India

Here we provide a day-by-day chronology of how the dispute at Graziano Trasmissioni started and developed over a period of months. What emerges the brutal treatment of workers and the terrible wages and working conditions they have had to suffer. This report is based on an interview with two workers at Graziano Trasmissioni.

The news that a manager at Graziano, an Italian multinational company, had been lynched recently made the rounds of the world media. Here we provide the facts as provided by the workers in India themselves, which shows that the workers were not responsible. They are being blamed as a tactic to break the workers’ struggle. They need the support and solidarity of workers of all countries.

The new edition of the Asian Marxist Review is about to come out and here we provide the Editorial statement that concentrates mainly on the situation in India.

The Economic and Political Weekly, the most academic magazine in India, has published a review of Lal Khan's book, "Partition - can it be undone?", written by Ranabir Samaddar. He gives a positive appraisal of the book and asks a pertinent question at the end: "But are the official communists listening to all these?"

West Bengal has been governed for many years by the Left Front, whose main component is the CPI(M), one of India’s main Communist Parties. Their past is one of support for Stalinism. Today the leaders of this party have transferred their allegiance to so-called “neo-liberal” capitalism, to the degree that they have actively organised brutal attacks on peasants defending their land from being taken from them.

The dalits, the “untouchables”, of India are not one homogenous bloc. Within them a bourgeois layer has risen and aspires to be a part of the bourgeois class as a whole. With this aim in mind they promote the idea that the dalits as a caste need their own “dalit party”. To do this they try to isolate the dalit proletariat from the rest of the Indian working class to promote their own selfish interests. Here Rajesh Tyagi explains that what is needed is proletarian unity across the caste barriers.

In the 1940s the Communist Party of India (CPI) was a prisoner of the policies imposed by Stalin on the international communist movement. In backward and colonial countries, Stalin decreed, the movement had to go through two stages - democracy, then socialism. This proved disastrous for the workers of the whole of the Indian subcontinent.

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Indian independence from British rule. In reality, the partition of India in 1947 cut through the living body of whole communities, leading to untold death and misery. This was all part of the tried and tested method of “divide and rule” and behind it lay the interests of privileged ruling elites, not those of the poor masses.

In this first article Jamil Iqbal outlines Marx’s analysis of how British imperialism, by introducing capitalist methods, broke down the old Asiatic mode of production and with it the old type of social structures. The British capitalists did this simply to facilitate the exploitation of Indian resources and labour, but by so doing also prepared the ground for the modern struggle against British imperialism.

On March 14 up to 100 peasants in Nandigram, West Bengal, were brutally massacred by the police as they protested against land-grabbing operations. The leaders of the CPI-M in the local government have justified this action as part of their so-called “development model”. The contradictions between the leaders of the Indian communist movement and the millions of workers who support them are posed here sharply.

Aakar Books in New Delhi, India, have just published an Indian edition of Alan Woods’ book The Venezuelan Revolution – A Marxist Perspective. Here we provide the new introduction to the book by Lal Khan in Pakistan and details of the publishers for anyone who wishes to get a copy.

There is a lot of hype in the media about India’s booming economy. The truth is that this affects a small minority of the 1.2 billion population. Some 300 million Indians survive on less than $1 a day. In this situation there is revolutionary ferment taking place that will shake India to its foundation.

Four hundred thousand slum dwellers were rendered homeless within a period of two months just before the heavy rain season of this year in the city of Bombay alone. This is happening all over India, making millions homeless to open up land for speculative investment. We publish a contribution from someone who is active in fighting the demolitions.

A new Indian edition of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed has just come out, published by Aakar Books and will be available at the Delhi (January 27) and Kolkata (January 25) book fairs.