Nandigram—repression and a false policy

See accompanying article, "Nandigram says 'No!' to Dow's chemical hub," for a first-hand account of the situation in this West Bengal area.

How could a party calling itself the Communist Party of India-Marxist carry out a policy of expropriating tens of thousands of peasants from their land and implementing Special Economic Zones with super-exploitation of labor? It is important to look at the history of class struggle in West Bengal to understand this development.

A left-front coalition led by the CPI-M was elected in Kolkata and West Bengal state in 1977. It has administered the state for 30 years.

West Bengal is the most densely populated state in India, with a population of 80 million. Kolkata has a population of 14 million. Beginning with British colonial rule, it became the most heavily industrialized city in India.

The region has a long history of revolutionary opposition to British colonialism as well as militant trade unionism and peasant organization. Communist and left parties have a strong base among both workers and peasants. From the 1950s through the 1970s, many workers were killed and thousands jailed in militant union struggles. There were general strikes and plant seizures. These strikes won important gains for the organized working class.

The CPI-M was elected in 1977 because of this revolutionary political climate. But it had a totally social democratic orientation. It had become a reformist, left party administering an oppressive capitalist state. This is why the Indian bourgeoisie accepts its holding office. It put a cap on the struggle.

The CPI-M has defended its open conciliation with the ruling class with the utterly false position that socialism in India can be built only on the basis of developed capitalism. Thus, it is committed to the smooth running of the capitalist state. This repressive state apparatus is often used against more revolutionary left parties who continue to organize and agitate among the workers.

Although the workers have won gains and some important land reforms, capitalist property relations remain basically intact. The repressive state apparatus of police, courts and jails and the enormous state bureaucracy enforcing capitalist ownership also remain unchanged. In West Bengal as a whole and in the huge city of Kolkata, there is desperate poverty and an enormous gap between rich and poor. In 30 years of administering the state, the CPI-M has never challenged these fundamental class relations.

Especially in the past decade, faced with demands from the IMF and World Bank to make the investment climate friendly to international capital, the CPI-M has made ever-increasing concessions. For example, based on a World Bank plan to improve the “image” of Kolkata, many thousands of homeless families who lived and slept on the streets and along the railroad tracks and canals were forcibly removed to vast slums outside the central city area. This did not solve the problem—it only removed it from view.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Indian bourgeoisie lost billions of dollars in Soviet aid and trade. In 2000 India announced the introduction of a Special Economic Zones policy. Since then 220 such zones have been established throughout India.

Throughout the 1990s a process of de-industrialization happened in West Bengal. Based on the drive to maximize profits by ruthlessly cutting labor costs and undercutting labor militancy, more than 56,000 industries closed shop in the state. The industrialized work force was cut in half, from 9,170,000 to 4,560,000.

The CPI-M, anxious to attract foreign capital, has expropriated the land of tens of thousands of peasants to create zones where corporations are free of all labor regulations and there is intense super-exploitation.

Rather than utilize land closer to Kolkata where closed industries used to be located, the state government selected Nandigram, an isolated rural area almost 60 miles from the militant workers of Kolkata, as the site for an SEZ.

The corporate media in India has praised these policies of the CPI-M as “creative” and “flexible.”

On a national level, the CPI-M is part of India's present coalition government.

he CPI-M’s program and actions in the Nandigram affair do the greatest injury to the history and name of communism and Marxism. Genuine communist, socialist and other progressive forces are organizing and leading the struggle against the SEZs, global imperialism and the Indian capitalist state. It is these truly revolutionary organizations that represent the future of the Indian struggle for socialism. Nandigram provides yet another, if not the most severe, lesson of the fatal and tragic error of communists joining and administering a capitalist state.