nepal’s small urban proletariat, although admittedly the focus was always on Kathmandu, the power centre. Strikes and bandhs played a crucial role in the Janaandolan as a tactic, but to describe it as a general strike and leave it at that is very misleading. This incredibly important historical event deserves more in depth analysis than that.
2. The second Janaandolan did not just ‘break out’. Again, this is extremely misleading language. The Janaandolan was a political movement called and brought into existence by the Maoists and the Seven Party Alliance (the alliance of the banned bourgeois democratic parties). The Maoists and the SPA announced a general strike and the trade unions affiliated to them, along with the other wings of the various parties involved, prepared the ground for it and enforced it. The masses responded with great enthusiasm, but to say a ‘massive general strike broke out’ implies that this was a spontaneous wave of workplace strikes. That is not the case.
3. While the focus of the Janaandolan was in Kathmandu, as previously mentioned it was not limited to there. And a very important point which many people fail to understand is that a very large percentage (it is impossible to know the exact numbers) of the protesters in the streets of Kathmandu were not residents of Kathmandu, but were from villages in the nearby valleys and surrounding countryside who had been bussed in by the Maoists. This was a massive operation – in many of the liberated areas, it has been reported that the Maoists requested one member of each household to travel to Kathmandu. So to imply that the People’s Movement in the cities emerged independently of the People’s War is simply ahistorical. The Maoists had Kathmandu blockaded. They lifted the blockade in order to flood the city with their supporters from around Nepal. The King was overthrown by the Maoists, not by a spontaneous proletarian movement that had nothing to do with them.
4. While it is true that many elements of a ‘classical revolutionary situation’ existed, many crucial elements did not. The 2006 movement was similar in many ways to the current situation in Thailand – society was radically polarised, the masses were fighting in the streets to defend democracy, but the working people (particularly those in the cities) had not yet come to the conclusion that outright revolution to smash the state was necessary. There is no way of getting around this. Many foreign leftists have assumed that the only reason the 2006 uprising didn’t lead to an outright revolution is because of Maoist treachery. In fact, it is more accurate to say that the 2006 uprising only had the success it did thanks to the organisational capacity and support base of the Maoists, and their alliance with the bourgeois parties against the monarchy. At a time when they were able to split the parties from the King and together eliminate the main obstacle to revolutionary change in Nepal, the monarchy, why would they have forced the bourgeois parties back into the monarchist fold? The Congress, the UML, the various other bourgeois parties still had support. They still had political bases, particularly in Kathmandu and other urban areas. The Maoists did not want to force their authority on the masses at the point of a gun, and did not feel they could conquer Kathmandu militarily without causing an absolute bloodbath and inviting foreign intervention. So they changed their tactics and have spent the past four years manoeuvring the bourgeois parties into isolation from the masses and working to split the army. The masses in the cities were too politically divided and had not yet come to the conclusion that it was necessary to smash the state, rather than to ‘preserve democracy’. This was the Maoist analysis of the situation, and their work for the past four years has been devoted to changing this and preparing the masses for a revolt.
5. It is simply not the case that the Janaandolan ‘eventually resulted in the Maoists emerging as the largest parliamentary force’. It implies that their success in the Constituent Assembly elections was due to events during and after 2006, and that they somehow overcame their previous lack of support to worm their way into power. In actual fact, the Maoists have used parliament as an arena of struggle for their entire existence, with success from the start. In the early 90s, the Maoists were organised in a party called the CPN (Unity Centre), the predecessor of the CPN (M). It had an above ground front called the United People’s Front. The UPF took part in elections and won in places like Rolpa and Rukum, underdeveloped and horrifically poor districts of the country. On the basis of this popular support, the Maoists initiated radical social programs in these areas, which were met with fierce resistance by the local elites. In the 1991 elections, the UPF became the third largest force in parliament despite the bloody repression of its cadres. In 1996, when the Maoists presented their 40 demands and launched the armed struggle, they had comrades in parliament. And of course, the Maoists earned their popular support through the People’s War. They transformed Nepal, and the poor peasants flocked to the cause in their thousands. It was this movement that led to the Maoist success in the elections. They were already the most popular party in the country before the Janaandolan, it just took the elections for the rest of the world to realise it.
The 2006 People’s Movement is often brought up as ‘proof’ that the People’s War was a wrong strategy that didn’t lead to the overthrow of the monarchy, and it is often implied that the Janaandolan emerged independently of the People’s War. This is simply not the case. The Janaandolan exploded precisely because of the advance of the PW and the crisis it created for the ruling class.
Gyanendra dissolved parliament because of the advances of the People’s War, which had by that stage liberated 80% of the rural areas. And there are many suspicious things about the palace massacre that led to Gyanendra coming to power in the first place, which lead a lot of Nepalis to doubt the official version of events (that the crown prince went on a drug fuelled rampage) and to suspect that Gyanendra had the royal family murdered to facilitate him taking the throne. There is some basis for this. Gyanendra and King Birendra represented different factions of the ruling class, which was divided over how to deal with the Maoists. Gyanendra called for the army (generally seen as ceremonial) to be unleashed on the rebels, while Birendra resisted this and insisted it was a police matter. History is full of plenty of examples of warring factions within the ruling class engaging in violent conspiracies against each other. The significance of this is that Gyanendra’s rise to power and his subsequent actions were entirely due to the success of the Maoist rebellion, whatever you believe about the palace massacre. The Janaandolan took place because of and in the context of the People’s War.
However, rather than basing themselves on this movement and taking it forward to its ultimate conclusion and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government which would overthrow landlordism and capitalism they entered an interim government. They defended the Stalinist “stages” theory. Firstly, it argues it is necessary to establish a capitalist parliamentary democracy and develop the economy on a capitalist basis and only when this is achieved in the future move towards a socialist alternative.
They have already overthrown landlordism to a large degree, and are in practice overthrowing it more all the time. The land seizures never stopped. It should also be noted however that in most of Nepal, there are not many large landed estates with landless peasants working on them. The country is too poor and the land produces too little surplus to sustain a parasitic landlord class in much of the country. Instead, the contradictions are between loansharks and peasants, government agencies and peasants, and between different castes and ethnicities.
This paragraph claims that the Maoists seek to establish a capitalist parliamentary democracy and develop the economy only on a capitalist basis. This is not the case. The Maoists have been quite clear that what they are fighting for is a People’s Republic, not a bourgeois parliamentary republic, and that the contradiction between those two things is the primary contradiction in Nepal today. I can provide plenty of quotes to illustrate that point, but you’ve probably seen them all before so unless they are specifically requested I won’t bother for now. I don’t think this is a case of the CWI deliberately distorting the facts, rather that the CWI is seeing Nepal through eyes distorted by an outdated analysis. To argue that Prachanda’s approach in Nepal is just a rerun of Stalin’s line on Spain, or China, or whatever is not a historical materialist approach. The CWI divides the workers movement into Trotskyists and Stalinists (a division which is becoming increasingly nonexistent) and having applied the label Stalinist to the UCPN (M), the CWI is forced to analyse their tactical manoeuvrings with a preconceived faith that what they are doing is being done with the intention of institutionalising capitalist parliamentary democracy. The Maoists retain a parallel state structure – they still operate People’s Courts in the countryside, the YCL acts as a second and competing police force and they have over the past year done a lot of damage to Nepal’s parliamentary democracy! They prevented parliament from sitting for over half a year, they have unilaterally announced autonomous states for the oppressed nationalities... their practice has been the exact opposite of a party seeking to ‘establish a capitalist parliamentary democracy’.
And while I have no intention of starting a discussion about socialism in one country... I thought it was impossible? Which would surely make your talk of Nepal moving towards a socialist alternative somewhat unrealistic? The Maoists will do the best they can under the circumstances, but that will require a transitional form of society with both capitalist elements and socialist elements coexisting as Nepal struggles to advance further down the revolutionary road. If you have an alternative, suggest it. World revolution doesn’t seem to be on the cards at the moment.
Yet the experience of the Russian revolution demonstrated that the development of the economy, solution to the land question and the development of the society cannot in the modern epoch be achieved in countries like Nepal or the neo-colonial world by landlordism and capitalism. These tasks are linked together with the question of the socialist revolution and developing the revolution to other countries - in this case, countries like India, Pakistan and others in Asia. Through the establishment of a democratic socialist federation of these countries it would be possible to democratically plan and integrate the economies. On this basis it would be possible to develop the economies and societies and eliminate the grinding poverty and destitution which exists as a consequence of landlordism and capitalism and exploitation by the imperialist powers.
Well yeah, that would be wonderful. And the Maoists are very internationalist – they have done a number of things to support revolutions in their neighbouring countries, such as forming the Coordinating Committee of Maoist Parties of South Asia, and proposing that as revolution spreads their various countries could amalgamate into a regional federation. The Maoist leaders recognise the seriousness of this problem, with senior leader Bhattarai having this to say recently:
This question of socialism in one country is a theoretical question to be debated. This is the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. Imperialism always consists of uneven and unequal development, so revolution within a country is not only a possibility, it is a must, because revolution won’t break out all over the world at the same time. That’s impossible as long as imperialism remains and uneven development is there. This is a basic tenet of Leninism which still holds true and we should grasp it.
But in the specific case of a small country like Nepal, sandwiched between the big countries of India and China and being dictated over by US imperialism all over the world, if you don’t have support, international support, or there is no strong revolutionary movement, it will be very difficult to sustain the revolution. It may be possible to carry out the revolution to capture state power, but to sustain the state power and develop in the direction of socialism and communism we will need support from the international proletarian movement. That way the level of international support and international proletarian solidarity is important. After the growing influence of so-called globalisation, imperialist globalisation, the reaches of the imperialist power have gone to every corner of the world. If there is no strong international proletarian organisation to fight against imperialist intervention and domination, it will be difficult to sustain the revolution in one small country.
Keeping this in mind, we must however make revolution in our country, this is a must. But to sustain it and develop it further we need the backing of the international proletarian forces. For that we have to give more importance to internet work and the international community. This need is more important in the case of small countries like Nepal. In fact, in recent months we have been discussing this issue. To complete the revolution in Nepal and sustain it and develop it further, at least in the South Asian context, we need to have strong revolutionary solidarity and we need the backing from the international proletarian movement. We feel the events of the international proletarian movement worldwide and some of the institutions that are being developed are all important, like the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), the Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties in South Asia (CCOMPOSA) and the World People’s Resistance Movement (WPRM). These type of organisations are very important for the success of the revolution and to gather support at the international level for the success of our revolution.
But while what the CWI is saying here is true and the revolution does need to spread, this will not be achieved through willpower and wishful thinking. The revolution will spread abroad when the objective conditions are suitable for it to do so. A revolution in Nepal will not magically trigger one in India, however much we may want it to. The Trotskyist notion that revolution will spread like wildfire unless it is betrayed by evil Stalinoid leaders is without basis in reality.
The failure of the “stages theory” is now being tragically demonstrated by events in Nepal. As a consequence of this policy Nepal remains in crisis and is currently stuck in a cul-de-sac. The Maoist Prime Minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as Prachanda, and the United Communist Party of Nepal –Maoist, UCP-M, have, resigned from the government, leaving a right-wing 20 plus party coalition in power. Any party of the left which joins a capitalist coalition will eventually have to choose between attacking the workers and the poor or being removed. The resignations followed the refusal of the President Ram Yadav, to dismiss the Nepalese army chief, General Rookmangud Katawal who had refused to incorporate the guerrilla forces into the standing army and who remains one of the former Royalist elite.
I take it that the CWI believe the resignation of the Maoists from government, which refused to attack the workers, the poor and the nation, proves that they are very much a ‘party of the left’? Either way, I’ve explained the Maoist entry into government here. It is not in any way proof of the failure of some mythical ‘stages theory’ – rather, it was a tactical move on the part of the UCPN (M) to dispel illusions in the parliamentary system and prepare the ground for the struggles to come.
Following their entry into the “interim government” the Maoists saw some erosion of their support as the revolution failed to advance.
This is not accurate, and there is no evidence to suggest this whatsoever. All the evidence points towards the Maoists having significantly increased their support in the urban areas in recent years, and while it is difficult to ascertain their exact levels of support in the countryside, there is no evidence to indicate they’ve shrunk. The Maoists recently organised massive demonstrations in every single district of the country. They are currently shutting down every single private high school in Nepal. At the last by elections, they started with two out of six seats and ended with three. Workers are switching from UML unions to Maoist unions in the few places where Maoists unions aren’t completely dominant. This is an assertion without any basis in fact.
They are now having to send some of their cadres back to the countryside to try and rebuild their support and are threatening to launch a further rural struggle having lost the opportunity to complete the revolution which broke out in 2006.
These cadre aren’t going back to rebuild lost support, they’re going into the countryside to prepare for the ‘final battle’ and the ‘decisive struggle’ to come. They’re conducting military training, organising donation drives and preparing the party cadres for a massive movement in the streets. They haven’t lost the opportunity to complete the Nepali revolution, and there was never a revolution which ‘broke out’ in 2006. There was a series of massive demonstrations that led to the King resigning from power, but these demonstrations emerged out of the struggles that preceded them, not out of thin air.
In the rural areas some of their forces are now being subject to attack in areas like Tarai through the emergence of armed groups like the Tarai Liberation Front.
True. However they have taken steps to deal with that, forming armed self-defence committees in the Terai and training their cadre in military methods across the country.
This is partly in response to some of the methods used by the Maoists during the civil war and also their wrong approach towards dealing with some of the national groups like the Tarai peoples.
In response to the Maoist’s methods? What does that even mean? The armed struggle has finished, and I very much doubt that many of the mercenaries attacking their cadre are acting in revenge for what they suffered during the People’s War. And even if they are, that would make them a landlord or a reactionary, in which case I find it hard to argue against whatever brutality they received at the hand of the masses. Most peasants aren’t aware of the Geneva Convention. But that aside, this is a strange thing to say and requires some proof to back it up.
As for the second claim, it would be nice to see some elaboration on what this ‘wrong approach’ was and why it was wrong. Groups like the Terai Liberation Front and the various other armed gangs in the Terai at the moment are not authentic liberation armies. They are death squads of the landed elite, set up either by India or the Nepal Army, and they target the Maoists because of the UCPN (M)’s commitment to class struggle between the peasants and the landlords. The Terai is the most agriculturally productive area of Nepal and is one of the few areas with real peasant/landlord contradictions.
The main criticism these groups have of the Maoist approach to the national people’s of the Terai (Madhes, Limbuwan, Kochila, Tharuwan etc) is that they give too much self-determination to the groups of the Terai. These Terai gangster organisations that are currently attacking the Maoist cadre tend to be of Madhesi origin. Madhesis are the largest nationality in the Terai, but by no means the only one. Some Madhesis support the concept of ‘One Madhesh, One Pradesh” which translates as a demand for a single Madhesh state encompassing the entire Terai. They accuse the Maoists, who have supported the rights of the other previously mentioned groups to self-determination and declared them autonomous states, of seeking to divide the Terai and attack Madhesis. This is essentially a conflict between Maoism and it’s commitment to self determination for all people’s, and Madhesi chauvinism. So to assume from the fact that some ethnic sounding groups are attacking the Maoists that the Maoists have taken a ‘wrong’ approach to the Terai is, to put it bluntly, bad journalism.
The erosion of their support escalated following their entry into the “interim government”. The “stages theory” and methods used by the Maoists forces have taken the Nepalese struggle into a dead end. The on going social and political crisis however will certainly mean new social explosions can erupt again.
As I’ve pointed out, there is no evidence to indicate an erosion of support. After all, the CA elections took place well after the Maoists entered into the interim government, and they did pretty well in them! Time will tell whether their strategy is a dead end.
Trotskyism and New Discussions
The crisis, in Nepal, and dead end of the “stages theory” and Maoist ideas have begun to open discussion about the lessons of the struggle. Significantly, reflecting its growing relevance, the question of Trotskyism has been raised in this discussion. A leading Maoist, Baburham Bhattarai, a member of the politburo of the UCPN (M), and former Minister of Finance, has invoked the question of Trotskyism. Writing in July 2009 in the UCPN (M) journal ‘The Red Spark’ he commented: “In this context, Marxist revolutionaries, should recognize that in fact in the current context, Trotskyism, has become more relevant than Stalinism to advance the cause of the proletariat”.
We shouldn’t read too much into this. For one thing, I don’t believe there is a journal called the Red Spark. There’s the Red Star, but no spark. This should indicate some of the translation issues here. Bhattarai almost certainly didn’t say that in Nepali. But even if he did, this doesn’t indicate that the UCPN (M) is preparing to adopt Trotskyism or anything like that. What it indicates is that Bhattarai is a very well read guy who’s engaged with a wide variety of ideas. He’s quote Rosa Luxembourg a number of times before – does this indicate that Bhattarai is a council communist? This single quote is not very significant at all.
Bhattarai has not drawn the correct conclusions or understood the essence of Trotsky’s ideas. He has distorted them and used them to justify a more right-wing social democratic position. However, it is extremely significant that a Maoist leader should invoke Trotskyism. Genuine Trotskyism stresses the need to break decisively with capitalism as well as feudalism-monarchism, even in a poor, neo-colonial society like Nepal. Only by taking such measures would it be possible to develop Nepal economically and socially and break the constraints imposed on it by imperialism, capitalism and land-lordism.But to defend and implement a revolutionary socialist agenda, of nationalisations under workers’ control, radical land reform, full equality and self-determination for the national minorities, a workers’ and poor peasants’ government in Nepal would have to appeal to the exploited masses and especially the proletariat of India, China and the entire world, and to spread the revolution globally. This is a completely different conception of the tasks facing the movement in Nepal compared to Bhattarai, who seeks to lower his followers’ expectations and confine the struggle to ’bourgeois democracy’.
Bhattarai does not seek to confine the struggle to that at all, and it is extremely misleading to put ‘bourgeois democracy’ in quotes as if you’re quoting from somewhere that he does advocate that.
Bhattarai recently summed up his views on how democracy should be practiced after the revolution:
The practice of democracy in imperialist counties is a form of bourgeois democracy, a ritual that deceives the masses of people and perpetuates the rule of their class state. But what we are talking about is not organising elections within the bourgeois state, we are talking about after the revolution in a New Democratic or socialistic framework, where there will be certain constitutional provisions whereby the reactionaries, imperialists and criminal forces will not be allowed to participate. Only the progressive forces, the democratic forces and people will be allowed to compete. That is the competition within the New Democratic or socialist framework we are talking about. This is a basic difference. After the revolution, the first thing we will do will be redistribution of property. There will no longer be rich and poor, a big gap between the haves and the have-nots. That way when we organise competition there will be an equal chance for people to compete. But in the given framework of the imperialist and bourgeois democratic system there is a huge gap between the propertied and property-less working class. The competition is so uneven that the property-less working class can never compete with the propertied, the bourgeois and imperialist class. That way, only after carrying out this redistribution of property in a socialistic and New Democratic manner can you organise political competition where there will be a fair chance of everyone to compete on an equal footing. Our idea of competition in a New Democratic and socialist framework is therefore fundamentally different from the formal competition and practice in a bourgeois democratic and imperialist state. The difference in the class nature of the state should be appreciated.