Coca Cola (red), Great Criticism series. Poster: Wang Guangyi.
By Saheli Chowdhury – Oct 6, 2024
Starting to write this, the first question that I ask myself is, who am I addressing? While the divisions among the left in general are notorious anywhere in the world, they are at another level when it comes to the so-called West, which is ironic given the almost non-existent success of the left in that part of the world. Nevertheless, taking into consideration the current dominant iterations, I suppose that the left in the West includes anything from liberalism to anarchism to Trotskyism to what is called Maoism – everything except solidarity – real solidarity without footnotes or parenthesis – with the anti-imperialist struggles in the “uncivilised” and “politically incorrect” rest of the world, whatever form such struggle may assume.
Maoists of West Bengal, India: my experience
I would like to start with my own experience of the effects of “Maoism” in my natal state of West Bengal, India, given the importance of “lived experience” in today’s activism scene. Although Mao himself had dismissed the notion of “Maoism,” a lot of leftists in the West hold the so-called Maoists of India in high respect, although the Maoists represent a fringe within the Indian left, or better to say outside of it. I feel I have some authority on this, given the way the Maoists, who call themselves the “only real left of India,” colluded with a tinpot fascist party to destroy the longest-running left government in India. This might seem counterintuitive, but this is effectively what has happened with several Maoist formations around the world. The “Communist” Party of India (Maoist) is banned in India as a terrorist organisation, and there is every reason for it.
As far as I can remember, starting from around 2007-08 there was an uptick in “Maoist insurgency” in the western plateau region of West Bengal. Although there existed an armed insurgency in eastern India since a few years before that, especially in the mining areas, and there were reasons for the origin of the insurgency – very similar reasons for the existence of insurgents in Colombia – in West Bengal, it was never a huge problem. Since 1977, the state has had a Left Front government, formed by a coalition of several parties from the left, with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) as the largest integrant of the bloc. By the 2000s, the state recorded better human and social development indicators than most of the country; tremendous strides had been made in women’s social, political and economic rights – Westerners may not realise the effort that went into it, especially because the Indian society is deeply conservative; the unemployment rate was low despite neoliberalism having been ushered in in India by the central government in 1991; and there was no “silent famine” in Bengal, unlike in the neighbouring states where armed insurgency had received some popular support precisely because of widespread hunger. All this is not to say that everything was rosy, but for a state in a quasi-centralised country (very unlike the US), the left government of West Bengal had achievements to boast (though the government never boasted about them, and that was a huge shortcoming in the media battlefield, but those were early days of the media warfare), achievements that had been recognised at international instances including the United Nations. Therefore, it came as a surprise when the Maoist insurgency exploded in the western forest lands of the state where resided a significant tribal population.
The Maoists declared the Communists of West Bengal as the culprit and the target of the insurgency. Their announced project was to overthrow the government of West Bengal because it was “capitalist” and was allegedly repressing the tribal population and taking away their lands. It was an absurd accusation, since it was precisely the left government of West Bengal that was the first in the country to carry out a total land reform and granting land rights to the traditional forest-dwellers, despite the reform costing the government and the people in blood and in image. The land reform laws of the left were especially focused on uplifting historically marginalised groups, including the tribal people, the religious minorities, the lower castes of Hinduism, and women. Still, the outlandish accusation coming from a fringe organisation was picked up, broadcast, and blown up by the media. Around the same time, there was an explosion of private media outlets churning out new “newspapers” every day, and new media channels – all right wing but wearing a costume of social justice – were coming up faster than one could realise.
In this scenario, a decision of the West Bengal government added fuel to the fire. In 2008, the government gave the green light to a car manufacturing project – a “public-private partnership” (PPP) between the government of West Bengal and the Tata Group, one of the largest business groups in India. The PPP model was nothing new either in the country or in the state, but unlike in most cases in India, the left government of West Bengal used to be the majority partner in such partnerships. Yet, after this project was greenlighted, the “Communist” Party of India (Maoist) claimed that the “fake Communist government” planned to take away all lands from farmers and give them away to big business-owners. It was a lie, but by repeating it a million times, Goebbels-style, through the new mouthpieces of social justice, it was turned into a truth. Thereafter, CPI(Maoist) joined hands with the tinpot fascist opposition party of West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), or rather with its land rights movement façade, “Movement to Protect Land,” with the declared aim of ending the “social capitalist Left Front.”
During the reign of terror that followed until the Left Front was out of power in May 2011 (and until a bit afterwards), the only targets of the Maoist “revolution” were communists, trade unionists, farmers rights activists, teachers, students, nurses – basically, working-class people. The “Maoists” – the only real communists, according to their own claims – shot teachers inside schools, in front of students. They pulled men out of their homes and shot them in front of their elderly parents and then maintained armed pickets so that the family members could not go outside their homes to recover the bodies. Women were raped, girls were disappeared, nurses working house-to-house in rural areas were attacked. There was also forced recruitment of teenagers, a feature of all such “movements” around the world. The “communist revolutionaries” shared movement and media spaces with the tinpot fascists; they committed all these crimes hand-in-hand.
Then there were crimes that achieved greater “fame” – the bomb attack on the chief minister’s convoy while he was visiting a site for a proposed steel plant and the terrorist attack on the Gyaneshwari Express train that resulted in over 150 deaths being the most infamous examples. The intellectual author of the last one was a Maoist leader (Chatradhar Mahato) who is serving a life sentence for terrorism and crimes against humanity. More interestingly, after the tinpot fascist TMC came to power riding on the Maoists’ shoulders, said Maoist leader was made a state secretary of TMC by the party’s leader (Mamata Banerjee), who is currently the chief minister of West Bengal. Many other Maoist leaders became TMC members overnight. One of the most wanted leaders (Suchitra Mahato) visited the new chief minister in her office (in Kolkata, the state capital, which is far from the place of the Maoist insurgency – how she made the journey without being arrested on the way is anybody’s guess) to turn herself in, and later, she quietly married a TMC leader, and all her past was forgotten. The only Maoist leader who was killed – by the new chief minister’s order – was alias Kishenji (who hailed from the state of Andhra Pradesh), which was ironic because he had declared publicly that he wanted to see her as the chief minister of West Bengal. The Maoists had even branded her and her fascist party the “real left” of Bengal.
Meanwhile, at least 499 people remain disappeared from that time. The number of displaced people would be several times more. Many even left the state, scarred for life by the events. But that was not all. The effects of the “revolution” that the Maoists conducted in Bengal remain to this day. TMC has done all the things that the Maoists had claimed that the Left Front was doing. The state’s development has been set back by at least half a century. The state’s public debt (from the World Bank, as well as vulture funds) is reaching astronomical levels. Corruption, extortion, migration and brain drain have reached unsustainable proportions. As for land rights, just search “Sandeshkhali” on the internet and you might gain some interesting insight.
The leader of TMC had claimed that she would solve the “Maoist problem” if she came to power. She has solved it alright – she has solved it by absorbing the Maoists into a proto-fascist party. And it was possible only because the Maoists were so much to the left that they reached the far right.
Some Western leftists confuse the Indian Maoists with the Naxalites, and although the two insurgencies have many similarities, there are important differences as well. The Naxalites were more similar to the Peruvian Maoist armed movement Sendero Luminoso: both originated because of legitimate grievances of the people, both were quickly and widely infiltrated by the very forces that they were supposed to combat, and both ended up committing atrocities against poor and marginalised people, against the working class itself. Finally, none of the two movements won. Sendero Luminoso was destroyed by the Peruvian military. The Naxalite movement was also mostly destroyed by the Indian State, but the movement reformed itself into a political party (Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)) and joined the electoral route, realising that in India, at least for now, it is the only viable way to make changes for a better and more just and inclusive society. Perhaps many in the Western left do not know this.
At this point, I would like to make a small but necessary digression. According to the CPI(Maoist), the infrequent adoption of the PPP model, the industrialisation plan, electoral participation, etc., were evidence that the CPI(M) and its associates and sympathisers are “social capitalists.” As far as I understand, and I am being generous, by “social capitalism” they refer to a system where a government – of somewhat socialist nature – coexists with capitalists and does not start off with expropriating everything. They present China as an example of this, but I will treat the China question in a separate place. What I will say now is that either the Maoists do not understand dialectics, or they purposefully distort it. The entire economy does not need to be “planned.” Small business-owners and small landowners are not the enemies of socialism. Teachers, workers, and nurses working within the “establishment” are not the enemies of socialism. And a government cannot give the middle finger to all rules and norms and international law (unless it is the US government) and let anarchy reign; it has duties and responsibilities and has to work within many boundaries, including some that may go against a governing party’s ideological position. And most importantly, socialists, or those who want to build socialism or transition towards a more just and equal world, have to adapt their actions to existing conditions. The world is not homogeneous; attempts to make it better cannot be homogeneous either.
Proletarian Internationalism: The Disconnect of the Western Left
China: socialist, capitalist, social capitalist?
Recently, I came across an interview of an Indian Maoist politician-scholar done by a Western leftist media outlet. Paraphrasing, the interviewee called China a danger as great as the US, or perhaps even greater, because China is “social capitalist.”
I already mentioned what I understand when Maoists say “social capitalism,” though I may be mistaken. However, what I do understand is that I cannot consider a person any kind of leftist when s/he calls a real existing system working to build socialism a greater danger to humanity than real existing imperialism. Yet, China is considered social capitalist/social imperialist by many on the Western left.
I will not go into the question of what China is or is not; there are numerous articles, pamphlets, and books on the subject all over the place. However, what I would like to emphasize is that the construction of socialism in China is a dynamic process, as it should be anywhere in the world. It is a new model, there is hardly any road, the road has to be built while walking that road, paraphrasing the great Antonio Machado. The move towards socialism in China is a complex process that has been described by many (within and outside China) as two steps forward, one step back. The Chinese socialist mantra is that socialism should generate wealth, a socialist state should not be poor nor backward. While a socialist system is under construction, it may be pragmatic to take advantage of the capitalists’ resources and technology. One need not start with expropriating everything.
Nevertheless, it is the State in China that has the controls over the means of production, the strategic natural resources, the heavy and strategic industries, as well as education and health. The Chinese State has taken advantage of the existing global capitalist market system to cement its place in the global production and supply chains; now it would be impossible to imagine a global economy without China. Is this not the necessary force that is precisely required by the Global South as it is being obliged more and more to confront the hegemonic empire? And there is only one empire in the world now, the United States. China, on the other hand, is simply a nation that suffered horribly at the hands of the Western empires of the day and has now gained the power and the ability to stand up to the modern-day inheritor of those empires. China does not have 800 military bases around the world. China does not overthrow foreign governments, create colour revolutions, or impose unilateral coercive measures. China does not steal other countries’ resources, irrespective of what your preferred “leftist” media tells you.
While we are at this, I would like to mention a few other countries trying to build socialism that are also demonised to various extents in the Western leftist spheres: Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Of these, perhaps Cuba receives the highest amount of support from across the left “spectrum” in the West, including from the anarchists who dislike the concept of State or consider it useless or even acting against the interests of the people. Perhaps this arises from their own experiences with their own States and State institutions, but it is wrong on their part to project their belief systems on to other peoples for whom their States are their shields against the imperialist onslaught. The common thread that runs through the three aforementioned countries is that all of them are trying to develop socialist projects that correspond to their own conditions, and all of them are on the receiving end of economic-financial-trade blockades imposed by the United States and its vassals. These unilateral coercive measures, euphemistically called “sanctions,” have gravely impacted all walks of life in said countries, not just the economic sphere, and this obliges their governments and State institutions to innovate and adopt measures and programmes that on first sight might seem like a “return to neoliberalism.” It is due to this reason that the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is routinely condemned by the Western Left as a “traitor” who has “abandoned Chavismo” and adopted “neoliberalism.” Venezuela, according to these ideologues, is no longer a “socialist” country but a capitalist one. For one, Venezuela was never a “socialist” country; both President Chávez and President Maduro have described the Venezuelan process as transition towards Socialism of the 21st Century. Chávez famously said that the Socialism of the 21st Century has to learn from the mistakes of the socialism of the 20th century in order not to repeat them. Again there is no unique model, no road to follow, the road has to be built while walking it. A comprehensive understanding of dialectics is essential to understand the processes in these countries, and reading a little bit of Mao may come in handy.
To close this section, I would repeat what a Syrian friend told me: the CPI(Maoist)’s position on China echoes the United States and Zionism.
‘Hamas conservative right wing’: to support or not to support the Palestinian independence struggle
Now that I have uttered “Zionism,” I must comment a bit about Palestine, a cause that is dear to my heart. It makes me glad to see the immense outpouring of support for Palestine in the West in the wake of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, carried out by the Zionist regime that is a cancer in the heart of west Asia. However, there are a few points that I would like to clarify here before closing this piece.
Almost all of the people in the West expressing solidarity and support for the Palestinians – irrespective of their political position – start with a vague condemnation of “conflict” or “war,” and many add a condemnation of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas. Many also express some sort of support for the creation of a Palestinian State, without clarifying what it may actually mean, and for most such a state is supposed to exist in conjunction with the Jewish state of “Israel” (the so-called two-state solution). These pro-Palestine people support the “unarmed, defenceless Palestinians” but not the armed resistance factions that originate from the same population, thus creating a distinction between the “people” and the “terrorists.” While this position on the part of apolitical people, who express their solidarity with Palestine because of the slaughtered children or the generalised genocide, can be overlooked, such ignorance of the Palestinian socio-political reality on part of those who identify as the “left” cannot be forgiven.
There is another worrying trend among parts of the Western left – not supporting the Palestinian Islamic resistance factions, that is, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or their associates in neighbouring countries such as Iran, Hezbollah (Lebanon), Ansarallah (Yemen) or the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) because of their alleged conservative and hence right-wing characteristics. Apart from exposing an immense lack of understanding of the reality on the ground, this position also exposes the Western left faction’s lack of knowledge that the Palestinian left parties like PFLP and DFLP work hand-in-hand with these allegedly conservative groups. According to my friend, the Palestinian socialist activist Khaled Barakat, when people find themselves between a rock and a hard place, they turn to God. The Arab socialist blocs understand that after their attempts at liberation failed and they were disoriented and largely destroyed, their religious colleagues filled in the void. “The people should not have to wait for the left to regroup itself; the people will carry on the task of liberation in whichever way they can,” he told me. I would request the Western leftists who support Palestine to try to comprehend the Palestinian left’s pragmatism.
I would also request my Western leftist friends, wherever on the left spectrum they may be, to recognise the Palestinian cause as a struggle for independence, as has been highlighted by the Palestinian left for decades. Wars of independence are complicated; they are bloody and messy; they do not follow clean lines; they are not homogeneous. If you really want to support Palestine, support the Palestinians’ war of independence without conditions, without ifs and buts, without judgement. Solidarity is support, not judgement.
By way of conclusion, I would urge Western leftists not to fall for and repeat imperialist propaganda about our countries and their movements, and definitely not to do something even worse — calling for imperialist invasions, branded as “humanitarian interventions,” against our peoples. If, for whatever reason, you cannot support our movements or the few governments that do try to work for the betterment of the people, it is comprehensible. But please do not be part of the imperialist battering ram against us; that would not be forgiven.
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Saheli Chowdhury
Saheli Chowdhury is from West Bengal, India, studying physics for a profession, but with a passion for writing. She is interested in history and popular movements around the world, especially in the Global South. She is a co-editor and contributor for Orinoco Tribune.
