CPIM state conference, January 2008
CPM facing a crisis of ideology?
By Uday Basu. Kolkata, Jan. 14. A The Statesman report
On the first day of the CPI-M’s four-day-long state conference today, the party’s top leadership tried to grapple with the self-contradictions in its ideological and tactical positions that have come to the fore in recent times.
The leaders were at pains explaining to about 900 delegates and special invitees the party’s shift in embracing capitalism as an inevitable course left to the governments run by it for industrialisation and creation of jobs, especially for the skilled and semi-skilled workers. The conference had a brain-storming session over how party activists would address the rural population during the run-up to the panchayat poll slated a few months away since the self-contradictions in the party’s theory and practice stand glaringly exposed in the rural belt. The CPI-M’s main vote bank ~ the rural areas ~ is under threat in the wake of the party’s policy of industrialisation through farm land acquisition.
The conference is laying maximum stress on this issue as the party has become unnerved by the way the Opposition has, so far, succeeded in exploiting to the hilt the widespread resentment of the rural population against the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee- government’ s aggressive and Stalinist way of forcing poor villagers to accept its industrialisation programme. The party activists are awaiting the outcome of the conference with baited breath. They are now a totally confused lot as the mode of industrialisation that the CPI-M is championing runs counter to its age-old struggle for upholding the poor farmers’ right to own and till land. Their problem is compounded by the fact that they would have to go to the people in the next few months for votes for controlling the panchayats. It’s an uphill task since they would have to face millions of villagers in 3,220 gram panchayats with about 58,000 seats.
This explains why the conference debated during the day a special resolution on “Left Front government, panchayats, municipalities and our task.” The leadership has, however, no other option than to give an ideological underpinning to its policy shift in embracing capitalism which it has since its inception denounced. But the task has put the top leaders in an unenviable position as they would have
to defend the indefensible.
The dilemma is clear from Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’ s vacillation over whether he should glorify the Marxists’ dirty word, capitalism. Aware that he can’t gloss it over, he toned down his earlier strident pitch for capitalism and said his only interest is in capital and not the capitalist approach to build the society.
CPM: Land reform is about capital
By Uday Basu. Kolkata, Jan. 15. A The Statesman report
For the past three decades, when the CPI-M created history of sorts by implementing its land reforms programme, transferring 84 per cent of the state’s land to the poor and marginal farmers, it was in effect developing capitalism. This revelation was made by the party leadership on the second day of its state conference which betrayed the Marxists’ desperation to find an ideological basis for their latest discovery of the need for capitalism for industrialising the state.
The delegates went through a churning process, questioning the rationale of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government’s policy of industrialisation by acquiring farmland. They wanted direction from the top leadership on how to go to the electorate in the coming panchayat elections, a few months away, as the rural population is seething about the state government’s aggressive approach in forcibly acquiring land for industrialisation that runs counter to the party ideology of championing the cause of poor farmers.
At pains to explain the shift in its ideological and tactical line in favour of its class enemy ~ the capitalists ~ the CPI-M leadership at the conference came out with the theory that “the land reforms programme implemented during the past 30 years was a process of capitalist development and it is wrong to find in it elements of socialism”. And as a logical corollary to this ideological line, they said the “current industrialisation initiative is likewise capitalist in character. Both (land reforms and industrialisation) are two different forms of capitalist growth. Capitalism is the intermediate stage between feudalism and socialism. We have to use the opportunities of industrial growth, while continuing the fight against its negative aspects and keeping in view the objective of abolishing the capitalist system”.
This is how the conference sought to prepare the delegates for confronting the rural population as the CPI-M is gearing up to acquire “fertile land, though in small measure, for setting up industries and building infrastructure” . The conference also discussed the “orchestrated efforts of the ultra-Left and ultra-Right reactionaries, so-called intellectuals and a major section of the media to whip up violence and chaos” to block the state’s industrialisation.