problems

of the

third world

R. ULYANOVSKY

PROGRESS PUBLISHERS MOSCOW

Translated from the Russian

CONTENTS

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Page

1. THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT.................. 7

Present Stage of the National Liberation Movement ... 7 Development of the National Liberation Movement ... 7 Unity of the Forces of Socialism and the National Liberation Movement---a Vital Condition for Success in the

Struggle Against Imperialism..........23

Non-Capitalist Development: the Path to Social Progress 36

Theoretical Aspects of the Non-Capitalist Path of Development and of National Democracy.........52

The United Anti-Imperialist Front of Progressive Forces in

the Newly Independent Countries.........124

Lenin, Soviet Experience and the Newly Independent Countries 151

II. SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM AND IDEOLOGICAL ISSUES IN THE NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT . . . . 176

Some Theories of Socio-Economic Development of the Newly Liberated Countries.............176

The Marxist Approach to Non-Marxist Socialism in the

Developing Countries.............198

Socialism and Nationalism in Africa..........210

Scientific Socialism, Gandhism and Modern India.....222

III. THE AGRARIAN QUESTION AND THE PEASANTRY IN

THE NEWLY LIBERATED COUNTRIES......275

Reform in Indian Agriculture Prior to the Early Sixiies . . . 275 Rural India Prior to the Reform: Objective Need for Agrarian Reform..............275

General Terms of Agrarian Legislation.......288

y

First printing 1974

© Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1974 Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

10303---365

014(01)---74

62---74

CONTENTS

Implementation of the Agrarian Legislation in the States of the Indian Union.............293

Agrarian Reform in Countries of the Near and Middle East and South and Southeast Asia by the Early Sixties: the Choice Between Two Paths of Capitalist Development in the Modern Context..............35.5

The Peasantry at the Present Stage of National Liberation Movement and the Results of the Agrarian Reforms at the Beginning of the 1970s.............412

Socio-Economic Problems of the Newly Free Countries . . . 469

IV. PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE.....

489

The State Sector................

489

Planning...................

519

Economic Independence: Priority Goal of the Liberation

Movement..................

527

V. NORMALISATION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE THIRD WORLD............546

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT

PRESENT STAGE OF THE NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT

Development of the National Liberation Movement

A major role in the struggle against imperialism that has now spread to every corner of the globe is played by the national liberation movement in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. To a large extent the future evolution of the world revolutionary process will depend on the way in which these countries solve the social and political problems now confronting them.

The national liberation movement is dealing blow after blow at the world imperialist system. In the Theses published by the CPSU Central Committee on the occasion of the centenary of Lenin's birth it was pointed out: "In our time countries which, as Lenin put it, were kept by colonialists 'out of history' for centuries have ceased to be the objects of policy and became its active participants. The prestige of socialist ideas and practice is quickly growing in these countries."*

The national liberation movement has now entered a new stage of its development. The appearance in the international arena of over 70 new independent states which are taking an increasingly active part in decisions affecting the future of mankind is the impressive achievement of the peoples' struggle for liberation so far, an event of major historical importance. As noted in the final document of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in 1969: "In the past decade the role of the anti-imperialist

* Lenin's Ideas and Cause Are Immortal, Moscow, 1970, p. 46,.

8

R. ULYANOVSKY

movement of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the world revolutionary process has continued to grow."*

The world national liberation movement which now embraces hundreds of millions of people and spreads over enormous areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America comprises separate detachments each of which has its own specific features shaped by the overall character of the movement in this or that particular country, the social and class composition of its membership and varying concrete tasks, stemming from the given stage of historical development.

The peoples of the newly liberated countries are waging a selfless struggle to consolidate their national independence. Some of them have embarked on a path of major socio-- economic changes which to a certain extent go beyond the framework of capitalism. Meanwhile the peoples of Zimbabwe, the Republic of South Africa, Namibia and certain other countries still languishing in colonial and racialist bondage continue their armed struggle for national liberation. The varying conditions and tasks facing the freedom fighters in each particular country or region shape the diverse forms and methods used to implement the struggle. In most countries prime importance is attached to campaigning for economic liberation, liquidation of economic and cultural backwardness and democratisation of society. Given the support of the socialist countries many of the newly liberated states are building up a new, independent economy, creating and consolidating a state sector and promoting co-operative forms of production. Much emphasis is also laid upon the political struggle against attempts on the part of imperialists and internal reaction to create political crises and overthrow independent progressive regimes in order to restore colonialist practices and put the historical clock back.

All the newly liberated countries come up against resistance on the part of international imperialism which " stubbornly defends the remnants of the colonial system, on the one hand, and, on the other, uses methods of neo-- colonialism in an effort to prevent the economic and social advance

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

of developing states, of countries which have won national sovereignty".* The defeats of anti-imperialist and democratic forces in Brazil, Indonesia, Ghana, the Dominican Republic and certain other countries show that these imperialist tactics can still achieve at least temporary results. This underlines the need for cohesion of all revolutionary, anti-imperialist and democratic forces of national and social liberation. In recent years the imperialists have suffered major political setbacks in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Suffice it to mention the United States' final withdrawal from Vietnam, progressive revolutionary coups supported by the popular masses in Libya, Somalia and the significant swing to the Left in Indian politics. Yet it would be unforgivable to underestimate the dangers" inherent in the aggressive policies of imperialism and the intensification of its subversive activity in the newly independent countries.

Although the imperialists' scope for aggressive action is limited and localised thanks to the present might of the world socialist system, it is still wide in the sense that they can concentrate their efforts in certain situations on any particular Afro-Asian or Latin American state, wherever they sense a weakening of the anti-imperialist front in these countries or a weakening of their ties with the world socialist system and the international working class and choose to exploit this situation. The imperialists, as has emerged from events of the last 10-15 years, are always quick to make use of any situation that they can put to good use in their efforts to change the balance of power in their interests and cause setbacks in the development of the national liberation movement in specific areas.

However, now that the imperialists, and in particular the American imperialists, are confronted by constant and growing resistance from the forces of international progress, they are looking for new, more roundabout ways of interfering in other countries' affairs, for boosting revanchism and neo-colonialism, and for the export of counter-revolution. A masked form of intervention is the imposition of puppet regimes and reactionary dictatorships by means of specially manoeuvred coups.

» Ibid., p. 12.

* International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, Moscow 1969, Prague, 1969, p. 27.

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These are usually preceded by agreements providing for military aid, the dispatch to the country in question of military instructors and intensified penetration of local intelligence services. Military coups are frequently implemented with at least a formal retention of sovereignty which complicates counteraction to this virtual intervention from any outside force. Therefore, to forestall such situations it is particularly important that national-democratic forces should always be on the alert, be ready and equipped to counter conspiracies of local reactionary forces---henchmen of the imperialists---with mass-scale, organised resistance. Even where pro-imperialist, neo-colonialist and militarist regimes succeed in temporarily consolidating their power, the anti-popular nature of their rule in the final analysis prepares the ground for unification of all democratic forces with a still wider programme of anti-imperialist policies than before. Persistent political and organisational work among the masses on the part of the progressive forces is required to bring such an alliance into being.

Sobered by the experience of the collapse of a number of anti-popular regimes the American imperialists now usually have recourse to economic measures, above all to so-called financial aid, in order to ensure such regimes of a firmer economic, and hence social and class foundation. In this respect imperialist loans and credits, though they bring certain economic returns by promoting capitalist development in the newly independent countries, possess in the long run reactionary implications of major significance since they are designed to ensure neo-colonialist dependence.

Although neo-colonialist intervention on the part of the imperialists in socio-economic processes at work in the newly independent countries serves to consolidate the private, capitalist sector of the economy, taken all in all it does not stabilise the system of socio-economic relations based on exploitation. Neo-colonialist policy does not bring the imperialists the results they are after, for it is based on an unreal supposition---namely that modern capitalism is in a position to effect a fundamental reorganisation of a backward socio-economic structure relying on capitalist methods. Experience has long since shown that the social repercussions of neo-colonialist policy lead in the end to a deepening

of class contradictions, to an intensification of the struggle against imperialism and the powerful national bourgeoisie that is inclined to compromise with the imperialists. In a number of Latin American, Asian and African countries growing class contradictions have led recently to a profound crisis of the social structure as such. India, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Peru, Bolivia and various other countries provide telling examples.

Crises affecting social structures in their turn lead to political instability of the political regimes that have succumbed to neo-colonialist influence and create real opportunities for their replacement with progressive anti-- imperialist regimes. The intensification of the national liberation movement and the collapse of neo-colonialist schemes push the imperialists into new acts of aggression, the unleashing of local wars and organising intervention. Sometimes it would appear that the present imperialist policy at least outwardly resembles the armed aggression of the late forties and early fifties when the collapse of the colonial empires under pressure from the peoples' armed liberation struggle was only just beginning. At the present time however the imperialists are attempting in a number of areas and countries to turn back irreversible processes in a completely different international situation in which a new alignment of forces obtains, when they no longer have at their disposal former opportunities for bringing influence to bear on the course of events even by force of arms. Vietnam, the Middle East and insurgent Africa all demonstrate this.

The capacity of the imperialists, particularly those from the USA, for concentrating fairly rapidly their mobile armed forces in certain areas, forces which for the time being are superior to those of the national liberation movement directly opposing them, has given the Pentagon one of its main excuses for unleashing aggressive, counter-revolutionary local wars. Imperialists count on the suddenness with which they are able to intervene and on the inadequacy of the military-political ties between the developing countries and the socialist world. However, all the necessary conditions now exist for any newly independent country, for any people fighting for its freedom and resolutely prepared to resist imperialist aggression, to organise effective nation-wide

R. ULYANOVSKY

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

resistance to imperialist acts, counting the while on all-round assistance from the socialist world, and to emerge triumphant in the local anti-popular wars unleashed by the imperialists or at least involve them in long, interminable hostilities.

A major task facing the progressive forces throughout the world is the reduction to a minimum of the neo-colonialist influence of imperialist aid, of both the military and economic variety. Already the socialist community has undermined the imperialists' monopoly of modern equipment, technological know-how, modern transport and communications facilities, weapons, and, what is particularly important, the monopoly of political and cultural information. The achievements of socialism which retain to the full their significance as revolutionary models, are providing an increasingly potent factor in the social changes now taking place in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries. Such former preserves of American and British imperialism as Peru, Bolivia, Libya and Somalia have demonstrated in the recent past how unstable is the neo-colonialist edifice being erected by the neo-colonialists with so much effort and expense.

The economic position of the Third World countries and hence that of their working population still offers a grim prospect. Sixty-five per cent of the population of the capitalist world lives in the developing countries while these countries only account for 10 per cent of its industrial production, 20 per cent of its trade turnover, 40 per cent of its agricultural produce and 12 per cent of its monetary (gold) reserves. The level of labour productivity in these countries is 8-9 per cent and the average per capita annual income is 10 per cent of those in the developed capitalist countries. The Third World countries owe the developed countries of the capitalist world over 50,000 million dollars, whereas a mere ten years ago this debt amounted to only 17,000 million. Annually between seven and nine thousand million dollars of foreign capital (from both private and state sources) are poured into these countries by the imperialist powers; however, the annual profits they wrest from the economy of the developing countries come to 17-22,000 million dollars. It should be borne in mind in this context that 80 per cent of

the world's annual population increase can be laid at the door of the developing countries.

These countries' capacity for accumulation is extremely small---only something in the nature of 2 to 12-15 per cent of the national income is spent on expanding production. In order to ensure an annual 4 per cent growth rate it would be essential, according to estimates drawn up by UN experts, to invest approximately 15 per cent of the national income in economic development. However, not even the largest of the developing countries are in a position to do this. This means that the majority of the small Third World countries with a population of under five million (i.e., 50 out of the total 75) are not in a position to secure an average annual growth of national income of even as much as 2 or 3 per cent.

This means that the continuing exploitation of the natural resources and labour force of the newly independent countries by the industrially developed imperialist powers reproduces relations of non-equivalent exchange and results in intensified removal of profits and superprofits thus curtailing accumulation in the developing countries and leading to a redistribution of the latter in the interests of the imperialist countries.

The technological revolution is evolving in such a way that it is virtually by-passing the developing countries and in particular their agriculture that constitutes the basis of their economy, while the construction of local industry in keeping with the demands of modern technology is proceeding at such a negligible pace in comparison with that urgently required to surmount economic backwardness, that the gap in productivity levels, in the volume of agricultural and industrial production between the developed capitalist countries and the developing countries not only is failing to narrow but on the contrary is widening, just as is the gap between levels of per capita income, a fact in no small measure caused by the so-called population explosion of the last twenty years.

There is good reason to suppose that given this objective situation anti-imperialist nationalism will not abate but increase and that ever wider sections of the popular masses will be drawn into the anti-imperialist struggle in the newly

R. ULYANOVSKY

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

15'

liberated countries; the patriotic sector of the national bourgeoisie and in particular the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie should play an increasingly significant role in the anti-imperialist struggle of the future. The working people, and particularly the growing working class are taking an increasingly active part in the anti-imperialist movement. This is opening up new prospects for development in the Third World countries.

New progressive advances are to be observed in the national liberation movement which could soon be irreversible. An important achievement of the national liberation revolutions is the rejection of capitalist development by a number of young independent states. This testifies to the fact that the nature of the leadership in the national liberation movement is changing. Progressive countries that have opted for the path of non-capitalist development and alliance with the world socialist system now lead the anti-imperialist struggle. In this connection the final document of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties pointed out: "Under the impact of the revolutionary conditions of our time, distinctive forms of progressive social development of the newly free countries have appeared, and the role of revolutionary and democratic forces has been enhanced. Some young states have taken the non-capitalist path, a path which opens up the possibility of overcoming the backwardness inherited from the colonial past and creates conditions for transition to socialist development."* Although the countries which have chosen the socialist path do not predominate in the part of the world fighting for national liberation, nevertheless their very existence is a factor of world significance since they present the liberated peoples with a model of successful advance along the path of social progress.

In present conditions the historic role of the working class in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America is assuming ever greater importance. Its numbers are growing and its organisational efficiency is increasing just as its degree of political awareness. The working class in the

Third World countries has proved an extremely active and consistent champion of national and social liberation. The struggle waged by the proletariat of Asia, Africa and Latin America is gradually gaining more and more support from the peasant masses, the urban petty bourgeoisie, young people and the intelligentsia and is creating new, more propitious conditions for the formation of a united nationaldemocratic front against imperialism in the name of generaldemocratic, anti-imperialist and social changes. A firm alliance between the working class and the peasantry has to provide the foundation for such a front. The head of the CPSU delegation at the 1969 International Meeting Leonid Brezhnev stated: "There is no doubt that in the young national states ahead lies the broadest development of the working-class struggle against imperialism and its allies. It is the working-class movement that will ultimately play the decisive part in this area of the world too."*

The economic backwardness of the newly liberated countries, their position as unequal nations in the world capitalist system place a heavy burden on the shoulders of the toiling peasantry. Political independence has not brought about any significant improvements in their material and social position. In many countries it has even deteriorated since independence. This situation provides undeniable reasons for activising the peasant movement and turning it into a major political force.

In his report to the Meeting Comrade Brezhnev laid particular emphasis on the significance of the peasantry in the Third World: "The central question of the revolutionary process in Asia and Africa today is that of the attitude of the peasantry, which make up a majority of the population.

``The peasants in that part of the world are a mighty revolutionary force, but in most cases they are an elemental force, with all the ensuing vacillations and ideological and political contradictions."**

In conditions of cruel exploitation and a desperate lack of social and political rights the toiling peasants in a number of Third World countries take to armed insurgence, which

* International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, Moscow 1969, p. 28.

* Ibid., p. 153. ** Ibid.

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in conjunction with the class struggle of the urban proletariat could well shake bourgeois and bourgeois-landowner regimes and military oligarchies to their very foundations.

In recent years marked differences in the political and socio-economic positions of a number of Asian, African and Latin American countries have made themselves most clearly felt; likewise in their economic ties with the world capitalist economy and the socialist system-, and in the levels and pace of economic and cultural development. These differences are reflected in the fact that sections and groups of the people from a wide range of class backgrounds are now taking part in the national liberation movement. They bring with them into the movement their own specific traditions and conceptions, their own particular nationalistic, religious, caste, patriarchal and tribal prejudices. The imperialists do all they can to exploit the contradictions and problems which arise within the movement, the inadequate consistency and class limitation of the leadership in its implementation of the movement's anti-imperialist and social goals, and try to undermine the anti-imperialist unity of the peoples and isolate the newly liberated countries from the world socialist system and the international working-class movement.

Depending upon the particular stage reached by this or that detachment of the national liberation movement the standpoint, role and position of the social classes and strata participating in the anti-imperialist struggle vary considerably. In some countries the revolutionary potential of the national bourgeoisie diminishes with the consolidation of its power, as the country's economic position improves and the national bourgeoisie ties up the economy more and more with foreign capital. This applies most of all in the case of the big bourgeoisie which in certain countries even assumes monopolistic traits, departs further and further from its original anti-imperialist stand and turns into a "business partner" of the imperialists and neo-colonialists in the exploitation of the newly liberated peoples. The corrupt civil service bourgeoisie, that comes to constitute a bureaucratic capitalist class that is ever more active in certain of the young independent states, provides a reliable ally for the imperialists. All this of course does not imply that the contradictions

between the bourgeoisie of the developing countries an,d the imperialists have already disappeared and that the antiimperialist trend of nationalism found amongst the formerly oppressed peoples is a thing of the past.

The composition of the anti-imperialist front in the various Third World countries can naturally not be identical in view of the diversity of economic, social and political conditions that obtain. However, the interests of the struggle demand that all classes, social strata and groups which are sincerely opposed to imperialism participate in the front. It is important to note in this context that revolutionary, antiimperialist potential can assume the most diverse ideological and political forms. It is not uncommon for the anti-- imperialist content of a particular movement to appear in a historically shaped nationalistic or religious form. Hence the vital need to single out this potential in good time and ensure where possible its inclusion in the common current of the liberation movement.

Nationalism that came into being on a basis of anti-- imperialist and anti-colonialist aspirations, provides a vehicle for the revolutionary, anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed peoples. It left a deep imprint on the minds of the popular masses. Even today revolutionary, anti-imperialist nationalism continues to play a significant progressive role. At the same time it is evident that the upper echelons of the national bourgeoisie and the collaborationist neo-colonialist stratum of the propertied classes in the newly liberated countries go out of their way to make use of nationalism to promote their selfish, chauvinistic ends, so as to justify national exclusiveness, isolate the national liberation movement from other revolutionary forces of the modern world and forestall its transition to a path of social revolution.

When the newly liberated countries embark on a path of independent development many millions start to take an active part in political affairs. As a result the question of correct and effective leadership of the people's mass struggle to uphold its fundamental national and social interests assumes particular importance. This is reflected in the activity of those political groups which endeavour to secure the support of the working masses through their influence and their organisations.

2---919

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.

{§

movement on the world revolutionary process have increased beyond measure in our age. This means that any disunity in the ranks of the Communists can bring direct and immediate harm to the cause of the anti-imperialist struggle and hold up the advance of the liberation revolutions. Real cohesion of the ranks of the Communists and all progressive anti-imperialist forces is the most important and urgent objective of the present period. The Communists in the newly liberated countries, as noted in the final document of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, support maximum consolidation of the anti-imperialist front, uphold the cause of freedom, national independence and a socialist future for their peoples; they propagate the ideas of scientific socialism and are in the forefront of the national liberation movement. The Meeting stressed the fact that "a hostile attitude to communism, and persecution of Communists harm the struggle for national and social emancipation"/^^1^^"

The foundation for the formation of the patriotic national front is co-operation between Communists, the most consistent champions of the social and national liberation of the working people, with the broad strata of revolutionary democrats. Experience has borne out the idea put forward by the international communist movement to the effect that for the successful development of the national liberation revolutions involving far-reaching socio-economic and political changes, a question of central importance is the co-operation and close friendly relations between the parties of the revolutionary proletariat and the revolutionary democrats. Any lack of mutual understanding and even tense relations between them can only play into the hands of the imperialists and local reactionary forces. This explains why the imperialists and their henchmen try to strain these relations and bring about splits between these revolutionary forces.

The unity of these forces may manifest itself in the wide variety of forms for the rallying together of different groups and their joint action, for the formation of united fronts opposed to imperialism and internal reaction and defending

In the East the communist movement finds itself up against many difficulties of an objective nature. MarxismLeninism and the goals it sets are undeniably in keeping with the interests of the working masses in the newly liberated countries. Yet given the widespread and sometimes predominant nationalistic, religious and other forms of ideology and the substantial influence of tribal, patriarchal and caste traditions left over from the past, Marxist-Leninist teaching can naturally not be assimilated in its entirety by the masses within a historically short period in countries where the basic democratic tasks of the national liberation revolution have not been accomplished. The still dominant influence of traditional attitudes and the organisations reflecting these can also be explained by the fact that these organisations, in order to gain mass support, sometimes include in their programmes slogans and demands which to a certain extent appeal to the masses that are becoming increasingly discontented with their economic, social and political position.

The development and intensification of the national liberation movement and the need for greater cohesion of all democratic and anti-imperialist forces give rise to a situation in which backward ideas among the masses gradually fade and disappear. A constant, persistent struggle to implement concrete demands of the masses, those that are immediately comprehensible and close to their hearts, is required. Reactionary and chauvinist organisations make use of these demands in an effort to promote their own selfish class interests, and at times with considerable effect. In the course of the national liberation struggle the masses come to understand, with the help of concrete examples, that the Communists and revolutionary democrats and the progressive organisations and politicians sympathetic to the former are the most active, consistent and honest fighters for the implementation of vital popular demands. This course of action enables progressive revolutionary forces to ensure the constant growth of their influence among the masses.

The Marxists-Leninists make up the vanguard in the antiimperialist revolutions and liberation movements in many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The scale and effectiveness of the influence of the international communist

* International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, Moscow. 1969, p. 29.

ft. ULYANOVSK?

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

progressive gains, etc. The choice of this or that way of drawing together, co-operating and organising a joint struggle depends upon the stand and decision of the progressive revolutionary forces themselves and their understanding of their particular responsibility, role and duty to the people.

The younger generation, in particular the student community is coming to play a more and more conspicuous role in the political life of the newly liberated countries. The minds of progressive young people are filled with ideas of freedom and independence and social progress and they are anxious to oppose imperialism. The mass of these young people are patriotically minded and they are most eager to intensify the struggle against imperialism and reaction and champion social progress. Yet lacking the necessary experience and really firm views they sometimes become subject to the influence of anti-popular and anti-socialist political forces. The imperialists and local reactionaries bear in mind this aspect of the youth movement and try to exploit it by involving it in their own anti-democratic activities. In so doing they distort the genuinely patriotic and anti-- imperialist aspirations of the youth movement and channel these against the nation's true interests. This means that one of the most vital conditions for an intensification of the struggle against imperialism and reaction in the newly liberated countries is the exposure of the fraudulent manoeuvres engineered within the youth movement by local and external forces of reaction, the securing of firm support from the nation's youth by drawing up patriotic, democratic action programmes. At the same time it is essential to take into account the age factor, young people's thirst for knowledge, experience and opportunities to put their ideals into practice, their eagerness to find for themselves a secure position and recognition in the economic and political life of their country, in the struggle for its democratisation and social advance.

A distinctive feature of the social conditions obtaining in the majority of the newly liberated countries consists in the fact that not one of the social classes there, because of the undeveloped nature of the class structure as a whole, can steer socio-economic and political processes without firmly allying itself to all the other anti-imperialist forces. Attempts on the part of any one class, social stratum or group to mo-

nopolise state power often disrupt political stability. In those cases where instead of a real struggle for the unity of all patriotic forces there are only sweeping statements with no foundation, where as a result a sense of responsibility to the people for the organisation of a joint struggle against the imperialists and their local agents is either lacking or insufficiently developed, weak and isolated links appear in the anti-imperialist front and the imperialists attempt to launch counter-offensives. It is important always to bear in mind that in recent years imperialist strategy usually combines an enforced abandonment of its positions in some sectors with intensification of aggression in other directions.

At the present time conditions are coming more and more to favour a combination of the revolutionary struggle against the dictatorship of the monopolies in the developed capitalist countries with staunch resistance to their policy aimed at consolidating and extending their influence in the countries of the Third World, at seeing to it that these countries remain an underprivileged appendage of the world capitalist economy and are transformed into preserves of `` periphery'' capitalism beset by practices inherited from archaic socio-economic structures. From this follows that in presentday conditions the internationalism of joint action, of the common struggle against the main adversary, as pointed out in the final document of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, finds expression in the elimination of the domination of the monopolies in the citadels of imperialism, in the creation of new, progressive societies in the newly liberated countries with the assistance of the world socialist system, and in the triumphant construction of socialism and communism in the countries of the socialist community.

The main trend of development to be observed since the Second World War is the wholesale retreat of the imperialists in all countries where the national liberation movement is active, a step which they have been obliged to take as a result of pressure from the forces of socialism, the international working-class movement and the national liberation movement. Precisely the unity of these three forces within the world revolutionary process has ensured the collapse of the colonial empires and the attaining of national

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23"

sovereignty by almost all the formerly oppressed countries. Economic co-operation between these sovereign states and the socialist countries has to a large extent undermined the schemes of the imperialists aimed at the imposition on the former of what virtually amounts to a new colonial status through the mechanism of the world capitalist economy.

The growing economic and military might of the countries of the socialist community and the consolidation of the forces of national liberation, on the one hand, and military defeats for the imperialists in local wars and political discrediting of the aggressors, on the other, constitute important prerequisites for further militant cohesion of all antiimperialist, democratic and peace-loving forces. The lessons of the Vietnam war and the Middle East crisis provide striking illustration of the fact that the aggressor can only be defeated by armed forces which combine effective use of modern weapons supplied by the working class of the socialist countries with the determination consistently to defend their national independence and social gains, consolidation of the unity of their anti-imperialist movement and the alliance with the socialist community and the international working-class movement.

The cohesion of all anti-imperialist forces, as an objective recognised necessity, has today become the decisive factor in the successful advance and intensification of the national liberation movement. Despite all the efforts expended the imperialists are no longer in a position to alter the basic trend of development to be observed in the national liberation movement of today. Temporary defeats and setbacks experienced by certain detachments of the national liberation movement in Ghana, Zaire or Indonesia have not altered the balance of power to the advantage of the imperialists. The imperialists have not been able to consolidate their position in the newly liberated countries. Their power is continually on the wane, their political influence is weakening and their military ventures, as a rule, prove fruitless. The national liberation movement in alliance with the world socialist system and the international working class has now open before it wider opportunities than ever for activising the struggle against imperialism and securing new victories on the path to complete liberation,

Unity of the Forces of Socialism and the National

Liberation Movement---a Vital Condition for Success

in the Struggle Against Imperialism

The anti-imperialist struggle waged by the liberated peoples has at present entered an important and complex stage. Intensified subversive activities of the imperialists directed against the countries of the socialist system are proceeding at the same time as their counter-offensive against the national liberation movement in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the Third World. The Israeli aggression against the Arab countries supported by the imperialists, and conspiracies against those states that have embarked on a path of non-capitalist development are all part of the international imperialist strategy aimed at holding back the historic advance of the forces of socialism and national liberation.

All-out consolidation of the alliance between the forces of world socialism, the national liberation and international working-class movements advocated by Lenin, a course that has borne the test of time and proved itself time and time again in the past, is as relevant as ever. Events in the past have demonstrated the inestimable importance of this alliance for the struggle against imperialism in the name of peace and the peoples' advancement. This alliance has acquired still more far-reaching significance in the course of the recent development of the international revolutionary process.

Imperialism is aggressive by its very nature; however, the intensification of this aggressiveness in recent years which finds expression not only in its open use of force but also in the application of ``quiet'', ``peaceful'' counter-revolution is of special significance. It is dictated by the firm intent of the imperialist politicians and ideologists to preserve intact the obsolete capitalist system. Success in communist construction in the USSR, the advance of socialism in other countries of the world socialist system, intensification of the class struggle in the capitalist countries, the collapse of the colonialist system and the irresistible force of socialist ideas rapidly gaining ground in the newly liberated countries are all factors serving to accelerate the course of social progress

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throughout the world and shorten the life of capitalism.

The imperialists now find themselves up against an unprecedented new phenomenon in the national liberation struggle: a process of national liberation that it is now impossible to turn back, insurmountable resistance from national-democratic forces and states that are endeavouring to reconstruct the whole social order inherited from the colonialist past. The irreversibility of these historic processes of national and social liberation, despite whole decades of counter-revolutionary efforts on the part of the imperialists and reactionaries, can to a large extent be explained by the united stand of the forces of national liberation and international socialism. This is why the state-monopoly, militaryindustrial and ideological complex of contemporary imperialism devotes so much energy to schemes designed to undermine the alliance of the anti-imperialist forces, making use of temporary contradictions arising in the course of the world revolutionary process to this end, and inciting and exploiting differences between individual revolutionary detachments of the international anti-imperialist front.

Bourgeois propaganda systematically aims at sowing distrust of Communists and Marxism-Leninism among diverse sections of the working population. It is designed to cut off the revolutionary democrats and the intelligentsia in the developing countries from the influence of Marxism-- Leninism, resorting to the wildest of fabrications and slander for this purpose.

The activisation of the subversive activity of the imperialists has been promoted by the reactionary and chauvinist splitting tactics pursued by the Mao Tse-tung group, which advocates a. revision of the Marxist-Leninist principles of the militant unity of the anti-imperialist forces, contrasting the national liberation movement with the international working-class movement, referring to the former as the "world village" and the latter as the "world town". The efforts of the Maoists are directed at splitting the alliance between the forces of socialism and the national liberation movement and creating in the liberated countries an atmosphere of hostile distrust of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, Communist Parties and the working class in the capitalist countries.

The actual state of affairs at the present time is such that the alliance of the forces of socialism, the national liberation movement and the international working-class movement is now being attacked by both world imperialism and the revisionists, of both Right and Left varieties, directing their subversive tactics against the unity of all anti-- imperialist, anti-colonialist forces.

The theoretical foundation for the great alliance of the forces of socialism and the national liberation movement was provided by Marx, Engels and Lenin who singled out the international proletariat as the champion of both social and national freedom, and economic progress, as the main force capable of overthrowing capitalism.

Lenin's concept of the unity and indissolubility of the component parts of the world revolutionary process, of all the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist forces involved was and remains a guiding principle for the CPSU and the world communist movement.

Lenin elaborated this idea possessed of such dynamic power long before the October Revolution. Its first seeds are easy to trace to the early period of Lenin's revolutionary activity as leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party and they can then be seen to evolve in Lenin's subsequent study of the national liberation movement prior to the First World War, in particular in his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

The concept of the unity of the forces of socialism and national liberation took definitive shape and was furnished with thorough theoretical and political substantiation lending it truly global implications precisely at that crucial moment of history when the oppressed peoples of the colonies, semi-colonies and dependent countries, inspired and aroused by the Great October Socialist Revolution, started to wage an active struggle against imperialism.

It was the Russian proletariat led by Lenin's Bolshevik Party which, in alliance with the peasantry, dealt the first crushing blow at imperialism and ushered in the crisis of the world colonial system. No one can deny the historical fact that the collapse of the colonial empires and the birth of over 75 new independent states with a population accounting for over a third of mankind are closely bound up

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with the victory of the October Revolution in 1917 and the emergence of the world socialist system.

Direct political, economic and military support from the socialist countries for the peoples fighting for their national and social liberation characterises the relations between the Soviet Union and other socialist countries and the emergent independent states and likewise those between the USSR and other socialist countries and the pe.oples fighting the colonialists to win their freedom, including those who are waging an armed struggle. At the same time the growing momentum of the anti-colonial struggle in all its forms serves to weaken the imperialist forces and consolidate the position of the world socialist system. At the present time a .powerful class and international alliance of the freedomfighters and progressive forces in the modern world is an established fact.

Recent history has shown beyond any doubt that the national liberation process in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America has developed all the more successfully, and the socialist prospects for this development in the future have emerged all the more clearly, the closer the ties these countries have established with the Soviet Union and the other fraternal socialist countries, the more they have secured the support of the progressive detachments of the working class, the Communist and workers' parties and the more the proletarian and national-democratic forces have rallied together. When this was not the case, then the imperialists often succeeded in securing decisive control over the national liberation movements, and national liberation movements in such situations soon found themselves isolated and undermined from within.

A lack of unity and close ties with the forces of socialism and the international communist and working-class movement for this or that particular national liberation movement always led to its rout or suppression by the imperialists, or the confinement of the national liberation struggle to a movement designed to do no more than pave the way for the given country's bourgeois-capitalist development.

In the course of the struggle waged by the colonial peoples for their freedom and independence that has been go-

ing on for over fifty years they have scored numerous hardwon victories over imperialism, while the Soviet Union has been developing into a mighty and highly developed power of tremendous economic and military potential and on more than one occasion has played a decisive role in the struggle of the forces of progress against the forces of imperialism and reaction.

After the Second World War the international community of socialist countries came into being and the role of socialism as a world force became infinitely more important in determining the destiny of mankind. The new, socialist system changed and is continuing to change the alignment of forces on our planet to the advantage of the progressive forces, thus creating conditions more favourable for the spread and intensification of the national liberation revolutions, for the developing countries' transition to a non-capitalist path of development.

Lenin's doctrine with regard to ways and methods of solving the national-colonial question is permeated with a spirit of proletarian internationalism. It rules out any isolation or contrasting of the individual parties or groupings within the international anti-imperialist front. The Marxists-Leninists have always taken this doctrine as their basis for action and will continue to do so.

After achieving their independence the liberated states still remain part of the world capitalist economic system in view of the objective laws of the division of labour operating within the world capitalist system, non-- equivalent exchange and the age-old technical and economic backwardness of these countries resulting from long years of exploitation by international imperialism. Colonialism kept these now liberated countries a long way behind the modern technological revolution and the present level of industrial progress. Suffice it to mention that the economically dependent countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America inhabited by two-thirds of the world population only account for onetwelfth of the manufacturing industries of the whole capitalist world, 5 per cent of its steel production and 3 per cent of its production of machines and equipment.

The newly liberated countries are now faced with a task of historic importance: they must overcome age-old eco-

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THEORETICAL ANt> POLITICAL ASPECTS

29

ductivity levels, strict economy measures, reliance on support from the working people, who should be involved in economic and state administration and a true cultural revolution. The internationalist duty of the socialist countries is to do all within their power to promote favourable conditions for the liberated countries' selection of a socialist path of development, for their attainment of complete independence of imperialism.

Some detachments of the national liberation movement are distinguished by insufficient stability, the lack of a precise programme for social progress, a departure from a clearly defined auti-imperialist line and manifestations of short-sighted nationalism. The specific conditions peculiar to the historical development of the newly liberated countries, the vast maojrity of whose inhabitants consists of illiterate peasants and an urban petty bourgeoisie, have engendered and continue to engender nationalistic prejudice and together with this a certain distrust of progressive socialist ideology.

Lenin was the first Marxist who appreciated the anti-- imperialist potential inherent in the nationalism of the oppressed peoples, which served to weld together various social strata in the colonies, semi-colonies and dependent countries in the struggle against mankind's greatest enemy, namely international imperialism. This anti-imperialist nationalism played a major role in the attainment of political independence by the countries of Asia and Africa. Its anti-imperialist potential has indeed not yet been exhausted even now. Yet despite all that, it is important to remember that the neo-colonialists, anxious to work in conjunction with the ruling bourgeois groupings in the Third World countries, are going out of their way to fan narrow nationalistic trends in the hopes of channelling these first and foremost against the communist and working-class movements.

In the course of the struggle against imperialism in the newly liberated countries the prejudices stemming from bourgeois nationalist influence are gradually being eliminated. This development is facilitated by the growth of the working-class and communist movements and by the decrease in national egoism among that part of the present-

nomic, technological and cultural backwardness as rapidly as possible, develop their forces of production to the utmost and increase the growth rates of their industry and agriculture. The main obstacle between them and this goal is international imperialism with its neo-colonialist system of political, economic, military and ideological relations. In these conditions it is vital that the national liberation movement should intensify its fight against neo-colonialism, against the economic power of the monopolies, the fight which is now gaining momentum in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this struggle the forces of national liberation glean support from their economic alliance with the world socialist system and its economic and technological assistance to the developing states, and from their ties with the socialist countries which are of a completely new type, based on equal rights and mutual trust.

The increasing orientation of many developing countries towards the large and growing market of the socialist countries helps them in their campaign to put an end to unfair, one-sided trade terms and their intensive economic and technological co-operation with the socialist countries is severing the old, colonialist production links. A new type of economic relations based on equal rights growing up between the socialist states and the developing countries compels the imperialists to make certain concessions to these countries and facilitates control over the predatory practices of the monopolies. In some of the liberated countries natural resources that were formerly exploited by the imperialist monopolies are now being used to promote the local economy. The socialist countries provide the necessary technical equipment and train local personnel to develop the economies of these countries.

Of course the construction of a new society, of new progressive production forces independent of the imperialists, is the concern of the people of the country, where the new society is taking shape. Socialism is not something that can be imported. A new social structure is forged by the indefatigable energy and labour of the popular masses, demanding tremendous constructive effort on their part, a constant struggle against imperialism, thorough and planned development of local resources, a gradual but steady rise in pro-

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day intelligentsia that is becoming more and more receptive to the ideas of scientific socialism.

The working class in the developing countries is growing apace: in 1970 its numbers were over two and a half times the pre-war total.

Internationalist tendencies are making themselves felt more and more in the national liberation movement and these serve to consolidate the very foundation of its alliance with world socialism and the international working-class movement. Despite this bourgeois nationalism, which the Marxists-Leninists with good reason view as a vehicle of capitalist ideology and policy, still raises its ugly head.

Inevitably enough the alliance of the national liberation movement with other revolutionary forces in the modern world has paved the way for non-capitalist development now beginning in the Third World countries, for this milestone in the direction of which many of the newly liberated countries are now moving. The number of countries and peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America which after the attainment of independence have been seeking in various ways to start advancing in the direction of socialism is growing. Revolutionary democrats and the revolutionarydemocratic parties have become an important factor in this trend toward social progress. The goals with regard to a number of important questions outlined in their programmes are gradually coming more and more to resemble those advocated by scientific socialism. The foremost representatives of the revolutionary democrats try to make use of the experience of the class struggle gained by the international proletariat in the course of socialist construction. The revolutionary democrats, accumulating the anti-imperialist revolutionary energy of the masses and applying in the specific conditions obtaining in the newly liberated countries the known propositions on the possibility of by-passing the capitalist stage or curtailing the period of capitalist development, are taking major steps along the path of socioeconomic progress. Many of these steps take them beyond the confines of capitalist development.

In modern conditions when the influence of scientific socialism is making itself felt throughout the world there are no obstacles that could prevent consolidation of the

alliance between Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary-- democratic parties or their joint struggle against a common enemy to achieve common goals.

The path to a radiant future is neither easy nor short. However, the theory and practice of the world revolutionary process, of which the national liberation movement is an essential ingredient, show the Marxists-Leninists and all advance detachments fighting for national liberation that this path can be shortened if they join together and concentrate their efforts in the struggle against imperialism.

Prime importance should be attached to co-ordinated action on the part of the various detachments of the united international revolutionary movement, close contact between the Marxist-Leninist, national liberation and nationalrevolutionary parties fighting for political and economic freedom and the elaboration of a joint strategy in the struggle against the common enemy.

Lenin wrote in his day: "World imperialism shall fall when the revolutionary onslaught of the exploited and oppressed workers in each country. . . merges with the revolutionary onslaught of hundreds of millions of people who have hitherto stood beyond the pale of history, and have been regarded merely as the object of history."* This united onslaught has been going on for over half a century, and the former all-powerful and unlimited domination of the imperialists is a thing of the past. Socialism, the international working-class and national liberation movements have dealt heavy blows at the imperialist system and brought about fundamental changes in the alignment of forces in the world arena.

The strategic policy pursued by the CPSU with regard to national liberation has always been based on Lenin's proposition to the effect that triumphant socialist revolution and the anti-imperialist national liberation movement are staunch allies in the common struggle against imperialism. Taking this tenet of Lenin's as its guiding principle the CPSU has been cementing its relations with the national

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 232.

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liberation movement for several decades on the basis of an alliance, profound mutual understanding and close cooperation.

The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU devoted a good deal of attention to the problems of the anti-- imperialist national liberation movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In a resolution drawn up by the Congress in response to the CPSU Central Committee Report it was stated: "The CPSU is invariably true to the Leninist principle of solidarity with the peoples fighting for national liberation and social emancipation. As in the past, the fighters against the remaining colonial regimes can count on our full support."*

The Congress stressed the united stand of the CPSU and Soviet people with the heroic Vietnamese who were successfully resisting the American aggressor, with the peoples of Laos and Cambodia who had risen in defence of their independence and with the peoples of Guinea ( Bissau), the Cape Verde Islands, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa who had taken up arms to defend their right to freedom and human dignity in a grim struggle against racialism and colonialism.

The Twenty-Fourth Congress provided convincing illustration of the fact that the efforts of the CPSU possess vital significance. The relations between the CPSU and the Soviet state, on the one hand, and the revolutionary national liberation movement and the newly liberated countries, on the other, have entered a new stage, in which each side's fundamental interests in their joint struggle against imperialism in the name of social progress coincide, and allround co-operation at state and party level on a basis of genuinely equal rights is developing with the newly free countries, particularly those with national-democratic regimes, with socialist-oriented parties and with progressive anti-imperialist movements.

This alliance is of truly historic significance and constitutes an exceptionally powerful means of mass resistance to imperialist expansion. The anti-imperialist forces are

supported by the overwhelming majority of mankind, the socialist community included. This community is a true, proven and universally recognised vanguard of mankind. The actual participation in the work of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU of 48 representatives from 21 national-democratic- parties of Asia and Africa provides convincing illustration of this. In their messages of greeting to the Congress these delegates paid tribute to the decisive contribution to the success of the national liberation movement made by the CPSU, the Soviet people and the socialist community.

In their speeches many guests to the Congress from AfroAsian countries gave clear expression to their deep appreciation of the significance of the USSR's achievements in the economic sphere, in technology, culture and defence for the national liberation movement. These achievements are rightly viewed as a considerable contribution to the antiimperialist cause by the Soviet people.

Recognition by representatives of the Afro-Asian countries with national-democratic regimes of the common interests shared by international socialism and the national liberation movement, and of the need to consolidate still further the alliance between them represents a significant victory of the CPSU's general policy line. Many difficulties had to be overcome before this recognition was attained: the failure of some leaders of the national liberation movement exposed to the influence of foreign enemies and local reactionaries to reach a correct understanding of certain important aspects of this essentially common struggle, unbridled anti-communist propaganda spread by the imperialists and their yes-men from amongst the national bourgeoisie and the landowning class, and finally the splitting tactics pursued by the Maoists in their efforts to fan anti-Soviet feeling.

The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU provided striking illustration of the increasing convergence of the main currents of the modern revolutionary process and of the leading role in this process played by international socialism. It demonstrated that the forces of the national liberation, closely linked as they are with the international working-class movement and having the support of the

3---919

24th Congress of the CPSU, Moscow, 1971, p. 215.

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Soviet Union and other socialist countries, are now launching a historic offensive against imperialism and in a number of areas are also waging a struggle against the capitalist social system, the capitalist mode of production as such. These developments provide the basis for still greater convergence of the socialist and national-democratic

revolutions.

The Congress mirrored the significant and increasing degree to which the views held by socialist countries and the national-democratic regimes on vital issues of domestic and foreign policy are coinciding. Another conspicuous feature of this Congress---and one most important for the overall destiny of the revolutionary struggle---was the consistent rejection by prominent politicians from abroad in their speeches from the Congress tribune of the false ideas to the effect that the national liberation movement is a force equally opposed to imperialism and the world socialist

system.

The consistent struggle for freedom and independence and the socialist policies being pursued by a number of newly liberated countries presuppose full support for these countries from the socialist states and close co-operation with the latter. This support and co-operation alone can guarantee successful rebuff to the aggressive manoeuvres and subversive activity engineered by the imperialists and

reactionaries.

The conception of ``equidistance'' from imperialism and socialism and also the so-called theories of "rich and poor nations" and the "two superpowers" sometimes find ready ears in certain strata of society in the developing countries. Put forward by the Maoists and taken up by the imperialist politicians these concepts are designed to alienate the developing countries from the Soviet Union and convince them of the latter's allegedly expansionist interests thus bringing them to ignore the basic contradiction of the modern world---that between imperialism and socialism--- which underlies the central line of struggle in the international arena. These fallacious ``theories'' misrepresent the essence of the modern revolutionary process and confuse the issue as to the enemies and allies of the liberated peoples: they are aimed at undermining the unity of national

and international progressive forces in the anti-imperialist

struggle.

The socialist world and the forces of national liberation have accumulated considerable experience in resisting localised counter-attacks of the imperialists supported by local reactionaries.

The imperialists are no longer in a position to stave off the advance of the national liberation movement, to turn it back from the frontiers it has won hand in hand with the socialist world and the international working class. However, it is vital to boost the revolutionary vigilance of the newly liberated peoples to the maximum possible degree, bearing in mind that the imperialists are still capable of causing no small measure of suffering and disaster. This requires constant readiness on the part of the anti-- imperialist forces to unite their efforts to repulse imperialist aggression.

World imperialism has been and remains the main enemy of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the struggle against imperialism, colonialism and neo-- colonialism they have no weapon more powerful than their own unity, than their alliance with the socialist world and the international working class.

At the present stage of the national liberation movement, against a background of increasing aggressiveness on the part of the imperialists, there is no denying the fact that everything points to the need for the broadest possible cohesion of all genuinely anti-imperialist forces both on an international scale and within the individual newly liberated countries. Despite the difficulties that sometimes stand in the way of the unity of the three basic currents of the world revolutionary process, namely, world socialism, the international working-class and national liberation movement, the necessity for their united action is gaining ever wider recognition as an undeniable historical fact. The interaction of the national liberation movement and world socialism and their close alliance is an earnest of new success in the struggle against imperialism.

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THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

Non-Capitalist Development: the Path to Social Progress

The majority of the former oppressed countries have already won their independence and they are now confronted by new tasks which to a certain extent modify the nature of the national liberation movement in these countries. Increasing importance now attaches to the securing of economic independence and social emancipation---a fundamental improvement in the living conditions of the masses, an all-out drive against poverty, wider involvement of the working people in the administration of state affairs, etc.: all this in its turn brings up the question of the choice of paths for socio-economic development the solution of which is urgently required in each of the newly liberated countries. The controversy on this decisive question between the various social forces in these countries is becoming more and more acute.

This intensification of the internal struggle is also due to the new international situation in which for the first time the peoples are faced by a choice between two concrete paths of development, for the one which best corresponds to their needs. The world socialist system helps the countries striving after liberation to ward off the imperialists' efforts to export counter-revolution, and affords them vital political, economic and technical assistance, thus facilitating their progressive development.

The internal struggle within the liberated countries is becoming more intense now that two forces representing two diametrically opposed trends of development---socialist and capitalist---are closing their ranks. There are now ample grounds for asserting that the national liberation movement serves to alter the alignment of forces in the modern world to the advantage of socialism not merely because socialism is essentially anti-imperialist but also because the national liberation movement is adopting an increasingly well-defined stand against capitalism as a social formation.

When referring to the prospects for the development of the former colonial countries many bourgeois politicians and sociologists drew up forecasts in the post-war years in

which their ardent desires were presented as the inevitable reality of the future. They prophesied that the Third World would provide a powerful injection of new life for capitalism and that neo-capitalism would flourish throughout the three backward continents---Asia, Africa and Latin America. They assumed that perfect soil for new capitalist development would be provided by the enormous territories with their population of over 1,500 million, living in pre-- capitalist conditions, or at best conditions of embryonic capitalism, in a pre-industrial society where private initiative is making inroads on the very foundations of the patriarchal, communal way of life and feudal patterns. Economically and socially backward societies with a tiny, poorly organised proletariat, and sometimes without one at all, societies in which conditions have not taken shape for the formation of Marxist-Leninist parties, the politically conscious vanguard of the working class, are a sure guarantee of unswerving capitalist development, of stability for those social relations which in Western countries no longer appear immutable on account of the powerful working-class movement.

Although these reckonings may have seemed outwardly convincing at the time, the fifteen to twenty-five years that have elapsed since the birth of the majority of the newly independent states have refuted beyond any doubt the forecasts to the effect that the Third World would become a bastion of capitalism serving to revitalise and stabilise it. Contrary to these forecasts, influential political forces in the young independent countries are adopting an increasingly intolerant stand with regard to capitalism. The advance of the international working-class and communist movement and the growing influence of world socialism on the fate of the peoples have altered the customary course of the historical process and opened up new opportunities and new forms for a revolutionary swing away from capitalism.

Practically all the countries fighting for their national independence have already for many years been faced by the problem as to which path of development they should choose, by the necessity of a choice between the two major social systems, the two poles of the modern world---- capitalism or socialism. By no means have all of them made

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this choice yet. Those of them who would appear already to have opted for the path of bourgeois development, are now in actual fact either marking time, or, what is more frequently the case, going through a profound socio-- political crisis in the course of which the popular masses endeavour to disrupt capitalist development and turn to the path of social progress.

This, of course, does not mean that capitalist economic development in the newly liberated countries has now come to a standstill. On the contrary, it has accelerated and during the sixties the average annual increase rate of gross industrial production was twice that recorded during the precolonial period. However despite this acceleration in capitalist development the majority of the newly independent countries inhabited by two-thirds of the capitalist world's population account for only a small share of industrial production, while with regard to agriculture they are the most backward countries in the world and thanks to capitalism are still not self-sufficient in food. This shows that the young developing countries are still subjected to capitalist oppression and imperialist exploitation. Instead of neo-- capitalism, neo-colonialism is the order of the day in these countries if they choose a capitalist path of development.

The non-capitalist path, on the other hand, which a number of newly independent Afro-Asian countries have opted for, is the logical outcome of the present stage of the national liberation movement, characterised by the collapse of imperialism and the transition from capitalism to socialism on a world scale. The objective nature of the aspirations manifested by the newly liberated countries to achieve non-capitalist development is the result of their dependent position, one of inequality, in the world capitalist economy, their inability to resolve the fundamental socioeconomic problems confronting them while following a capitalist course of development, and of the notorious reputation capitalism is acquiring in the eyes of the general public in these countries. People are becoming increasingly convinced of the fact that while following the capitalist path it will be impossible for them to throw off the shackles of poverty and backwardness and achieve broad-scale economic and social progress.

A feature characteristic of the world capitalist economy today as in the past is the ever-widening gap between the levels of economic development reached by the industrialised imperialist powers and the countries of the Third World. The disparity between the GNP in the newly liberated countries and the developed capitalist countries is of an unprecedented size as the following table illustrates (1963 prices, $000 mln):

;.-

Newly independent countries

Industrially developed capitalist countries

Index of the lead enjoyed by the second group

120.4

617.0

+ 496.6

297.8

1,413.3

+ 1,115.5

Absolute growth

+ 177.4

+ 796.3

+ 618.9

The overall growth of the GNP in the newly independent countries over the twenty years was 77.8 per cent less than in the developed capitalist countries. These countries account for a mere 17 per cent of the gross product of the world capitalist economy: this means that in the non-- socialist world two-thirds of the population produce only a sixth of the total gross product.

Experience of development in the newly liberated countries over the last 15-25 years has shown beyond any doubt that it is virtually impossible to ensure their rapid and steady economic advance and to put an end to the age-old backwardness of their economy if the latter is based on capitalist economy. Not one of these countries, even if it has been independent for between twenty and twenty-five years, has been able to become an industrial or even agrarian-industrial country during that period. Most of them have failed to develop a large-scale industry on anything like a systematic basis although the period of their independent capitalist development already numbers twenty years and upwards. The International "Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties (1969) had every reason to conclude that the newly liberated "countries which have taken the capitalist road have been unable to solve any of the

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THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

basic problems facing them"/^^1^^" These are the objective reasons that give rise to the anti-capitalist aspirations of many Third World leaders, to their efforts to put an end to imperialist exploitation and the position of inequality as trading partners imposed on these countries in the world capitalist market. This development represents a practical corroboration of the conclusion drawn at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in 1960 which in its Statement pointed to the fact that the popular masses "begin to see that the best way to abolish age-long backwardness and improve their living standard is that of noncapitalist development. Only thus can the peoples free themselves from exploitation, poverty and hunger."""*

The most important of the objective prerequisites for the feasibility of socialist development "by-passing capitalism" is the uneven nature of the economic and political development in the countries which are part of the world capitalist economy. Usually, it is with this unevenness, which is a general law of world capitalist development in the imperialist era, that the possibility of a socialist victory in a particular country---with at least a mean level of capitalist development---is linked. This is true for the first triumph of socialism is under discussion, i.e., that in Russia in 1917. However the uneven development referred to above demands that the newly liberated countries, if they wish to shake themselves free of the shackles of imperialism, should without any doubt reject the capitalist path of development. Capitalism will not only prevent them from achieving equality of conditions for their development in the world economy but will make impossible any evening out of levels of economic development, as the table cited above made clear.

A pledge of the success of the national liberation revolution is the consistent implementation of the tasks implicit in the general-democratic stage that is destined to free all the working people from all forms of oppression, to involve

them, in one form or other, in state administration. Progressive forces strive to take into account experience gleaned by the socialist countries in the course of their advance. The tremendous progressive impact of socialist ideology is another factor of no small importance.

The experience of many countries has shown that the general-democratic stage of the national liberation revolution extends beyond the bourgeois-liberal programme for the advance of free enterprise within the newly independent country. Successful fulfilment of general-democratic tasks as a rule now opens up possibilities for looking for an alternative to the capitalist path of development that would satisfy to the utmost possible degree the interests of the masses in the newly liberated countries and would express their national, anti-imperialist aspirations. Such an alternative is provided by the non-capitalist path. This marks a new and extremely important feature of the present stage of the national liberation revolution.

Wherever the compradore or big national bourgeoisie or either the bourgeois-landowner bloc on coming to power force the people to follow a course of capitalist development, they either sabotage general-democratic reforms (support for the state sector, agrarian reforms, industrialisation, etc.) or pursue their own selfish aims while introducing isolated progressive measures. For example, the establishment of a relatively strong state sector in a number of countries, on the one hand, has placed a major obstacle in the way of the foreign monopolies impeding their ambitions by making them subject to more rigorous state control, while, on the other, it has served to consolidate national capitalism and the position of the bourgeois-landowner ruling clique, its power and influence.

In these countries the popular masses are becoming increasingly aware of the national bourgeoisie's inability to develop the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolution in depth or to implement the general-democratic programme in the interests of the people. In a number of Afro-Asian countries the national bourgeoisie has become a power that is impeding the further advance of the liberation struggle and its upper sections are openly joining ranks with the reactionaries. This explains why the bourgeois leadership of the

* International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, Mos: Dmocracy and Socialism, Moscow, 1963,

p. 64.

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national liberation movement in a number of countries is now going through a profound crisis. So-called middle or intermediate strata are coming to occupy a more prominent position in the leadership of the national liberation struggle. These strata of the population are in a position and in some countries actually do set up a democratic coalition in opposition to the monopoly of power enjoyed by the bourgeoisie or the bourgeois-landowner ruling circles. An all-out drive to deprive the national bourgeoisie and the landowners of their monopoly of political power is becoming one of the issues in the class struggle underway in many of the newly independent states.

Events themselves show that the firmer the cohesion of all patriotic, progressive and democratic forces in the newly liberated countries the more successful their struggle to attain social progress and national independence will be. Communists who are the most selfless champions of the struggle against imperialism in the interests of the people take an extremely active part in this struggle.

A number of countries (including Syria, Algeria, Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Somalia, South Yemen and Burma) have already opted for the non-capitalist path; however, anti-capitalist attitudes within the national liberation movement are taking firmer root and their advocates are becoming more experienced and politically mature in all the newly free countries. A consolidation of anti-capitalist forces on a broad nationaldemocratic basis is under way. A situation is taking shape in which the non-capitalist path of development complete with its diverse forms anJ initial approaches to the solution of the most vital tasks---the removal from power of pro-- imperialist, pro-feudal and finally pro-capitalist elements and their deprivation of ownership of the main means of production---is becoming the route to social progress of the

peoples.

In his elaboration of the theory of socialist revolution Lenin drew the conclusion that it was not essential for economically backward countries to pass through a capitalist stage. He expressed his conviction to the effect that if the peoples of the economically backward countries accept the help of the victorious proletariat they would be able to, on

passing through a specific stage of development, make a direct transition to socialism by-passing or at least cutting short the stage of capitalism as a dominant social formation. This opportunity foreseen by Lenin has since become tangible reality.

The non-capitalist and socialist paths of development have the same goals and share a general trend of socio-economic development. However the non-capitalist path, and particularly at the very outset, is, of course, not the same as the stage of all-out socialist construction. That is the stage of socio-economic development of the newly free countries during which the vital prerequisites for the transition to socialist construction will be provided by means of non-capitalist methods.

The starting-point for non-capitalist development in the developing countries is the victory of the national liberation revolution accompanied by the establishment of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship. This dictatorship gleans its support from non-proletarian, semi-proletarian, and, where they already exist, proletarian working masses alongside with a certain coalition with patriotic sections of the petty and a part of middle bourgeoisie, provided the latter does not sabotage social change.

From the point of view of its class implications and its overall trend and logic, the non-capitalist path of development is not at variance with the dictatorship of the proletariat as the power of the working class and those sections of the working people that are close to it. The non-capitalist path is an alternative to capitalism. In the final analysis this path will lead to the formation of a working class in those places where it is weak or does not yet exist at ail and will enhance its important role in the life of society. Yet all these developments will proceed not on a bourgeois but on an anti-capitalist basis although bourgeois elements, being interested in the accumulation of capital, and pressure from petty-bourgeois elements put up a strong resistance to this.

This means that, on the one hand, the non-capitalist path of development would be historically impossible were it not for the fact that the working class had assumed power first in one country and later in a number of capitalist countries: the victory of the October Revolution and the subsequent

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formation of the socialist community brought about an abrupt change in the international alignment of forces. On the other hand, there is no need to wait for the spontaneous development of capitalism within each particular country to create a mature capitalist society with all the objective and subjective prerequisites essential for the establishment of working-class power and for the transition to socialism before this or that individual people embarks on a non-capitalist path of development now, when the transition to socialism is proceeding on a world scale.

The idea of socialism entertained by many national democrats is often subjective and subject to definite limitations. This is revealed in their assessment of the historic role of the working class, of proletarian internationalism and of Marxism-Leninism as an ideology. Yet it would be the worst kind of doctrinaire approach to assume that because their conceptions of socialism in connection with a number of major questions do not coincide with those found in Marxism-Leninism, it is therefore not in the interests of the common cause to support national revolutionaries.

This point of view usually leads to many other incorrect conclusions: for example, the assertion that in all cases in countries where the working class does not have direct leadership, where it has not assumed power, it is impossible to carry out the tasks implicit in the general-democratic stage of the revolution, namely agrarian and anti-imperialist reforms. This assertion has no factual foundation. Since it disregards the revolutionary potential of national-democratic regimes and the vanguard role of the world socialist system and ignores the role of the non-proletarian and semi-- proletarian working masses, this point of view inevitably leads to a tacit recommendation to sit back and wait for the day when a local industry and proletariat come into being in those Afro-Asian countries where no full-fledged proletariat has as yet taken shape, for the day when this proletariat will come to lead the movement, to assume power. Meanwhile the advocates of this point of view would have us believe that revolutionary national democrats are incapable of waging a struggle against feudalism, imperialism and local capitalists, that they should "serve their apprenticeship with the capitalists", since sooner or later

capitalism will bring forth the prerequisites essential for socialist revolution. The beginning of the transition to a new progressive social system, the adoption of initial measures to hold back further development of capitalism that is anxious to merge with foreign capitalism, moves to clear the way for future socialist construction by getting rid of the obstacles to this end inherited from the colonialist past---the domination of foreign imperialists in the economy, feudalist practices---efforts aimed at bridling and undermining local capitalism should all, according to the doctrinaires, who do not accept the theory of non-capitalist development, be put off indefinitely. It is not difficult to appreciate that this solution of a problem possessing truly international importance is completely alien to Marxist dialectics and genuinely scientific socialism.

The idea that the non-capitalist path of development is a separate social formation, so to speak, half-way between capitalism and socialism is quite unscientific. It has little bearing on reality and is a long way from the truth. At the present there are two main socio-economic formations on this earth of ours---capitalism and socialism. Their symbiosis is ruled out for the two formations are antagonistic. The formations preceding capitalism exist as the legacy of the past and the extent of pre-capitalist survivals depends on the degree of capitalist development in the country in question.

There exists a considerable number of different ways and forms for the transition to socialism; however, their essence is always the same---anti-capitalist.

The non-capitalist path of development which prepares the way for the transition to socialism in countries predominated by survivals from a pre-capitalist age is introduced under the guidance of revolutionary-democratic elements, which represent in the main the non-proletarian and semiproletarian working masses.

The now widely current term "non-capitalist path of development" first came to be used in the twenties. At the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 the question was discussed as to whether economically backward countries could make the transition to socialism while by-passing or cutting short the capitalist stage of development. As mentioned earlier, ``Leftist'' elements, while admitting that such a possibility

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existed, at least in the abstract, saw the Communists' task to lie not in supporting national-revolutionary forces and setting up a united front with the latter, provided that the proletarian movement was able to retain its independence, but in leading the struggle of the working people for independence against the colonialists, speeding up the transformation of the national liberation movements into a proletarian revolution and in this way achieving social and at the same time national liberation: this and this alone was what they saw the Communists' duty to be. In other words, it was an unrealistic and therefore plainly unfeasible strategy that the ``Leftist'' adventurists put forward as an alternative to capitalist development of the colonies and semi-colonies. Its architect was a certain Manabendra N. Roy whose stand in connection with all basic questions was criticised by Lenin and rejected by the Comintern Congress.

Lenin resolutely opposed this point of view and pointed out the conditions in which the economically backward countries had a real chance of interrupting their capitalist development at an early stage or even by-passing it altogether. Lenin singled out among these conditions, firstly, an increase in the political awareness and independent organised political activity of the masses, and secondly, a factor of international importance that emerged only after the victory of the October Socialist Revolution in Russia---help from the victorious proletariat which would come to exert a decisive influence on world politics as it asserted its power in more and more countries, i.e., as the dictatorship of the proletariat ceased to be a national phenomenon becoming an international one instead. In this connection Lenin held that the most important task confronting the Communists in the underdeveloped countries was to foster the organisational and political independence of the proletarian movement even in its most rudimentary form and to establish close ties between the revolutionary masses of the Eastern countries and the international proletariat, to promote their firm alliance with Soviet Russia.

Lenin's theory was to vindicate itself. The Second Comintern Congress rejected the ``Leftist'' course demanding a direct implementation of the proletarian revolution in countries where pre-capitalist relations dominated and where the

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

main objective was to put an end to foreign domination, feudal survivals, the attainment of national independence and state sovereignty. The Congress declared at the same time that these countries could attain socialism "not via capitalist development" (this formulation was proposed by a commission working under Lenin's direct supervision). This tenet of Lenin's was later elaborated in detail in the resolutions adopted by the Fourth Comintern Congress. The subject was also discussed at subsequent congresses (Fifth and Sixth).

At the present time the socialist path has been chosen by a number of newly free countries in which state power is in the hands not of the working class but the non-proletarian revolutionary forces that are linked with the working masses of town and country vitally interested in the introduction of fundamental social changes to the advantage of the people. It would be wrong to lose sight of the fact that these countries' path to socialism lies "not via capitalist development" or, in other words, is a non-capitalist path, when drawing attention to their socialist orientation. Socialist orientation is synonymous with the non-capitalist path of development.

When using the term "non-capitalist path of development"---in keeping with scientific socialism we are resolutely rejecting the point of view according to which the peoples of the economically backward countries can only attain socialism by passing through the stage of capitalist development;

we draw attention to the fact that the advance of these countries towards socialism at the stage of generaldemocratic, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal transformations accompanied by the liquidation of large-scale capitalist property in the hands of the foreign, compradore and local bourgeoisie can proceed given the support of the proletarian and non-proletarian working masses even when the direct leadership of the working class has not yet taken shape;

we assert that relatively favourable conditions of an objective and subjective, internal and external nature for this advance take shape in the given country by the initial moment of the selection of the socialist path, the rejection of a capitalist orientation, the beginning of the country's advance

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in the direction of socialism "not via capitalist development";

we draw attention to the fact that although the nationaldemocratic leadership of such countries is not of a MarxistLeninist nature, which alone is capable in the final analysis of ensuring the triumph of socialism, nevertheless such leadership possesses not only anti-imperialist but also anticapitalist potential, the successful realisation of which in practice logically and historically demands a gradual adoption by this leadership of scientific socialism, the entrusting of a pre-eminent role to the working people, the working class, in all spheres of social life, if this leadership is anxious to secure complete independence in all spheres of political and economic life and if it sees its task to be not merely the initiation of an advance towards socialism but also the successful implementation of such a policy;

we stress that the creation of the material and technical basis for socialism and a corresponding social structure bypassing capitalism or cutting the stage of capitalist development short will be a lengthy, complex and difficult process demanding the application of the principles of scientific socialism. These special difficulties are linked with the absence or serious deficiency of the material, social and political prerequisites of socialism, which are engendered by the very course of capitalist development, the removal, curtailment

or by-passing of which is the essence of the revolutionary

process.

Thus without questioning the socialist orientation of a definite group of newly liberated countries (whose numbers are growing) the term "non-capitalist path of development" draws attention to important special characteristics of the advance towards socialism made by former colonial and backward countries. These characteristics are the manifestation of the general patterns peculiar to the transition to socialism, not from a capitalist economic and political system that has taken precise shape and established its domination, but from pre-bourgeois, initial or undeveloped capitalist relations in the new conditions of the international revolutionary process in view of the emergence and growing influence of the powerful world socialist system and the collapse of the imperialist colonial system under joint onslaught

of the forces of the national liberation and socialist revolutions.

It is possible that the term "non-capitalist path of development" is not ideal but it is quite clear that it is more than a mere product of the imagination: it designates a concrete social phenomenon of exclusive importance and a detailed analysis of which is at present essential to the elaboration of a correct line for a deepening of the national liberation revolution and its transition to a more advanced stage. The term "non-capitalist path of development" corresponds to Lenin's phrase "not via capitalist development". Although only a small number of countries has embarked or is trying to embark on this path, in the final analysis it represents one of the main paths along which the world's population of some 1,500 million is advancing away from capitalism i that has already become obsolete as a socio-economic I formation.

t Regardless of the efforts expended by ``Left'' dogmatists and Right-wing opportunists to discredit the term "non-- capitalist path of development" and the Marxist-Leninist scientific conception which it serves to express, this path of development actually exists and will continue to gain ground, in ! so far as it reflects the extremely significant objective need i felt by the underdeveloped peoples to move forward, to a 1 path of socialist orientation and start in earnest to put an end to their age-old technical, economic, social and cultural backwardness without reliance on the ``services'' of capitalism.

In keeping with the teaching of Marx and Lenin ComI munists hold that if objective and subjective conditions for 1 the leading role of the working class in any given country I have not yet taken shape and if at the same time an anti1 capitalist programme providing for social progress is being implemented to a certain degree by a national-democratic regime, all this represents a major achievement of scientific i socialism in the context of the national liberation revolution j and serves to promote the overall international revolutioni ary process directed against imperialism and capitalism. No I one can deny the fact that it was precisely the founders of Marxism who provided the only scientific theory of the historical inevitability of capitalism and the laws of its devel-

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opment and collapse and who also, as early as the latter half of the last century, started singling out and theoretically substantiating the possibility of by-passing capitalism for those peoples who had not yet passed through the capitalist stage and were able to profit from their fortunate position enabling them to avoid it, given the support and assistance of the victorious proletariat in the economically developed countries. Nor can anyone deny that it was the Communists who were the first to implement in practice this chance of by-passing capitalism within the wide expanses of the Soviet Union---in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the Far East, the northern regions of European and Asian Russia ---all of which had a complex past, unusual social structures and large populations enjoying widely varying living conditions. The Communists were the first to lead dozens of peoples within the Soviet Union to socialist prosperity while bypassing capitalism. Linked by ties of friendship with the Communists of the Soviet Union the Marxists-Leninists of Mongolia performed a similar mammoth task to by-pass capitalism in their country starting out from a revolutionary national-democratic stand and coming more and more to adopt the ideas of scientific socialism that were taking ever firmer root in their country.

Efforts to renounce capitalist development in countries where there is no Marxist-Leninist leadership should receive all-round support from the communist movement. It is not the words and declarations of the national democrats which possess decisive importance in this connection but their practical steps, their ability to lead their countries along a consistently anti-imperialist course, introduce social change in the interests of the people and with the help of the people, their efforts to consolidate the cohesion of a united front of all progressive forces and reach a clear understanding of the role and significance of scientific socialism, while sincerely attempting to co-operate with its adherents.

In recent years non-capitalist development has made undeniable strides forward in a number of countries. There is good reason to expect that certain Arab countries in the Middle East, and possibly certain Afro-Asian countries as well, will start taking steps towards a transition to noncapitalist development. More and more people will be

opting for this basically socialist path of development, and this process possesses world-historic importance.

The transition to the path of non-capitalist development ettected by a number of countries was confirmed in the proposition put forward by the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the International Meetings of Communist and Workers Parties held in 1957, 1960 and 1969 concerning the various forms of transition to socialism. Particularly important is the fact that this proposition was found acceptable by the Communist and national-democratic parties in the newly independent states and provided the basis of their programmes for the struggle to introduce socialism

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF THE NON-CAPITALIST PATH OF DEVELOPMENT AND OF NATIONAL DEMOCRACY

The concept "non-capitalist path of development" is sometimes regarded as unsatisfactory. Indeed if viewed in the abstract it definitely invites criticism since all it contains is a negative attitude to capitalism. A non-capitalist path, but what does this really imply? Are there any other paths at the present time other than the socialist or capitalist

ones?

Efforts to "introduce logical clarity" to this concept from the point of view of formal logic inevitably make it appealuntenable: this is true whether this approach is adopted by representatives of the Right or the ``Left''. The latter deny the possibility of the initial general-democratic stage of the advance to socialism under the leadership of anti-- imperialist national-democratic forces and denote this advance as something utterly bourgeois. They deny the socialist orientation of the activities of national democrats and reject their socialist slogans. They maintain that hegemony of the proletariat is essential from the very outset of the anticolonial revolution. Without this direct hegemony of the proletariat they would have us believe it is impossible to implement profound general-democratic reforms and make the transition to subsequent social changes. Therefore it would follow that non-capitalist development is unthinkable in those countries where there is no proletariat or Communist Party or where these are weak and do not yet occupy a leading position.

Apart from this ultra-revolutionary angle on non-- capitalist development, widespread is a seemingly quite opposite approach to this problem exaggerating the success of noncapitalist development and arbitrarily and subjectivistically equating it with socialism. Those who adopt this approach are attracted by talk of the leading role of the working people, of the vanguard party, the adoption of scientific socialism, without taking into account the ideological and political context which lends a special significance to these slogans that at times sound one hundred per cent Marxist. This approach is frequently found in socio-political literature: it impresses certain ideologists of national democracy and is taken up by them.

The liquidator approach to non-capitalist development from ``Leftists'' who demand that radical nationalists should immediately recognise scientific socialism and establish working-class power is fraught with the danger of pseudo-revolutionary adventurism. It is sufficient to prove the undoing of as yet weak and relatively isolated socialist elements in the light of its overestimation of their maturity and numbers and can lead to a fatal split in the united antiimperialist front. It can give rise to strife between progressive groupings who at the present time and for a long while to come will have much to gain from the implementation of anti-imperialist, democratic and anti-capitalist changes. The international communist movement rejects this irresponsible adventurist line.

The proletariat in many Afro-Asian countries is indeed still numerically extremely weak and poorly organised; it does not constitute a class that plays a decisive role in social development. If the working people in an economically underdeveloped country without a firmly established working class waited for the chance to set up a national proletarian dictatorship before embarking on the transition to socialist development, this would mean that it was necessary to promote capitalist development apace in order to build up a working class on the basis of capitalist industrialisation and then, given that foundation, set up a Marxist-Leninist party. This point of view has been put forward before and has proved untenable in practice. At the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International in 1904, the Dutch Social-

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Democrat van Kol maintained that Marx's hypothesis to the effect that some countries are in a position, at least partially, to by-pass the capitalist period in their economic evolution, had not been borne out by subsequent developments. Van Kol insisted that primitive peoples would only arrive at advanced civilisation by way of capitalism: this led him to conclude that it was the duty of Social-Democrats not to hold up the advance of capitalism that he regarded as an essential link in the history of mankind, maintaining^^1^^ they should even go so far as to promote its emergence by stilling its birth pangs. Those who today reject in principle the idea of non-- capitalist development, whether they like it or not, are adopting the stand of the Right Social-Democrats, condemning as it were the peoples of many countries, where conditions for socialist revolution do not yet exist, to capitalist development, to a path of oppression and suffering. Underestimation of the influence of national-democratic parties, condescending attitudes towards the latter and inability to work in conjunction with them imply a virtual refusal to implement the principles of scientific socialism on the basis of a united front of all progressive forces through a gradual extension of links with the people and a search and affirmation of those common aims and endeavours which Communists and national democrats share in the struggle against imperialism, feudalism and capitalism. Displaying inability or unwillingness to increase links with the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the nonproletarian working masses, alongside with ever closer co-operation with revolutionary democrats---means to play into the hands of those elements among the Communists who use a mask of ideological purism to disguise their politically sectarian and therefore detrimental stand.

Marxists-Leninists have always upheld the decisive role of the working class in the advance of the socialist revolution, in socialist construction, and they continue to do so; however in countries, where a working class has not yet taken shape, this approach to the leading role of the working class is something that the country can attain at a specific stage of non-capitalist development after first rejecting the capitalist path. The point at issue here is a country's approach to socialist construction in general and not to its

immediate construction, let alone its conclusive stage which is of course still a long way off in these countries under discussion.

A liquidator stance with regard to non-capitalist development from the Right stems from an idealisation of the development of a number of Afro-Asian countries, from disregard of concrete historical conditions rendering impossible an immediate start on all-out socialist construction, and finally from an underestimation of the lack of homogeneous united class forces at the helm of the progressive countries in Asia and Africa. It should be noted that this approach to non-capitalist development is not accepted by the international communist movement. There is no longer any doubt about the fact that non-capitalist development is not tantamount to immediate construction of socialism but rather represents a specific stage in historical development, "which makes possible the elimination of backwardness inherited from a colonial past and the creation of conditions for a transition to socialist development".* This line was consistently developed in the documents issued by the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in 1969.

Rejection of the idea of non-capitalist development from both a Right and a ``Left'' stand betrays an eagerness to make real situations fit theoretical formulae that have proved effective in different historical conditions. Such efforts display a deliberate disregard for a whole historical period in which anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolution is being completed, a period which as a rule covers not years but decades that are essential for the creation of material, cultural and political prerequisites of the transition to the socialist stage of the revolution.

This approach does not pay due consideration to the specific nature of the situation obtaining in the former colonial countries that attained their independence in an age when socialism had already become the motive force behind world progress. This factor opens up new, unprecedented opportunities for social progress in the Third World. Attempts to see the development of the young states, that is

Kommunist, No. 9, 1969, p. 22.

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ridden by profound contradictions, as either capitalist or socialist lose sight of the infinite diversity of transitional stages and link-ups that lack precise qualitative definiteness but can give rise to opportunities or prerequisites for socialist transformations. In the Third World which needs most urgently to embrace socialism by-passing the stage of developed capitalist society, the significance and duration of these intermediate stages is particularly enhanced. These stages are rife with contradictions, including those stemming from the as yet ill-defined alignment of class forces; a characteristic feature of the transitional stages is the alliance of all progressive elements, between which there exist substantial contradictions and even antagonism. The successful affirmation of the socialist orientation and its firm consolidation in all aspects of national life depend to an enormous extent in these conditions on correct, far-sighted and realistic political leadership.

The non-capitalist path of development constitutes precisely such a transitional period, an extremely complex combination of socio-economic and political processes opening up new prospects for progress and socialism. The changes carried out at this stage deprive capitalism of its aura of historical inevitability, open up opportunities for an advance towards socialism, the achievement of which would depend entirely on the degree of preparedness and maturity of the revolutionary-democratic forces. In his article "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It" relating to mid-September 1917, Lenin wrote: "We cannot be revolutionary democrats in the twentieth century and in a capitalist country if we fear to advance towards socialism."*

Indeed if the revolutionary democrats in this latter part of the twentieth century characterised by the decisive role of the world socialist system pursue policies in their respective countries, which have definitely not yet assumed final capitalist characteristics, not in the interests of the landowners and capitalists but rather against them, in the interests of the broad masses, "then it is a step towards socialism". While, as Lenin pointed out with regard to the developed capitalist countries, "it is impossible to advance from monop-

olies .. . without advancing towards socialism","' for those countries liberated from colonial domination there is also no other road forward apart from that leading in the direction of socialism, if they are to eliminate centuries-old backwardness and, in alliance with the socialist system, achieve economic independence of imperialism.

The concept of advance towards progress under revolutionary-democratic leadership finds concrete expression in the "non-capitalist path of development". The term possesses an incontestable advantage in that it corresponds to the current level of modern historical experience, does not lag behind the latter and yet does not outstrip it to such a degree as to lose all contact with reality.

Non-capitalist development as understood by contemporary Marxist thinkers ceases to be an abstraction. The most striking demonstration of its validity is provided by the practical experience of a number of independent countries of Asia and Africa.

Despite the similarity of conditions inherited from the colonialist age and the similar problems of development and despite the certain similarity between some economic and political methods applied in the former colonial world it is becoming increasingly clear that two fundamentally different trends are emerging as social change is implemented. The non-capitalist path is one of these and its very existence is a decisive factor and achievement in the development of Africa and Asia over recent decades. No amount of theorising on the common destinies of the Third World countries can conceal this fact.

Of late the countries that have freed themselves from the colonial yoke have been referred to as ``developing'' countries. Despite the relative aptness of this term in one respect it is quite definitely acceptable: all-round economic, political and cultural development is the main aim these countries set themselves, their main objective, what they all have in common and without which neither capitalist nor socialist society is feasible, nor even politically independent national

* Ibid., p. 358.

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 356.

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existence. In so far as all the newly independent countries are faced with this task of attaining social, technical and economic progress---the condition of national survival--- there is no need to overstress the differences between them as is sometimes done---no need to single out the progressive political regimes favouring non-capitalist development and dogmatically contrast these with all other young states, lumping the latter together as reactionary. Of course the advance towards progress even in countries that have a good deal in common can be effected in a variety of ways, and moreover these ways cannot be regarded as equally effective from the point of view of prospects for the revolutionary development of the peoples of Asia and Africa.

Some representatives of "African socialism" say that the most important thing for the African countries at the present stage is economic growth. This is, in a certain sense, true. Yet it should not be assumed that economic growth equals socialism, that everything which promotes economic growth leads to socialism. In that case Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Malaysia and the Philippines, countries which have made considerable economic progress following a path of capitalist development, could be regarded as examples of those nations which have embarked on a socialist path, while in actual fact these countries now find themselves in a situation of firmly established neo-colonialist dependence.

Socialism is a class concept, a political concept; a specific level of economic advance is a prerequisite, not the essence of socialism. The essence of socialism is in the assertion of the power of the working people, the triumph of the toilers, the laying of the foundations of socialism on the basis of socialisation of private property of the main means of production and exchange. In the final analysis genuine socialism is impossible without revolutionary changes which cannot but lead in some form or other to progressive state power exercised by the working people. Otherwise in certain of the developing countries the "national socialism" proclaimed as being in force would definitely tend to degenerate into national-bourgeois reformism couched in fine-sounding socialist illusions.

The experience of many Afro-Asian countries that have gained their independence since the war bears witness to

the fact that attempts at accelerated economic development, while as a rule these are pursued to an accompaniment of socialist slogans, in actual fact are either of a capitalist or non-capitalist nature.

The first alternative relies heavily on capitalist methods of economic management although admittedly of an up-- todate and etatist variety. Considerable development of the state sector by no means always or everywhere leads to a decline in private enterprise. At a given stage the state and private sectors develop parallel to each other and where private initiative proves inadequate the state sector even provides something in the way of support or a supplement for the former. In this situation exploiting sections quickly take shape and the bourgeoisie becomes clearly defined as a class. The exploiting sections strive increasingly to get hold of the apparatus of economic and political domination. The new stratum of the compradore bourgeoisie emerges which actively pursues a policy of economic neo-colonialism of a pro-Western, capitalist orientation in both industry and agriculture and also when it comes to the training of new technical and administrative personnel, a new stratum of intermediary bourgeoisie, in conditions when the former colonial power no longer exists. Bureaucratic capital accumulates and an ``administrative'' or ``parliamentary'' bourgeoisie takes shape that actively pursues a policy of capitalist accumulation and makes use of the state apparatus, the army, police, various enterprises, banks, foreign trade, construction and transport firms belonging to the state to secure greater profit. Corruption soon develops on a nation-wide scale. This paves the way to a situation in which influential dominant forces emerge that are opposed to socialism and which in themselves represent an obstacle on the path to socialism. The capitalist path leads to the loss of a considerable part of the national income and the plundering of national resources in order to satisfy egoistic and parasitic demands of exploiter elements; it also leads to a weakening of state control over the economy and over foreign capital which cannot fail to hold back progress. The capitalist path relies on intensified exploitation of urban and rural toilers and leads to a rapid stratification of the rural population and its impoverishment, thus making social and political

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(11

italist course of development there has also emerged a state non-capitalist sector which is gradually coming to occupy a pre-eminent position, particularly in towns.

It is perfectly clear that, given this variety of economic structures, non-capitalist development, as found in each individual country, has to be analysed separately and most carefully. The aim of this work is to expound some of the general characteristics, point to the essence and general patterns of development in those countries where pre-capitalist relations or embryonic capitalism dominate, in particular in agriculture, while socio-economic structures are typical of the multi-structural economy inherited from a colonial-- feudal system. In these countries capitalist development is only at an early stage and the path of social progress is distinguished by special features as a result of which advance in a socialist direction is referred to by the term "non-- capitalist development''.

ferment inevitable. If such policies are pursued for long periods then the removal of the domination of bourgeois elements in the course of an acute class struggle becomes an essential condition for genuine social transformations in the interests of the people.

Non-capitalist development presupposes ensuring economic progress by such means and methods, as a result of which no new obstacles on the path to socialism would loom up, but on the contrary, the way would be cleared and the atmosphere become favourable for the subsequent transition to socialist reconstruction of society. In other words, the non-capitalist path presupposes the implementation of the urgent tasks of economic growth allowing for socialist development in the future. The strategy of non-capitalist development consists in the fact that in the final analysis the acceleration of the country's economic and cultural advance should serve not to consolidate the economic and political position of the exploiting forces nor to turn the national bourgeoisie or national-bourgeois elements into the ruling class.

Despite the common factors discernible in anti-capitalist measures that are determined by the endeavour of the newly liberated countries to put a stop to backwardness and deprive local and foreign capitalists of the chance to dominate the economic and social structure of society, these measures are being effected in the striking variety of the conditions of socio-economic and political development, and also despite the large differences in the alignment of class and political forces in specific national states. The manifestation in the newly liberated countries of some or other traits of noncapitalist development is an expression of the specific nature of this phenomenon and the inevitability of its transformation in the concrete conditions obtaining in each country.

Variety in approaches to non-capitalist development can also be put down to the multi-structural socio-economic make-up to be found in the newly liberated countries. Side by side with structures of the economy typical of transitional periods (tribal, patriarchal-feudal, or small-commodity ---the most widespread type---local private enterprise, private enterprise backed by foreign capital in both town and country, state capitalism) in countries following a non-cap-

Three main factors lie at the basis of the involvement in the social struggle of the non-proletarian and semi-- proletarian working masses and the peasantry in the former colonies and semi-colonies. These are:

1. Capitalist development in the former colonial and semicolonial countries which gave rise to an increase in the number of hired workers, to stratification among the peasantry and an intensification of capitalist accumulation, and aggravated the poverty and hardship of all oppressed classes. Capitalist development does not bring people what they had expected to achieve after gaining national independence. Local capitalists and imperialists worked all out towards the impoverishment, proletarianisation, ``teaching'' and ``training'' of the non-proletarian and semi-proletarian working masses in the former colonies. Capitalism of a local brand proved just as inacceptable as that from outside.

2. Intensification of the class struggle in the countries working to achieve their independence. While striving to consolidate their national independence the popular masses come to realise that part of the bourgeoisie even opposes general-democratic and anti-feudal policies and has no wish to carry through national independence to its logical

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with the world capitalist economy, its laws and uneven distribution of rights and privileges has not taken place yet, but the relations which bound these countries to the world capitalist system, leaving open to them nothing but a path of capitalist development, have already been shaken and undermined.

Economic expedience alone and the desire to embark on non-capitalist development are of course insufficient in themselves. They are important stimuli but at the same time objective and subjective conditions are essential for the satisfaction of the acknowledged need for non-capitalist development.

Some supporters of non-capitalist development from the ranks of the national democrats of today frequently hold that there is anti-capitalist potential latent in the primitivesocialist, communal, patriarchal or tribal institutions and traditions of their peoples, in religion, etc. Such ideas can lead to dangerous idealisation and exaggeration of the role and significance of patriarchal traditions in the transitional period when the break with capitalist development is just beginning. It is important to remember that these institutions constitute a serious obstacle in the path of the development of modern productive forces and are often a bastion of ignorance and political backwardness. In themselves they contain no spontaneously developing seeds of progress which might allow a backward society to emerge from its stagnation without participation in the contemporary class struggle and the struggle between socialist and capitalist civilisation. They are powerless to withstand the pressure of the pernicious trends towards private property, profit, exploitation and parasitism. The existence of deep-rooted patriarchal traditions and resultant illusions to a certain extent creates an atmosphere favourable for the propagation of the struggle against exploitation of man by man. Yet this situation demands the decisive intervention of progressive forces and the use of modern methods and techniques of economic progress and the class struggle which must be taken from beyond the confines of the-tribal- way of life, in order that these traditions might be more or less effectively used to promote the development of initial socialist trends in backward societies.

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conclusion. This means that the attainment of general-- democratic and national goals becomes impossible without the implementation of domestic social transformations and in many Afro-Asian countries the popular masses and their revolutionary-democratic leaders embark on a struggle to achieve such transformations.

3. The international working-class movement, and in particular its offshoot---the world socialist system, which not only provides a revolutionising example to the rest of the world but also fulfils the role of the vanguard of the proletariat (for example, it helps to counter the export of counter-revolution and affords all-round support, including that of a material variety, etc.). The influence of the socialist system is making itself felt more and more in all continents and all countries and not only in political, diplomatic and military affairs but also in the sphere of technology and economics. If this influence is ignored it is impossible to reach a proper understanding of much that is now taking place in the world and in particular in those countries which are pursuing a course of non-capitalist development.

These factors help explain the fact that at the present time the popular masses in a number of countries have chosen the path of non-capitalist development and started to move in a socialist direction despite the absence of a dictatorship of the proletariat in a particular country and of a firmly established, well-organised Marxist-Leninist party.

The reasons for the spread of this movement towards socialism in the Third World cannot of course be explained only by the anti-capitalist feelings of the popular masses and many Third World leaders. As pointed out above the economic position of the former colonies and the continuing exploitation to which they are subjected by the imperialists dictate the need for them to search for a non-capitalist alternative.

When analysing the present-day world capitalist economy, part of which consists of countries which have only recently shaken themselves free from colonial dependence, it is not difficult to single out those specific factors which drive the developing countries to oppose capitalism as a system and gradually break with it by restricting and then ousting the capitalist elements from their economy. A complete break

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The significance of patriarchal patterns does not lie in the fact that there is any guarantee of a subsequent transition to socialism latent within them as some national democrats would have us believe but in the fact that a country where the traditions of a communal, tribal society still make themselves felt is in a certain sense a tabula rasa. This means that it is receptive to new social structures and can well develop not only in a capitalist direction, if trends undermining communal principles are given free scope to gain ground, but also a socialist one, if objectively and subjectively favourable conditions for the latter are at hand.

However the existence of certain vestiges of patriarchal society are not the essential condition for the possibility of non-capitalist development. After all this factor was present even before the First World War and between the two world wars; national-revolutionary and national-reformist leaders often used to set their hopes on this factor when dreaming of establishing social harmony and justice. However these dreams were always of an illusory nature and any hopes of building socialism on such a foundation were Utopian.

A fundamentally new phenomenon leading to the emergence of new forms of transition to socialism is provided by the assistance afforded to the national liberation movement by the world socialist system. Socialist countries not only assist the newly independent states with their material and technological aid but also provide a guarantee protecting the progressive transformations being implemented in these countries and shielding revolutionary political regimes from encroachment on the part of the imperialists. Precisely this support from the socialist community and its active struggle against the imperialists provide a vital basis for non-- capitalist development and indeed make it possible. The sooner and more fully national democrats grasp this the better prospects for non-capitalist development will be.

The idea that the non-capitalist path of development only became possible thanks to the support of the socialist community is not merely an important theoretical statement. It is of great practical and political significance. It underlies the strategic line of the relations between the socialist countries and the national-democratic forces in the former

colonies, a line of consolidation of their co-operation, mutual aid and united stand in the face of the common enemy.

Indeed no other policy is thinkable for the socialist countries vis-a-vis the national democrats. It is dictated by their fundamentally objective interest in consolidating the radical, consistently anti-imperialist wing of the national liberation movement, to which socialist ideals are far from alien. As for the forms of assistance afforded the newly independent states by socialist countries here probably there is room for improvement and more careful thought. It is vital that the assistance from socialist countries should, wherever possible, consist in mutually advantageous co-operation, for it is clear that the scope of one-sided aid is limited and blatantly insufficient for the satisfaction of the needs of these states that are ready to embark on a path of non-capitalist development or have indeed already done so.

The objective need for co-operation between the socialist countries and the national democracy makes specific demands on the latter. The foreign policy tenets and concepts which at one time served as a common platform for all Third World countries now require to be developed and defined more precisely. Positive neutrality and non-- interference can no longer be interpreted as an effort to steer a course of balance between the two systems. Non-capitalist development is not possible on such a basis. It demands closer relations with the socialist community in the interests of the common struggle against the imperialists and a clear understanding of the social implications of socialism and imperialism, opposition to the theory of "rich and poor nations" or that of "two superpowers" based on a rejection of the class character of the two camps in the modern world. Reversion to this theory is still to be found amongst certain national democrats and leads to a certain mistrust of the socialist countries and the isolationist slogan calling for ``self-reliance'', etc. Experience is the best master and it leads the national democrats to a clear grasp of the vital need to consolidate ties with the socialist countries; sometimes however this policy is promoted with certain reservations, with caution as it were. A clear understanding of the fact that prospects for non-capitalist development are inseparably linked with the support received from the world so-

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cialist system will pave the way to conditions most favourable for mutually advantageous economic and political co-- operation.

disregard these powerful revolutionary outbursts and fail to see in them new forms of the advance of world revolution.

This article, which treats not only the revolution in Russia but also revolutions in the countries of the East that were drawing nearer and nearer, stresses throughout that the undeniable lack of economic prerequisites for progress can to a certain extent be made up for by political prerequisites, which can and indeed should become the basis for the creation of the economic ones. Lenin wrote: "If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism ... why cannot we begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers' and peasants' government and the Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?"*

It was precisely from this angle that Lenin approached the imminent revolutions in the countries of the East: this approach reflects the revolutionary spirit of Leninism which enabled the party and the international communist movement to single out, analyse and support the tremendous revolutionary potential of the peoples in the colonial and dependent countries who are striving, albeit in a haphazard, unorganised way, to turn the struggle against imperialism into a struggle against capitalism. Recent events in Algeria, Syria, South Yemen, Somalia, Tanzania, the People's Republic of the Congo, Guinea and Burma are ample proof of this. There is no doubt that the number of countries where events take a similar course will steadily multiply. Meanwhile Lenin's approach to this question of the revolutionary potential of the colonial countries is free of any kind of subjectivism. It is based on a comprehensive scientific analysis of the present situation, for political preconditions of revolution are precisely that objective reality which requires a most exact assessment of the class structure of society, the economic situation, the alignment of political forces, ideological trends, etc.

If we approach the prospects for revolutionary development in the Afro-Asian countries from the angle of objective

* Ibid.

Socialist revolution demands specific technological, economic and socio-political prerequisites. This is an incontrovertible tenet of scientific socialism. However Leninist theory categorically opposes not only any undue emphasis of technological and economic prerequisites to the exclusion of all else, or the establishment of strictly fixed and rigidly defined economic and cultural levels as indispensable for socialist construction ("although nobody can say just what that definite 'level of culture' is",^:;" as Lenin reminded us), but also vulgar-determinist concepts to the effect that the political prerequisites of revolution only emerge as a result of economic growth. In this respect Leninism differs from the ideology of Right-wing European Social-Democracy with its slavish imitation of the past and insistence on European models.

According to these Social-Democrats only the progressive countries of Western Europe had reached a level enabling them to embark on the construction of socialism. As for the countries of Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, including Russia in 1917, they would have to wait for the establishment of socialism in the advanced countries of the West.

Lenin renounced these bourgeois-reformist ideas that acted as a brake on the revolutionary energy of the vast masses living in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. He gave them confidence that they could, through their own revolutionary efforts, work towards the construction of socialism. Lenin's article "Our Revolution" is permeated with ideas concerning the distinctive nature of the forms and sequence of development in the countries of the East. Lenin started out from the premise that in the age of imperialism and socialist revolutions revolutionary situations could take shape even when what the Social-Democratic doctrinaires referred to as the objective economic prerequisites of socialism were not at hand and that it would be unforgivable to

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 478.

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preconditions, then it becomes quite clear that in most of them there do not exist either technological and economic or political preconditions for any immediate implementation of socialist transformations. It does not however in the least imply that the Asian and African peoples are deprived of opportunities to embark on deliberate plans for drawing nearer to socialism, or opportunities to work towards socialism and moreover not through building capitalist society, as is assumed by people who sacrifice such revolutionary potential to tritely understood economic determinism, but by more or less by-passing capitalism and its developed forms. In an age where the world socialist system has become the main factor deciding historical development, these prospects open up before practically all countries that have freed themselves from colonial domination.

Even nowadays, some 90 years after Engels wrote his letter (dating from September 12, 1882) to Kautsky, it is impossible to provide an exhaustive answer to the question as to which phases of development the backward countries will have to pass through in order to reach socialist organisation of society although one thing is quite clear: the non-capitalist path of development is one of the essential patterns of the newly free countries' development that emerges in the course of their struggle against the imperialists, a struggle which they wage in alliance with the socialist system so as to achieve full national independence and social progress.

The concept of non-capitalist development consists in the opportunity of making important preliminary steps towards socialism in conditions where there are insufficient objective preconditions for the direct implementation of socialism. This merely serves to underline the importance of objective political preconditions making it possible to exert decisive influence on the course of the complex process of non-- capitalist transformations, on the attainment of fundamental objectives that history places before the newly independent

countries.

In Africa, and to a certain extent in the Asian countries as well, the level of capitalist development is low, in most cases extremely low, if not embryonic, and there is a heavy burden of communal traditions, albeit modified by

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influences of a feudal or capitalist character/^^1^^" This means that technological and economic, and the closely tied with them, cultural preconditions for the construction of socialism are either utterly inadequate or do not exist at all. With reference to Russia which at the time found itself at a completely different medium level of capitalist development, Lenin spoke of the need to raise the country's material and cultural level by means of socialism relying on the socialist state-political superstructure as a precondition. However the creation of a political superstructure adequate for the implementation of socialist transformations and that might open up the road to economic construction, is not going to be achieved merely by a seizure of power on the part of the revolutionary forces; it requires a broad and reliable social basis in the form of a working class and of a political vanguard armed with a progressive scientific theory. In most African countries even these conditions do not exist and the same applies to a large number of Asian countries. The working class in the African countries is extremely small and has not yet wrested itself once and for all from the strata of the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie; its political organisation is weak and class consciousness insufficiently developed. The Marxist political parties that have emerged in a number of African countries and are exerting on the development of the latter a fruitful revolutionary influence do not yet represent a force sufficiently strong to lead the popular movement. Certain representatives of radical nationalism emphasise those tenets of scientific socialism which frequently provide them with a suitable ideological backing up for their own political platform. However the petty-bourgeois, nationalistic basis of their ideas at times constitutes a serious obstacle impeding any consistent or comprehensive grasp of the theory of

* An incomplete but useful list of the countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America divided up according to levels of capitalist development was provided in the journal International Affairs (No. 2, 1964, p. 8). According to this publication in eighty countries and territories prefeudal relations predominate, in eleven feudal relations, in thirty capitalism has reached a low level of development, and in seventeen countries (Turkey, Brazil, India, etc.) a medium level of capitalist development has been attained or approximately so.

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scientific socialism. The class which, in the light of its economic nature, is best suited to assimilate scientific socialism is the proletariat and in particular the industrial proletariat. Representatives of democratic middle sections, on the other hand, usually adopt a selective, eclectic and restricted approach to socialism. This is why the radical petty-- bourgeois stratum is liable to opt for socialism, but however much the revolutionary situation might urge it on in the direction of scientific socialism, it cannot in the final analysis provide a sufficiently reliable social basis for the establishment of working-class power, for all-out socialist construction, that might secure the final victory of socialism.

After the world's first socialist state came into being and the socialist community took shape new prospects for drawing nearer to socialism were opened up before the peoples who were still at a backward stage of economic development. To a certain extent assistance from the socialist states compensates as it were for the deficiency of internal objective prerequisites of socialism.

When the economic, political, internal and external preconditions either do not exist, or, if so, then in insufficient measure for a country to embark on socialist construction, the main task to be carried out during the transitional period of non-capitalist development is the creation of the economic, political, cultural, internal and external conditions which would facilitate advance in the direction of socialism, which at some later stage might enable the working class in alliance with the toiling peasantry to come to power and thus attain a decisive prerequisite for the socialist reconstruction of society. Thus the essence of non-capitalist development at the present stage consists in the main of general-democratic anti-imperialist transformations, the toppriority task to help pave the way for a socialist future.

A special feature of the non-capitalist path of development is the close link between the two stages of revolution: the national liberation, anti-imperialist stage and the struggle for the establishment of social justice that extends beyond the confines of the anti-colonial movement in its classical, i.e., bourgeois forms, when the local bourgeoisie comes to power and opportunities arise for the accelerated growth of local capital. The new historical epoch has merged these

two stages together, as it were, so that something in the way of a symbiosis is taking place, characterised by various features of both national-democratic revolution, on the one hand, and socialist revolution on the other. National aims prove to be attainable only given the consolidation of the social front and the extension of social changes. The dividing line between these two stages of the revolution has shown itself to be relative, although of course the qualitative differences between them still hold good. Sometimes general-democratic reforms have been implemented so radically and consistently that they came to be associated with those transformations which in other conditions were carried out during the initial transitional stage of socialist revolution. This however does not imply in the least that countries following a non-capitalist course have already embarked on the socialist road.

In the policy documents issued by all countries pursuing a non-capitalist course and in the speeches of their leaders a good deal of attention is paid to the dual task implicit in socialism---the establishment of socialist society, i.e., the elimination of exploitation of man by man, and the attainment of economic, social and cultural progress. But not always is the correlation of these two aspects presented distinctly enough.

In the majority of Third World countries capitalist private enterprise, which has made considerable strides in such countries as India, Pakistan, Iran, the Philippines, Thailand, Morocco, the Lebanon, Tunisia, the Ivory Coast, is nevertheless ill-suited to ensure a rapid rate of economic progress and provide solutions for the fundamental problems of development facing these countries. This task (which in itself has nothing socialist about it) is taken on by the state. This testifies to the profound lack of trust in the principles of private enterprise and the ever wider extent of the influence of socialist ideas. At the same time it would be wrong to ignore a number of factors which complicate the transition to noncapitalist development. The fact is that the interlinking of class and social aims, on the one hand, and anti-imperialist, national, cultural, economic aims, on the other, the attainment of which demands a different alignment of class forces, gives rise to considerable difficulties in the path of the

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struggle for social progress in countries where the working class has not yet assumed a leading position in political life and where there are not yet any Marxist-Leninist parties which could lead the movement working towards socialism. The dovetailing of these tasks which have conventionally been regarded as belonging to two different stages of the revolution (the stage of national liberation and that of radical social transformations) constitutes the distinctive aspect of modern development in the national-democratic countries and explains the complexities and peculiarities of the alignment of class forces.

With reference to the Chinese revolution at the beginning of this century Lenin stressed that in China there still existed a bourgeoisie capable of consistent revolutionary action, i.e., the peasantry. In the countries of the Third World of today there also exist large intermediate petty-bourgeois strata of essentially radical and revolutionary sympathies that are capable of political action and which represent a direct encroachment on the interests of the privileged sections of the population, including the interests of the local bourgeoisie. In conditions where the revolutionary potential of the proletariat has not come into its own for objective reasons, or where this revolutionary potential has not yet come to constitute a decisive social force, the revolutionary potential of the petty bourgeoisie can still quite definitely fulfil a useful purpose. What is more it provides a school that will serve to mould the political outlook of the working people in the Third World and through which the latter must without fail pass. The petty bourgeoisie that dominates the political scene in many of the developing countries is in a position to ensure advance along the non-capitalist path, in so far as it remains loyal to principles of petty-bourgeois radicalism and revolutionary ideals, and does not veer towards bourgeois reformism, which for the petty bourgeoisie is always a possible outcome of its political evolution.

It would be naive to count on being able to construct socialism with the support of the petty bourgeoisie and under its leadership. However it is quite logical to talk of the period of the domination of revolutionary petty-- bourgeois circles as a distinct stage in the course of the former colonial peoples' advance to socialism. The greater loyalty

to revolutionary ideals shown by these circles, the closer their links with the working masses, the more intolerant they will be of bourgeois tendencies and bourgeois reformism, the longer will be the period of time when they will be in the vanguard of the people and the more considerable will be their contribution to the preparation of the necessary conditions for the construction of socialism in economically backward countries.

This is the idea which lies at the basis of the non-- capitalist path. It could be characterised as the implementation of general-democratic transformations that take into account the prospect of a socialist future. This means that the farreaching social transformations which are not in themselves socialist should be carried out in such a way that the national bourgeoisie does not turn into the politically and economically dominant class or the dominating social force and thus lead to the appearance of yet another obstacle on the path to socialism---namely, a well-defined class of capitalists, the absence or weakness of which is a vital precondition for non-capitalist development.

The non-capitalist path of development is a relatively new phenomenon in the life of society. Many aspects and implications of this phenomenon have not yet been defined, and not merely in theory but in practice as well. It would be dangerous to hurry with the construction of any artificial schemes and fail to take into account the social situation which has not yet assumed definitive shape and which is full of contradictions. Here we are dealing with something other than mere repetition of the well-known historical experience of the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union. This is a specific manifestation of the movement towards socialism not involving, at this particular period, direct state leadership by the proletariat but made possible thanks to the support of the socialist community and to close alliance with the international working-class and communist movement. The examples of the Mongolian People's Republic and the Soviet Central Asian republics are usually cited in discussions of non-capitalist development. This is justified and there are good reasons for it. It

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goes without saying that the idea to the effect that noncapitalist development can be effected in countries where there is no dictatorship of the proletariat constitutes a logical continuation of the premise regarding the possibility of advance towards socialism "not via capitalism". Non-- capitalist development outside the confines of the socialist system is a qualitatively new phenomenon. In the republics of Central Asia advance towards socialism by-passing capitalism took place under the leadership of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This first, tremendously important historic experience was distinguished by the fact that the countries and peoples which in the course of their development bypassed capitalism, were within the orbit of the Great October Socialist Revolution, were able to turn to the Soviet Government for direct state aid, make use of its guidance, army, state apparatus and were led by political cadres and a political party whose course of action was based on Marxist-Leninist teaching. In this situation the hegemony of the proletariat came into its own not merely in a national context but in a certain sense in an international context as well.

The idea of non-capitalist development, which first gained acceptance in the sixties on the basis of the experience of the Afro-Asian countries, hinges on the fact that it is possible to undertake certain steps leading away from capitalism towards socialism in countries that have not yet broken away from the world capitalist economy, nor entered the socialist community, in countries where internal conditions for the hegemony of the proletariat and the leading role of Marxist-Leninist parties have not yet, to the necessary extent, taken shape, and where the influence and support of the world socialist system cannot take the form of direct state leadership from countries where the proletariat has proved victorious, where they cannot be all-embracing. Herein lies the principal difference in the modern advance along the non-capitalist path in a number of Afro-Asian countries, as opposed to that which took place in the Soviet republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan.

In the international context there is no doubt that the world socialist system in its constant endeavour to protect progressive regimes against imperialist encroachment and to afford these countries significant economic, political and

military aid goes a long way toward guaranteeing the success of non-capitalist development. If the world socialist system did not exist it would be impossible for these countries to pursue a course of non-capitalist development.

However the situation with regard to the prospects of this type of development is by no means identical in all those countries that have opted for it. In the Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Mongolian People's Republic territorial proximity to revolutionary Russia, traditional ties with the latter, relative isolation from the imperialist states all helped to provide a reliable guarantee of protection of revolutionary gains by the world's first socialist state and made that state the most important, if not the only source of all-round help and assistance. The revolutionary transformations that were implemented in the Central Asian republics and also those in the Mongolian People's Republic were introduced under the direct influence of the socialist revolution in Russia and in close conjunction with that revolution. The ties between the Afro-Asian countries following the path of non-capitalist development and the socialist community are not so direct, close and comprehensive. Not only does geographical distance play a part but also traditional ties betAveen the developing countries and the former "mother countries" as well as the fact that the AfroAsian countries still remain part of the capitalist market of the world economic system. These factors, however, clearly account for the continuing opportunities not only for economic but also political influence of the world capitalist system, and from this influence stems the utterly objective and historically explicable balancing of many newly liberated countries between the two systems, their non-- alignment, which does not rule out anti-imperialism, growing sympathy for the socialist countries and co-operation with the latter in an international context engaged in by progressive national movements, by non-capitalist regimes in Africa and Asia.

The national liberation movement has assumed global proportions. The developed socialist countries cannot, naturally, provide all the assistance necessary for the economic reconstruction of dozens of countries that have freed themselves from colonial and semi-colonial dependence. Economic

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reconstruction is first and foremost the concern of the peoples of these countries themselves. Help from the Soviet Union and the existence of Marxist parties created important political and economic preconditions for the construction of socialism in the Mongolian People's Republic and the Central Asian republics. In Asia and Africa these preconditions---involving direct state unity of the newly liberated countries that have opted for socialism with the countries of triumphant socialism---do not exist, and attempts sometimes made in Marxist literature to identify modern conditions pertaining to non-capitalist development in the countries of Asia and Africa with the experience of the Mongolian People's Republic and that of the Central Asian republics in the Soviet Union, seem unwarranted. Modern national-democratic non-capitalist development is a qualitatively new phenomenon, which incontestably has much in common with the experience of both the Mongolian People's Republic and that of the Central Asian republics in view of the endeavour to by-pass capitalism or at least shorten its stages, but which at the same time introduces fundamentally new elements to the theory and practice of by-passing capitalism.

An important difference between present-day non-- capitalist development and earlier experience of by-passing capitalism in the USSR lies in the fact that social transformations are being implemented in countries where there is no hegemony of the proletariat and these policies are not being guided by Marxist-Leninist parties but pursued under the leadership of a radical anti-imperialist revolutionarydemocratic intelligentsia exposed to the powerful impact of the theory and practice of world socialism, and the international working-class and communist movement.

The national democrats---as a rule, intellectuals of humble origin, or the sons of peasants or semi-proletarians---are radicals by upbringing, in their outlook. The national democrats represent the interests of broad circles of the population who support consistent anti-imperialism and progressive social change. They play a leading role in the broad national front, which includes the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, workers, peasants, part of the national middle bourgeoisie that still supports the struggle against imperialism. Enjoying the support of the working masses the national democrats are able to undertake decisive measures against the imperialists, neo-colonialists, local big capitalists and feudals.

This social stratum in Asia and Africa is characterised by hesitant policies, fluctuations in orientation and vacillation between the stand of the working people and that of the bourgeoisie. In the context of non-capitalist development in societies where class antagonisms are as yet ill-defined or because of the prime importance of tasks of national scope when class contradictions are not in the forefront of political life, this intermediate stratum acquires a certain stability, has the opportunity to maintain over a long period a balance between conflicting trends thus representing the nation as a whole without losing its social specificity and seeking support from the armed forces, one-party regimes and the non-proletarian working masses. Nevertheless eventually as the correlation between the general-democratic and the socialist tasks of the revolution changes and also in view of the fact that during periods of military and social crises fluctuations and balancing become ever more difficult, the intermediate social strata are obliged to opt for one side or the other.

In Soviet political literature a national democracy is defined as a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of semiproletarian and non-proletarian working masses and pettybourgeois strata all anxious to see independent progressive development. In this definition which in the main is apt, two closely connected and controversial questions still require clarification: the participation in the national-- democratic united front of patriotic forces of part of the national bourgeoisie, and the question of its leadership.

Some countries which are embarking on the path of noncapitalist development are characterised by the absence or relative insignificance of the traditional socially and politically formed class antipodes---the bourgeoisie and the proletariat---and their political parties. As a result of this situation it is the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia which conies to constitute the dominant political force.

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In uncritical identification of the non-capitalist and socialist paths of development it is tempting to exclude the national bourgeoisie from the alliance of national forces and acknowledge the leading role of the working masses, in particular since a number of statements by ideologists of national democracy provide formal substantiation for this.

It would seem that to deny out of hand that any section of the national bourgeoisie can participate in the government of a national-democratic state that has opted for policies of social progress at this particular stage would be hasty.

In the first place, at this particular stage the national democrats upholding the non-capitalist path of development are coming to grips with tasks of an anti-feudal, antiimperialist nature, i.e., general-democratic tasks the implementation of which is also in the interests of a certain section of the national bourgeoisie. Egypt's Charter of National Action makes this quite clear since it contrasts national capital, that is included in the category "working forces of the people", and exploiter capital. However much these two concepts may be displaced in this definition the main idea is unmistakable, namely, that this charter is aimed at the small and medium capitalist. Other policy documents published in national democracies (Iraq, Algeria, Syria, South Yemen, Somalia, etc.) are worded in similar terms.

In the second place, the weakness of the national bourgeoisie means that some sections of it are interested in a certain expansion of the state sector, i.e., in the context of the given alignment of political forces in the national-- democratic states they are anxious to see non-capitalist methods applied in the building up of the national economy.

This economic interest shown by part of the national bourgeoisie in non-capitalist development may appear paradoxical but it is an undeniable fact. Indeed, during its initial stage the non-capitalist path provides in the main for the implementation of general-democratic, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal measures. Medium and small-scale local capitalists who actively participate in the economic life of their countries know that these measures are in their interests. They serve to protect medium and small-scale capital from economic pressure exerted by the imperialists and from competition from big capital of both the local and

foreign variety. Nor do the interests of medium and smallscale national capital conflict with the state sector which constitutes the basis for the economy of those countries that have opted for the non-capitalist path. It is revealing to note that in those countries, and in particular the Arab countries, the work of state enterprises has not served to oust small and medium-scale employers. Active private enterprise is particularly widespread in the sphere of retail and semi-wholesale commodity circulation, in small and medium-scale manufacture, in workshops with a limited number of hired workers (some 5-10), in construction work by contract and in the transport network. At the present stage the formation of the state sector is proceeding side by side with the emergence of something in the way of a mixed economy subject to state control. The non-capitalist path of development allows for the long duration of this coexistence of the state and private sectors.

Of course it is important to approach different sectors of the national bourgeoisie with carefully differentiated criteria. In this stratum, and in particular in its upper echelons, it is common for tendencies to ally with the imperialists and undermine the united front of the national liberation movement to be encountered. These tendencies are sometimes made more prominent by measures that are not really justified from an economic point of view and which have not been adequately prepared in the political sense: such measures include over-hasty nationalisation of enterprises belonging not only to foreign capitalists but also those from the sphere of medium and small-scale national industry as well as premature nationalisation in the trading sphere including retail trade. As regards the middle and, chiefly, the petty national bourgeoisie, at the present stage in a number of countries these sections support the national democrats. This goes to show that if appropriate policies are pursued a certain section of the local bourgeoisie can over a definite periocl be relied on to co-operate with the national democrats and work within the anti-imperialist bloc, although this does not mean that there will not be any inner stratification or friction within that bloc.

There therefore exist objective grounds for allowing the national bourgeoisie certain scope for participating in the

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national-democratic bloc. When representatives of intermediate social strata, representatives of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia---both civil and military---are in power, room is open for political influence of the national bourgeoisie. This means that when defining the class essence of the national-democratic state it is wrong to maintain that within such a state the national bourgeoisie has been entirely removed from political power.

The true position of local capitalists in the political system of national democracy finds clear expression in the thesis accepted in Marxist literature to the effect that the bourgeoisie as a whole is deprived of any monopoly of political power and only participates in national administration within the framework of a national front, which it no longer dominates.

Events have shown that the tasks of national-democratic revolution cannot be consistently carried out under the exclusive leadership of the national bourgeoisie, but only when more progressive forces are in control, forces embracing representatives of the proletarian and non-proletarian strata in town and country and also representatives of the petty bourgeoisie. Although a certain section of the national bourgeoisie numbers among those forces which are working towards social progress, it is important not to overestimate this section's role in that process; the national bourgeoisie as a class cannot of course be numbered among the main motive forces behind that process.

It is precisely those social forces which contain bourgeois tendencies within the country and paralyse them that provide a guarantee of a consistent socialist orientation. The intensification of the influence of these forces within the national front ensures gradual development of socialist tendencies. This will lead to a weakening of the political position enjoyed by the big local capitalists and the pro-- imperialist forces working in collaboration with the latter.

It is evidently from this standpoint that the assertions of certain ideologists of non-capitalist development concerning the power of the peasants and workers in a number of Asian and African countries (Tanzania, Guinea, Burma, etc.) should be approached. These assertions should be taken into account and welcomed in so far as they reflect pro-

gressive tendencies of political development. Yet it is important to remember at the same time that there exist probourgeois tendencies opposing them and, still more important, that as yet there do not exist adequate objective and subjective conditions for the workers and peasants to come to power and that these classes do not yet possess independent political organisation based on scientific socialism. In some of the countries under discussion the working class is not yet sufficiently organised or politically mature to assume political power, in others although it may have acquired the necessary degree of maturity it is not yet admitted to power to such an extent as to determine the class nature of the latter, and in yet a third group of countries the working class is only just starting to take shape.

When stating that national democracy answers the aspirations of the popular masses, including the peasants and workers, we mean that the overall policy of these regimes and the progressive socio-economic transformations they implement are in tune with the class and national interests of the working people. As for their real participation in the exercise of state power, as a rule this participation is blatantly inadequate and in some countries even negligible. Military officials and civil servants, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and representatives of the liberal professions act as spokesmen of the interests of the working people within the state apparatus and its economic bodies. Many of these groups in the light of their class background are subject to political vacillations and are often likely to cooperate with private capital.

The vital need to draw the working people into active political life and the importance of a reconstruction of the state and party apparatus according to genuinely democratic principles and in such a way as to ensure the wide involvement of workers and peasants is recognised by many leaders of national-democratic regimes. However in the majority of countries that have embarked on the path of non-capitalist development decisive steps in this direction still have to be taken.

An important precondition for the enhancement of the role of the working class and all the working people is the existence of political organisation making it possible to

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bring influence to bear on socio-political decision-making, and to take up a position that corresponds to their class goals. This is all the more important in view of the fact that in some countries that have opted for the non-- capitalist path the working class has already taken on fairly definite shape (Syria, Algeria and Burma) while in others it is still in the process of formation (Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, etc.).

The working class in the Third World too constitutes the foremost detachment of the working people, the most consistent champion of socialism and the interests of the people. In some countries that have embarked on the non-- capitalist path, in particular the Arab ones, the working class has already amassed a good deal of experience of economic and political struggle and come to uphold fine revolutionary traditions. In these countries conditions are taking shape that will make various forms of the working people's active participation in the political leadership of the country quite feasible. Much, of course, depends on the position adopted by the ruling national-democratic circles, on the degree to which the latter appreciate the role of the working masses and first and foremost the role of the working class, on their readiness to rely consistently on working-class support and co-operate with the working class.

The idea that in those countries that have opted for the non-capitalist path of development, the national bourgeoisie and bourgeois elements have been deprived of all participation in political power and that this power is completely in the hands of the working people is without doubt exaggerated and can be explained by attempts to identify noncapitalist and socialist development. In actual fact the necessary conditions for the undivided power of the working people have not yet taken shape in the majoritv of the developing countries. The participation of certain sections of the national bourgeoisie in political affairs can be traced back to a variety of circumstances and not merely explained by the fact that these sections are incorporated in the united front of democratic, anti-imperialist forces and that it is in their interests over a certain historical period that the movement for social progress should prosper. The fact is that these

sections of the national bourgeoisie in the political, ideological, organisational and economic sense are prepared better for active involvement in political affairs, for shouldering political power. The classes of the working people, on the other hand, in most of the countries that are embarking on non-capitalist development, are poorly organised and have little political experience. It is beyond any doubt that the machinery of political power in these countries which is in the hands of representatives of the radical petty-- bourgeois intelligentsia, is unstable and ridden with contradictions; this abundance of contradictions in certain conditions may lead to an additional scope for the intensification of the influence of national-bourgeois elements within the bloc of anti-imperialist forces. In view of this it would evidently still be correct to define a state that has opted for non-- capitalist development or a state with a national-democratic regime as a political regime deriving its power from the broad social bloc of the working people, that embraces a growing proletariat, petty-bourgeois strata from town and country, and certain sections of the national bourgeoisie that support progressive social development from an antiimperialist standpoint. The decisive aspect of non-capitalist development in which lies its historic importance is the fact that the national-bourgeois elements within this bloc are deprived of a monopoly of political power. This opens up possibilities for the subsequent gradual ousting of these elements, as the influence and political grounding of the working people, and in particular of the working class, increases. The class nature of national-democratic regimes is distinguished by two features. Firstly, it is above all petty-- bourgeois strata (the intelligentsia) that provide the main political champions of the interests of the bloc of the classes of the working people, the petty and middle bourgeoisie. In the second place, these representatives of the petty-- bourgeois intelligentsia who are at the helm of state and party affairs, the army and the economic apparatus enjoy relative freedom of action and a certain temporary independence vis-a-vis the main classes in society. In most countries of this type because of the as yet ill-defined nature of class relations there is a partial or total absence of a direct subordination link between class organisations, wherever the lat-

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ter exist, and the representatives of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in power. This means that the regime can introduce first measures that further the interests of the toiling social strata and then others which oppose them. This situation gives rise to the illusion that these regimes are of a supra-class character.

In recent years some national-democratic regimes have revealed a tendency for radicalisation, reflected in their more resolute implementation of anti-imperialist policies, in the consolidation of anti-bourgeois tendencies, in the embracing of a number of tenets of scientific socialism, in particular with regard to the class struggle, and in statements on the special role of the workers and peasants in the exercise of political power and in the expansion of co-operation with the socialist countries.

How should these phenomena be evaluated? Do they represent a qualitative change in the class character of the regimes or their continuing radicalisation within the framework of revolutionary-democratic or nationalist ideology?

The second would appear more likely although it is possible that such radicalisation also prepares the ground for future qualitative changes. Some ideologists of non-- capitalist development have veered to a certain extent in the direction of scientific socialism, in particular as regards the important question of recognition of the class struggle, yet even so it would be wrong to equate the ideas of the national democrats with Marxism. When it comes to fundamental ideological issues the national democrats have not abandoned their petty-bourgeois stand, although their recognition of the class struggle (as found in Iraq, Syria and certain other countries) goes hand in hand with some degree of recognition of the need to set up a bloc or front of progressive, anti-imperialist forces, national democrats and Communists. Yet they restrict opportunities for what could otherwise be practically unlimited co-operation with the Communists. Nor should the increasing role of the workers and peasants in the national-democratic countries be overestimated. The role of the workers and peasants should not be judged from political declarations. The main mass of workers and peasants have as yet no access to power. Those in power still suffer from fear of the masses---the

national democrats have not overcome this fear, some of them still do not trust workers and Communists, although at times they are obliged to work alongside them.

Most revealing in this context is the way in which the political concepts of the former leaders of the Republic of Mali have evolved. The leaders of this republic put forward slogans calling for the radicalisation of the revolution, an "active phase of revolution", a transition to "genuine socialist construction" and a purging of the ranks of the party from counter-revolutionaries of all brands. In this connection Madeira Keita mentioned the need to make a transition from a united national anti-imperialist front to a vanguard party capable of building socialism within the context of the class struggle and a popular-democratic dictatorship. An alliance between the working people of town and country was advocated. Yet it would be over-hasty to regard these tenets as Marxist, for the very concept of classes and the role of the proletariat used by these leaders is too abstract and ill-defined.

It is quite obvious that many representatives of the revolutionary intelligentsia are able to make the transition to a Marxist-Leninist stand. Yet even by doing so they will not place themselves in a position where they can change the social character of the regime or the social basis of the movement, which remain petty-bourgeois. Therefore the adoption of a Marxist-Leninist stand in relation to isolated issues is most important and revealing; indeed, it is most desirable and should be fostered, but it will be of an unsteady, reversible nature, while such a national-- democratic party will by no means become a Marxist-Leninist one as a result of this transition. It is on the class basis of the national-democratic parties that our attention should be focussed first and foremost in any evaluation of such parties' opportunities and prospects.

The main source of these parties' support is provided by the petty-bourgeois section of the population. In some quarters it is held that the peasantry when living in feudal or communal conditions does not really constitute a pettybourgeois stratum and is not predisposed for the emergence of capitalism and the adoption of petty-bourgeois ideology. Some ideologists of national democracy consider that in the

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light of this situation the peasantry, taken on its own, provides a reliable class foundation for socialist construction and that on such a basis socialism can be built just as successfully as on the basis of proletarian support in developed countries. Here the internal contradictions inherent in the peasantry are ignored completely, just as its uninterrupted stratification is ignored. This idyllic, romanticised approach to the peasantry has a great deal in common with Russian Narodism and its imitators right up until the present time, when certain traitors of Marxism try to put the peasantry over as the working class. When talking of the class essence of the national-democratic parties it is important to bear in mind also that, because of the lack or weakness of a class-conscious proletariat, these parties will have to evolve over a long period under the leadership of representatives of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and come to terms with all the implications of this situation, particularly all manner of possible power fluctuations.

This naturally leads on to the question as to why the international communist movement supports national-- democratic regimes and programmes of non-capitalist development which they advocate and implement.

In the first place this support can be explained by the fact that the activities of these regimes are in keeping with the overall, general demands of progressive evolution in the developing countries at the present stage---that is, evolution away from capitalism towards socialism, while these countries at the same time are not yet ready to embark on the direct implementation of socialist transformations under working-class leadership.

At the present stage the national democrats are introducing a number of far-reaching anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-capitalist transformations which Communists would also have implemented if they had been in power, although, of course, Communists would have introduced them while relying on the support of the working people, the working class, and would have been pursuing a consistent, clearly defined Marxist-Leninist course of action.

While such general-democratic transformations are being introduced (this applies still more so to isolated socialist transformations) in countries that have opted for the non-

capitalist path, some methods and tenets of scientific socialism are applied. When revolutionary democrats reject the capitalist path of development and implement more or less complete nationalisation of capitalist property belonging^^1^^ to foreign or big local capitalists, introduce agrarian reforms in several stages, so as to ensure that the class resistance of those that oppose such reforms should not result in any serious setbacks for the agricultural productive forces, which are weak as it is, and manifest political solidarity with the socialist countries in international affairs with regard to the basic issues of world politics---in all these cases the revolutionary democrats act as would have, if they had been in power, the Communists whose policies are always based on Marxist-Leninist precepts.

In order to solve fundamental social problems consistent revolutionary democrats who really base their policies on the interests of the working people have no other scientific theory to turn to, even if they do not embrace Marxist ideology in toto; they have no other political methods, devices and practices at their disposal for the implementation of socio-economic • transformations other than the methods, devices and practices that have been tested and proven by the struggle and lives of hundreds of millions of people and which Marxist-Leninist theory generalises and substantiates. It is possible not to accept Marxism-Leninism on grounds of insufficient acquaintance with the same, falling a prey to prejudice or on account of the social limitations of certain leaders of the liberation movement, but it is impossible to carry through to the end any single anti-- capitalist transformation without reference to Marx, Engels or Lenin, without reference to the experience gleaned by Marxists-Leninists in their struggle against imperialism and capitalism. This explains why in the countries that have opted for the non-capitalist path, the influence of workingclass ideology, of Marxism-Leninism is making itself more and more clearly felt as time goes on. To ignore this logical process is to condemn oneself to political defeat, as has been borne out by events and experience in political struggle.

In addition national democracy itself is evolving and at the present stage it is evident that in some of its elements

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it is approaching scientific socialism. As a result of gradual and protracted changes the finest representatives of national democracy may, apparently, make the transition to the principles of scientific socialism. However this transition requires a firm foundation that can only be provided by a consolidation of the position of the representatives of the emergent working class in the state apparatus and the national-democratic parties. At the present time there are no reliable guarantees of such development within national democracy. It does not make a point of rallying proletarian support or giving the proletariat access to power or preparing the ground for any change in the class nature of its power. The time is not yet ripe for this. Nor is national democracy itself ready for such a qualitative leap. Not in any one of the countries pursuing a course of non-capitalist development has the proletariat asserted its right to power, although it is gradually coming up to this in a number of countries. This explains why it is possible to observe intensification of Left-radical and bourgeois-opportunistic tendencies in the stratum of representatives of the petty-- bourgeois intelligentsia now in power. The victory of the bourgeois trend is a possible outcome at the present stage of development in these countries and this fact should not be forgotten.

The non-capitalist path of development could be interpreted as such a phase of development when the bloc of anti-imperialist, progressive social forces that from a numerical point of view is dominated by non-proletarian working masses, represented in political affairs first and foremost by intermediate strata, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, implements general-democratic transformations using noncapitalist methods thus laying the foundation for the subsequent transition to a socialist path.

In the context of non-capitalist development in theory private economy capitalism does not assume the importance of the dominant or leading economic pattern. The development of industry is carried out in the main with non-- capitalist methods and wide social strata are interested in seeing its progress. Nevertheless the chance and danger that the general-democratic transformations that are being introduced might be used as steps on the way to capitalism

remain, because of the close ties between these countries and the world capitalist economy, the domination of a smallcommodity economy, the existence of a bureaucratic proWestern bourgeoisie, the powerful influence of former landowners and capitalists and finally because of the pettybourgeois nature of the regime in power, all of which factors serve to render the political structure of these countries unstable.

The alignment of political forces shall determine which of the possible outcomes asserts itself. A fierce political struggle for the consolidation of the position of the most consistent revolutionary elements within the bloc of progressive forces and for the real involvement of the working people in the political affairs of these countries is in progress and gaining momentum. Certain successes have already been scored in this respect and these successes provide a guarantee of further progress in national democracy. At the same time setbacks and even defeats have also been recorded.

``But whatever the difficulties," Leonid Brezhnev speaking on behalf of the CPSU delegation at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in Moscow (1969) pointed out, "they cannot minimise the importance of the cardinal fact that a start has been made in a fundamentally new direction for the development of the newly independent countries. And their example will carry the greater conviction the more headway the revolutionarydemocratic countries make in their economic and cultural development, the fuller the advantages of non-capitalist development are revealed.''

It can be said there are two vital conditions that make possible a socialist orientation in the Afro-Asian countries. The first already referred to is support from the socialist countries and the international working-class movement, co-operation with them and a united stand in the anti-- imperialist struggle. The second is the cohesion of all patriotic, consistently anti-imperialist forces within the country and the creation of a united front of progressive social forces and organisations. The non-capitalist path characterised

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at the present time mainly by general-democratic transformations and consistent implementation of anti-imperialist policies requires a wide alliance of class forces including the worker and peasant masses, wide semi-proletarian strata, the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie and the patriotically inclined representatives of local capital.

The goal of the imperialists and reactionaries, and those bourgeois elements ready to collaborate with them is to use the gains of the national-democratic revolution to further their own ends, i.e., capitalist development. In this situation it is imperative that the national democrats should be vigilant and meticulous in their defence of all revolutionary gains, that they secure the support of genuine and consistent adherents of socialist trends, and these, in the end, can only be the working people.

Socialist trends of development can only be consolidated by all-round activisation of the participation of the working people (first and foremost that of the working class) in political affairs, the creation of a progressive political organisation to further the growth of class consciousness and to facilitate organised consolidation of political resolutions and the political line corresponding to the true interests of the people.

The question as to the place of the working people within the framework of the national-democratic state leads on to the complex problem of relations between the national democrats and the vanguard of the working class in the developing countries, namely, Marxist-Leninist parties and groupings. For many countries that are embarking on the non-capitalist road it is this that constitutes a most important aspect of the task of the formation and consolidation of a united front of anti-imperialist forces of a socialist orientation.

These parties themselves, and they alone, can decide what the attitude of the working class and its MarxistLeninist party to the activity of the revolutionary democrats should be. Yet when each specific decision is reached the experience already amassed by the communist movement is taken into account and likewise the Marxist-Leninist tenets already elaborated on matters relevant to the issue in question.

Lenin drew attention to the fact that petty-bourgeois democrats are inclined to take into account, accept and utilise in their political struggle only isolated aspects of Marxism. He commented on this practice in the following words: "The rate at which capitalism develops varies in different countries and in different spheres of the national economy. Marxism is most easily, rapidly, completely and lastingly assimilated by the working class and its ideologists where large-scale industry is most developed. Economic relations which are backward, or which lag in their development, constantly lead to the appearance of supporters of the labour movement who assimilate only certain aspects of Marxism, only certain parts of the new world outlook, or individual slogans and demands, being unable to make a determined break with all the traditions of the bourgeois world outlook in general and the bourgeois-democratic world outlook in particular."*

It thus follows that the complex nature of the ideology of the national democrats can be explained by objective factors. A good deal of time is required before the nationalrevolutionary parties will come to embrace whole-heartedly scientific socialist positions as a result of the changed conditions in the newly independent countries, industrial development, the formation and consolidation of the working class and the growth of the political consciousness of the popular masses. For this reason, while firmly upholding Marxist-Leninist principles, Marxists need to be far-sighted and flexible in their activities so as not to lose the support of the masses: they must be constantly searching, and indeed must find, their allies from among those social strata and groups which at the present time do not yet accept the theory of scientific socialism in all its aspects but are already making partial use of it and could well embrace it in full tomorrow.

The most important political task now confronting Marxists-Leninists as they work towards the final triumph of socialism, is to search out in the contradictory situation pertaining in economically backward countries opportunities for welding a firm alliance between Communists and those

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16, p. 348.

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social forces which are turning towards socialism and enjoy the support of millions and tens of millions, to help their allies from among the non-proletarian working masses to attain an understanding of the principles of scientific socialism---and all this without indulging the prejudices of the rank-and-file petty-bourgeois representatives of the national revolutionary democracy.

Lenin had made a number of profound and penetrating observations regarding certain aspects of the way in which the intermediate social strata behaved during the October Revolution and during its most critical stages. These observations are most enlightening with regard to problems of development encountered at the present stage of the revolution taking place in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the years immediately following the Revolution a swing in support of Soviet power was to be observed among the petty-bourgeois masses and their parties. With reference to this Lenin wrote: "It is not enough to encourage this change of front and amicably greet those who are making it. A politician who knows what he is working for must learn to bring about this change of front among the various sections and groups of the broad mass of petty-- bourgeois democrats if he is convinced that serious and deepgoing historical reasons for such a turn exist."*

Lenin's approach to the attitude that should be adopted to petty-bourgeois democrats teaches Communists to make use of all possible means to bring forth the swing of the masses in the direction of scientific socialism and consolidate it. This development of world-historic importance is taking place in the minds of tens of millions throughout Asia and Africa. They are coming to link up improvements in their living conditions with the struggle to achieve socialism. They are not yet aware of what scientific socialism really is and what a complex task is involved in the construction of socialist society in economically backward countries. At times they are prone to expect excessively rapid results from socialism not realising what tremendous feats of labour are required to secure the triumph of socialism. Sometimes they approach socialism from a predominantly

selfish point of view and this is understandable. Yet even then it is clear that they appreciate there is no solution other than a transition to socialism and that capitalism provides no real prospects for improving tr\eir living conditions.

Most Marxist-Leninist parties and groupings in the developing countries have on a number of occasions declared their support for progressive measures introduced by the national democrats and their readiness to work with the latter in the interests of national liberation and social progress. Communists submit to comradely constructive criticism negative aspects of the activities engaged in by the revolutionary national-democratic leadership in the countries with a socialist orientation, but assure them of their full support for all progressive policies and their struggle against the common enemy, namely, the imperialists and internal forces of reaction. The Communists sincerely endeavour to co-operate with the revolutionary democrats, thus exerting a positive influence on them in the hope of ensuring more consistent and effective implementation of a revolutionary-democratic, anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-capitalist programme. In no way do they attempt to make capital out of this or that error or miscalculation, setback or temporary defeat of the progressive regime so as to discredit it: they go all out to promote the development of the democratic and socialist potential latent in progressive regimes and consistently support the class interests of the emergent proletariat and of all the working people, attaching prime importance to them.

Only in this way is it possible for Marxists-Leninists and at the same time for the consistent national revolutionary democrats to accelerate the historically irreversible process of the advance of scientific socialism, and hence that of the working class so that they play a leading part in the revolution in their particular country. The leading position of the working class in the national liberation revolution comes as the result of persistent work on the part of its vanguard within the context of the revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist front and is in no way a preliminary vital condition for the first steps along the non-capitalist path.

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 191.

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Communists and national democrats constitute the two most authoritative political forces in the developing countries that are opposing imperialism and working for social progress. Their co-operation is an objective necessity if the national liberation movement is going to triumph: it is a factor of decisive importance for the future of the AfroAsian peoples.

No single ubiquitously acceptable variety of this co-- operation has yet been defined in the light of past experience. ThereMs nothing surprising about this seeing that the paths of development followed by the national-democratic revolution and the ways in which political parties have taken shape in the various countries under discussion are infinitely various.

In some countries of Asia, and almost everywhere in Tropical Africa, the ill-defined class stratification of the population has not made the emergence of class parties a historical necessity, particularly in the early stages of the antiimperialist and social struggle. In these countries---of which there are a good number---there did not exist either proletarian, or bourgeois class parties. National fronts of a nation-wide character, that led these countries' struggle for independence, expressed the people's patriotic and social interests. In most of these countries it is these national fronts which still occupy a leading position. A good number of contradictions have made themselves felt within these organisations as social conflict has gained ground; in some of them Left groupings have emerged that are endeavouring to set up vanguard parties of a socialist type. In a number of countries even before independence, before nationaldemocratic regimes assumed power, Marxist-Leninist groupings took shape and engaged in political struggle despite tremendous difficulties in their way. Sometimes these groupings were not sufficiently organised or cohesive for them to develop into parties; however, in some states parties were set up and they played a leading role in the struggle against imperialist and reactionary forces. Communist Parties of this type were set up in Syria, Iraq and certain other countries and they won universal respect for the heroic struggle that they waged over many years in the name of their people's national interests, in the name of

liberty, progress and social justice. Fraternal Communist Parties were, are and will remain the patriotic forces most dedicated to the people, the champions of the revolution against the imperialists, fighting for independence, democracy and social progress and capable of making inestimable sacrifices in the name of the final victory.

Relations between the national democrats and the Communist Parties and Marxist-Leninist groupings follow varying courses and are by no means always smooth. Major successes in stabilising the internal political situation and rallying together all progressive forces in order to repulse the common enemy have been scored in those countries, where these relations developed on a basis of co-operation.

In Egypt there existed Marxist-Leninist groupings which at the time of the 1952 revolution had not yet joined together to form a united Communist Party. Now Egyptian Marxists are co-operating with the national democrats within the framework of the Arab Socialist League.

Relations between the national democrats, who came to power in Syria, Iraq and Algeria, and the Communists were coloured by manifestations of prejudice, mistrust, errors and misunderstandings, many of which have not been surmounted to this day. By no means all the national democrats support the general endeavour to achieve social progress, or appreciate the need to join forces in face of the common enemy. Meanwhile it is precisely an understanding of this need---and only this understanding---that can open the way to close and more successful co-operation between the Communist Parties and the revolutionary democrats in these countries. Of course there might still be differences on a number of essential issues in the liberation struggle and in regard to ways and forms of development. However what is important is that there exists an objective opportunity for a broad coincidence of interests in the course of defence and consolidation of national independence, in the struggle against internal forces of reaction that are supported by the imperialist powers and in the implementation of far-- reaching social reforms in the context of non-capitalist development. Work directed towards making the most of this opportunity provides a reliable foundation and guarantee for success of the national-democratic revolution.

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Acknowledgement of the apt nature of the Communists' activities creates a favourable political climate for the active participation of Communist Parties in the movement for non-capitalist development and for friendly relations with the national democrats. Such developments are impeded by the mistrust and suspicion of the working class and its revolutionary vanguard that are cultivated by the imperialists and reactionaries among Right sections of the national democrats. Sometimes reactionaries succeed in pushing through their insidious plans and goading on the national democrats to engage in anti-communist campaigns and excesses. The interests of non-capitalist development demand that attitudes fostering the disunity of revolutionary forces be forgotten and wiped out as soon as possible while anti-capitalist, consistently socialist tendencies are consolidated in these countries.

National revolutionary democrats and Communists, who are true patriots and champions of independence and a better future for their peoples, need to appreciate still more clearly that their indestructible source of strength lies in unity. It would be a tragedy, not only for them, but also for their peoples that have opted for a non-capitalist path, if only a defeat of the revolutionary forces were to make them appreciate this indisputable fact.

The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU proclaimed an appeal for the consolidation of all anti-imperialist and progressive forces in the countries that have embraced a socialist orientation, for the establishment of close co-- operation between national democrats and Communists. The political unity of all patriotic and anti-imperialist parties, organisations and forces in a united and progressive national front capable of taking upon itself the implementation of socialist orientation and work towards the ultimate goals of non-capitalist development, and also democratisation of the social order with increased involvement of the working people have the wide support of the popular masses and patriotic organisations in the newly independent countries.

A striking example of this is provided by the course of events in the Republic of Chile. In that country the popular front of progressive forces uniting the two main parties---

the Socialists and Communists---constituted a firm nucleus of the working people.

It is on the national democrats and Communists that the outlook for creating normal conditions for close and honest co-operation in the interests of revolution depends. Experience has shown that the rallying together of national democrats and Communists to pursue a common policy of consistent anti-imperialism and social progress and granting to the champions of scientific socialism opportunities actively to participate in socio-political affairs, constitute essential preconditions for a successful advance along the non-- capitalist road. Communists armed with a scientific theory of social development are infinitely better equipped than others to struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society.

Deliberate intervention in haphazard economic evolution so as to avert uncontrolled development of capitalist private enterprise is only possible with the help of an appropriate political superstructure. Only a state possessed of the necessary apparatus and means for implementing economic planning and control and, where necessary, resorting to legal coercion, and having its own economic basis---namely, an expanding state sector---is in a position to check economic anarchy and secure conditions favourable for non-capitalist development. In the final analysis the success of non-- capitalist development depends on a correct balance between a state's political and economic priorities, and its active, rational role in economic and social affairs.

From this it is clear that the political superstructure is also of decisive importance for non-capitalist development. On the one hand, a state needs to be set up that is capable of flexible and consistent implementation of the anti-- imperialist, anti-capitalist course outlined earlier; on the other hand, the political vanguard at the helm of such a state must have a coherent revolutionary programme, capable of rallying together considerable sections of the popular masses and stirring them to action to achieve revolutionary socio-economic transformations.

The main difficulties in the period under discussion stem

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from the problem as to how to set up a new state, mould its social and class structure, make sure that the activity of the state apparatus is, as far as possible, in keeping with the goals of non-capitalist development, consolidate ties between the state and the popular masses and finally to ensure the latter's involvement in the work of the state's administrative apparatus. The social character of the state and the class structure of the state apparatus in a number of countries, th^at have announced their intention to pursue socialist goals, sometimes differ considerably from those publicly proclaimed. In this context there still exists a large gulf between word and deed.

When analysing the structure of the state apparatus set up by national democrats it soon emerges that this state apparatus is often of a military or semi-military character, particularly during the initial stages of the national-- democratic states' development. At this stage national-democratic regimes at times undergo the influence of the rule of individual personalities.

Events in many places have shown that not only the administrative, but also the army apparatus in the nationaldemocratic states are littered with people whose political reputation is, to say the least, dubious and who sometimes blatantly oppose national-democratic objectives. Such figures usually constitute a major threat to national-democratic revolution, to its anti-imperialist, democratic and social goals and transformations. They also constitute a threat for the revolutionary national leadership and for the stability of the state structure. This gives rise to the question as to the need for breaking up or fundamentally reorganising and cleaning up the state machine that has been inherited by the nationaldemocratic regime.

In Burma, for example, after the establishment of a national-democratic order it was the army which became the main force behind the state apparatus. The group of officers, guided by patriotic sympathies and progressive aspirations, which effected the coup, took over responsibility for the administration of state affairs, for foreign and internal policy and the economy. However, the civil and administrative apparatus inherited by the new regime from the national bourgeoisie was, as acknowledged by the new head of state,

General Ne Win, corrupt through and through and reared and prepared for office under the influence of the colonialists and their bourgeois hangers-on. As frequently noted in the Burmese press, this civil service more often than not acts against the interests of non-capitalist development rather than in such a way as to promote its programme. This raises the issue as to how the army can find opportunities for remodelling the state machine on more healthy lines.

The Burmese army was set up in the forties as an army of national liberation to wrest independence from British and later from Japanese occupation; it was an armed force of national revolution. The creation of this army was to a large extent carried out under the influence of the Communist Party of Burma. It is a democratic army consisting mainly of peasants and in which the urban poor, the working class and the urban petty bourgeoisie are widely represented. Its officer corps is also made up of men from humble social backgrounds with democratic sympathies. As a rule the officers have no links with feudal-landowning elements or the big bourgeoisie. It is revealing to note that one of the leading organisers of this army, General U Aung San (killed in 1947), was at one time a prominent figure in the Communist Party of Burma. Despite the fact that for almost fifteen years the bourgeois governments led by U Nu, U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyain tried to use the army as a shock force in their struggle against the Communist Party of Burma and implanted anti-communist ideology and practices in its ranks, the revolutionary national-democratic officers opposed the imperialists and the local bourgeoisie at the critical stage of their country's development (March 1962). Naturally enough however the anti-communist prejudice cultivated among the officer corps of this army has not been erased completely yet and at times breaks through to the surface.

The experience of Burma and various other countries, that have embarked on the non-capitalist path, shows that the national democrats are able to make use of the state apparatus they inherit from the preceding regime only at the initial stage of their campaign to introduce anti-- capitalist reforms, and that such a policy leads to considerable difficulties and tension and much loss of pace and results. The

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country's subsequent development along the non-capitalist path in the direction of socialism, quite apart from its transition to all-out construction of socialism and the triumph of the latter, can be achieved only as a result of fundamental changes in the class character of the state apparatus, the introduction of improved administration methods and techniques and its turning into a state of the working people. \ Even now the social transformations that have been introduced in a number of countries have made possible the initial success of non-capitalist development but given rise to considerable resistance on the part of reactionary circles. The need to surmount the opposition of internal and foreign reaction demands further, new steps in the direction of state democratisation, the mobilisation of the working masses in the struggle to create a new society, and their enhanced role in state administration. This need brings up first and foremost the question as to the consolidation (and in some countries the creation) of the vanguard, popular political party capable of embracing ever more comprehensively the theory and practice of scientific socialism and, on such a foundation, of guiding state affairs with the support of the broad masses of the working people. The efforts devoted to the creation of such parties or the transformation of existing mass national-democratic parties are being undertaken in Burma, Egypt, Guinea and a number of other countries.

Non-capitalist development outside the confines of the socialist world is a path which has so far not been traversed by anybody and which is therefore an exceedingly difficult one. This is due to lack of experience, of ready models and also due to the magnitude of the tasks facing the countries which have embarked upon this path. It is clear that the less prerequisites there are for an advance towards socialism and the larger the number of intermediate stages to be by-passed or surmounted, the more difficult this advance becomes. There is little doubt that these difficulties will affect, or indeed are already affecting, the results achieved and influence the forms and methods of progressive transformations. It is dangerous to present non-capitalist development in idyllic terms. A socialist orientation by no means removes all difficulties overnight or guarantees immediate social and polit-

ical harmony. Non-capitalist development is without doubt an advance in the direction of socialism, but it starts out from backwardness. Socialism is a relatively distant prospect, while backwardness is a day-to-day reality. Backwardness cannot help but leave its imprint on the forms of development adopted. However it is of course quite wrong to link the influence of this backwardness on social affairs---as the opponents of socialism do---with the policies of a socialist orientation pursued by states that have emerged as a result of national-democratic revolution. Backwardness is the result of a colonial past and does not stem from the selection of a socialist orientation, but its impact on the progress of transformations is undeniable and cannot be attributed wholly to any mistakes of political leaders; it is the result of objective conditions.

In all developing countries, and perhaps particularly so in those which are implementing the most consistent transformations, there exists a contradiction, something in the way of a constant conflict, between progress and backwardness and the objective conditions are such that they frequently leave open to the revolutionary-democratic leadership no other choice but to aspire after progress using available ready-made political methods, even when the social and economic prerequisites for them do not yet exist, which means that they are often doomed to failure.

These contradictions between progress and backwardness, between a socialist perspective and concrete economic and cultural levels determine to a considerable extent the development of the state-political superstructure in the countries which are embarking on the non-capitalist path. Some aspects of this development may appear to have little bearing on any prospects .jor a socialist future but nevertheless such is the contradictory background against which the first signs of progress are painfully breaking through to the surface.

The problem of democracy, in which many vital aspects of political development in the newly independent states are focussed, serves to bring out the actual difficulties and contradictions facing the national liberation movement in countries that have opted for a non-capitalist path of development.

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The evolution of state institutions in many of the countries that have shaken themselves free of colonial dependence in recent years is characterised by a deliberate rejection of Western models of bourgeois democracy. Such models have proved ineffective and inacceptable in the conditions obtaining in the former colonies.

The states, which are embarking on the non-capitalist path, are searching for state structures and socio-political methods which meet the requirements of accelerated progress of the former colonies and dependent peoples and which are in keeping with their traditions. Their refusal to recognise West European and American models of statehood and political procedures is distinguished by the undeniable fact that the national democrats are working towards a socialist future and staking on socialism. However critical an approach one may adopt to socialist conceptions of revolutionary democrats, bearing in mind the limited and one-sided character of the latter, it is impossible to overlook the fact that they reject ``Western'' political institutions and conceptions of democracy, not because they are Western but because they are bourgeois. And this is most important. The concepts of statehood and democracy to which the ideologists of non-capitalist development subscribe are noticeably influenced by scientific socialism and the experience of the socialist countries. They criticise bourgeois democracy as democracy for a wealthy minority of exploiters and recognise the blatant inadequacy of the methods employed by the traditional institutions of political democracy when no steps are taken to relieve social inequality and exploitation.

The national democrats have advanced a revolutionary conception of democracy which transcends the limits of traditional bourgeois ideas. Briefly it can be defined as a combination of far-reaching social change in the interests of the working people designed to further the introduction of economic democracy and social justice, on the one hand, and the granting of political rights, freedoms and scope for civic activities to the popular masses, on the other. This theoretical solution for the problem of democracy put forward by the ideologists of non-capitalist development appears promising. As for their practical methods, these are not charac-

terised by a similar degree of consistency in view of a number of both objective and subjective factors.

In the first place a definite, and to a large extent objective contradiction between the social and political aspects of democracy is to be observed. The most vital link in the concept of democracy when viewed from the practical angle is social reform. Reforms implemented by progressive Asian and African countries meet the interests of the popular masses and ensure their support for revolutionary governments: they constitute the democratic foundation for progressive political regimes. As for the political aspects of democracy, these have not been developed fully enough and some of them are either lacking or not functioning to the full extent they should. Bourgeois critics of regimes which are following a non-capitalist course of development, accuse them of being non-democratic in the light of this. Yet they forget that there can be no absolute democracy either from the class angle (i.e., extending to all strata of the population) or as regards scale, and also that democracy has been and indeed will always be commensurate with the specific historic, social and political conditions.

At the present time in those countries that are pursuing a non-capitalist course of development, as is the case with the majority of Third World countries, the institutions of political democracy are not being developed to the necessary degree. The objective prerequisites for this are lacking--- namely, a specific cultural, social and economic level and traditions of political life. They prove impracticable in conditions of fierce political struggle, which is by no means restricted to the parliamentary sphere and, as a rule, is gathering momentum in other contexts as well.

The role of all these factors which obstruct the all-round development of political democracy is increased in countries with a socialist orientation as a result of the particularly acute conflict with the imperialists, whose neo-colonialist policies are directed first and foremost against these countries, and also as a result of the growing internal class contradictions and the increasing resistance from reactionary elements whose egoistic interests are threatened in face of social reform. In conditions, where the working masses are lacking in political experience and certain revolutionary

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regimes fail to foster firm enough links with them, situations can take shape in which political liberties are exploited for subversive ends by the enemies of non-capitalist development. Unlimited political freedoms thus come to represent a threat to the implementation of social transformations. It goes without saying that any restrictions should be of a strictly class character, directed against reactionary exploiter elements. Only restrictions of this type are objectively justified and dictated by historical conditions. However, in some of the national-democratic states, where there is the objective need for restriction of the sphere of democratic freedoms, cases unfortunately do arise when subjective aspirations to go beyond the really necessary limits come to the surface. In addition not enough consistence is always devoted to ensuring that the restrictions retain a strictly class character.

Such phenomena should not only be regarded as subjective delusions but also as part of the objective dialectics of the revolutionary process. Of course recognition of the inevitability of certain restrictions on political democracy in the countries following the non-capitalist path by no means implies that the tasks of improving and democratising the political machine cease to be relevant. Yet a sober evaluation of the actual situation leads one to conclude that in the complex and comprehensive concept of democracy (which Marxists can never reduce to mere notions of a parliamentary system and political freedoms for the individual) the correlation of social and political aspects of democracy is by no means identical at different epochs. Whereas the political aspect of democracy may prove to be the pivot of the problem and even provide an instrument for lending democracy new social content in firmly established, developed societies at periods of their evolution, when the class and political struggle is proceeding within more or less clearly defined limits, in unstable societies which find themselves in a turbulent stage of national and political consolidation it is the social aspects of democracy that assume prominence. Institutions of formal political democracy common to bourgeois society are not in a position to guarantee the social objectives of far-reaching transformations in the newly independent states. The revolutionary forces have nothing

left, but to resort to the political methods that are placed at their disposal by the obtaining situation in the struggle against the pressures of imperialism and reaction. Many revolutions pass through this stage in their development. The countries that are embarking on the non-capitalist path are also experiencing it now.

The interests of revolutionary transformations and the defence of progressive regimes make the consolidation of political power (i.e., the most important and, at the present time, from a practical point of view, the decisive internal prerequisite of non-capitalist development) a task of the first urgency. Its prime importance has led to the elaboration of a number of political principles and institutions such as strong presidential power, a one-party system, not infrequent combination of the functions of head of state, party and government, merging of state and party apparatus (a factor which in some countries has even come to represent more or less a constitutional principle) and all-out consolidation of centralism. In these aspects of state procedure the new is closely interlinked with the old, prospects for future development are considered side by side with tradition. Some elements in this fusion need to be developed while others need to be gradually dropped in keeping with the interests of revolutionary development. The strengthening of central power, for instance, often turns into issues of ``personality'', into a system of chieftancy, messianism, a system in which the objectives and destiny of the revolution come to be embodied in the leader's personality. This does not promote democracy but can be explained no doubt by the cultural and political level obtaining in countries where peoples, who have been living under colonial regimes for a long time, come to see the idea of freedom in terms of personalities in order to lend it more authority, weight and conviction. The need to eliminate such repercussions of the consolidation of revolutionary power is already being appreciated. Undue adulation of leaders is being submitted to relevant criticism in a number of national-democratic states and parties.

The very need for centralisation and consolidation of power, its concentration in the hands of a united revolutionary leadership is entering, in a number of revolutionary-

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democratic countries, into certain contradiction with the requirements of democratisation and with the socialistoriented course in the" sphere of both internal and foreign policy. This complex problem does not admit of any one-sided solution. It is a dialectical contradiction which can only be solved by means of a complex synthesis. The consolidation of power and its democratisation do not really conflict with each other at all for both are objective conditions of revolutionary development. The degree to which these two processes are dovetailed and their correlation found determines the prospects for further successes in non-capitalist development and for the elimination of difficulties arising in the sphere of political democracy. It would appear that the solution to this problem should be sought in the third aspect of the revolutionary concept of democracy reflected/in the ideology of non-capitalist development, but which/has not yet been comprehensively elaborated in practice---- namely, the enhancement of the working people's political role and activity.

The national democrats cannot embark on the path of democratisation that bourgeois politicians would foist upon them and which would involve uncontrolled extension of political freedoms and scope for opposition activities. Such a policy would sacrifice revolutionary prospects to an unduly fetishistic concept. A revolutionary understanding of democratism is characteristic of the advanced detachment of the developing countries. It is determined by the actual participation of the masses in state and social affairs. The democratisation of progressive political regimes demands first and foremost the consolidation of their ties with the working masses and the enhancement of the latter's role, activity and political awareness. These processes can advance in step with the further consolidation of revolutionary power, since in the final analysis the stability of revolutionary power can only be secured if it has support of the masses. The experience already amassed by national-- democratic countries in Asia and Africa provides irrefutable proof of this. In the tense days of the 1967 summer crisis Egypt's revolutionary gains were preserved thanks precisely to the resolute action of tens and hundreds of thousands of working people who declared their support for President Nasser's

anti-imperialist policy for all to hear. This saved the progressive regime although the mass demonstrations of that period were spontaneous to a considerable extent. On the other hand, the absence of close ties with the masses, from which Kwame Nkrumah's government and the People's Convention Party in Ghana suffered, made the staging of a military plot to engineer a counter-revolutionary coup extremely facile. Activisation of the masses entails wide-scale painstaking work to raise their political and cultural standards, to involve them in trade unions, peasant and other organisations, to enhance the role and consolidate the ideological and organisational principles of the political vanguard, i.e., the ruling party, and to promote its alliance with the Marxists-Leninists and consistently develop democracy.

Only the successful implementation of these objectives can guarantee that objective problems will not be further complicated by subjective factors, that the necessary temporary restriction of political democracy will not come to be regarded as a virtue and that these limitations will be made applicable only to the class enemy, while the need to consolidate state power will not lead to bureaucratic degeneration, nepotism and corruption that are so widespread in the Third World. To follow this course calls for a close alliance with all those forces, which are interested in the success of non-capitalist development, and first and foremost with the most consistent of them, namely, the Marxists-Leninists, the Communists.

The future of non-capitalist development and the socialist perspective in the former colonial countries depend on the degree to which the representatives of the radical intelligentsia now in power succeed in rallying together all the true champions of social progress, linking the party and state apparatus with the masses and ensuring the consolidation within it of the position of the working class and the working people as a whole.

The present state of the theory of non-capitalist development and the practical experience gleaned by national democracy allow of a relatively precise answer to the question as to what the criteria of non-capitalist development are.

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For a full definition of these criteria the problem needs to be approached from various points of view.

As far as the class aspect of the phenomenon and the class essence of the state are concerned the first criterion of noncapitalist development is, as noted above, the elimination of the bourgeoisie's monopoly of political power.

In those countries where power is assumed by revolutionary forces capable of implementing resolute measures designed to check the influence of capital, conditions take shape making possible the advance along the non-capitalist path. However this is only a first step which in the course of revolutionary advance often proves easier to implement than those which follow. To assume power is sometimes simpler than to secure the stability of a revolutionary regime; to proclaim a revolutionary programme is simpler than putting it into practice and providing a reliable social foundation for its success. For this reason a criterion for the successful development along the non-capitalist path is the gradual but steady consolidation of the position of the working people in political affairs, the participation of the latter in state power while parallel steps are being taken to weaken the influence of bourgeois elements. A true guarantee for these socialist trends in the complex process of non-capitalist development can be provided by reliance of the political regime not on national capital, nor on pettybourgeois strata prone to vacillation, but on the working masses.

The decisive criterion of non-capitalist development which incontestably determines the class nature of the regimes concerned is the policy pursued by ruling circles.

In the sphere of internal policy non-capitalist development involves consistent implementation of the agrarian reform making possible the liquidation of feudal and big capitalist landownership, the distribution of land to the peasants, which serves to promote co-operative development in rural areas, and the establishment of a strong state sector in industry that will dominate the main branches of production. Also involved are the concentration in the hands of the state of finance and banking, mineral resources and transport and communication, by means of nationalisation in particular, wide-scale economic planning designed to

promote consolidation of the state sector on a permanent basis and hold in check capitalist tendencies, which are compatible with a-socialist perspective, and the raising of the population's cultural and economic standards, etc.

When it comes to foreign policy the path of non-- capitalist development is distinguished by a consistent struggle against imperialism, resolute forestalling of all attempts of economic exploitation instigated by the imperialist states, efforts to reduce dependence on the world capitalist economy, close co-operation with the socialist countries and support for their anti-imperialist foreign policy and for the national liberation movement in all its forms and all over the world.

Criteria of the non-capitalist path of development can also be discussed in relation to its ideological platform. Here such discussion gets a particularly concrete ailsince the ideology of national democracy in its main points has already assumed definite shape. Its distinctive features are as follows: an understanding of socialism as the triumph of social justice, the elimination of class exploitation and the predominance of socialised forms of production; militant criticism of imperialism and present-day capitalism; rejection of modern apologetic theories such as the welfare state theory; recognition of class contradictions and the class struggle in the conditions obtaining in the developing countries and of the class character of political power; the strong influence of the ideas of scientific socialism.

The sum total of these ideological, political and class aspects provides a relatively distinct idea of the highly complex revolutionary process in the countries of the Third W^5nd~which has come to be known in Marxist literature as the "non-capitalist path of development''.

Social and political scientists often turn their attention to the question as to whether the non-capitalist path is universally applicable, as to whether it is obligatory for all developing countries, whether or not in present conditions it is not tantamount to a universal law of development in the direction of socialism. The very fact that such questions are asked bears witness to the definite popularity of the

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concept of non-capitalist development, to the favourable reception with which the idea has met in political circles and amongst the popular masses in the Third World countries.

There is nothing ambiguous about the answer to this question. Non-capitalist development is not a universal law, but rather one of the diverse routes for the advance to socialism, which is plausible, justified and indeed necessary in certain specific conditions.

It is necessary to have a clearly defined idea of the essential character of the non-capitalist path and the objectives that it sets out to reach before judging how widely spread this particular course is. The goal of non-capitalist development is to create the prerequisites for a subsequent transition to socialist construction in the countries where these prerequisites, such as the necessary technical, economic and cultural standards, together with the political ones (which could perhaps to a certain extent compensate for inadequate economic prerequisites for socialism), i.e., broad and reliable social support from the working class and the toiling peasantry and a well-organised political vanguard armed with a genuinely scientific theory, are lacking. It is clear that in those countries where the preconditions for the implementation of socialist transformations already exist, where the revolutionary movement has deep roots among the working masses, where there are influential and well-- established Marxist-Leninist parties, the stage of non-capitalist development may appear unnecessary. In such countries the prerequisites for socialist development have taken shape in different conditions. Of course, in countries where the objective conditions for socialist transformations are already at hand, to put forward as a political programme non-- capitalist development (given its social foundation and the class character of the political power it implies) would be tantamount to tagging along behind the revolutionary movement and disorientating and disarming the masses.

Experience of the last few years has made it possible to draw some concrete conclusions concerning the applicability of the ideas implicit in the theory of non-capitalist development. This theory has been put into practice and come to constitute a powerful political trend holding out considerable

promise for the future, mainly in African countries. It is on that continent that non-capitalist development has a definite future and it is there that more and more countries will opt for this particular course. As for certain countries of Asia (India, etc.) and in particular the Latin American countries, the concept of non-capitalist development is presented by the revolutionary forces there in a somewhat different light and as a rule assumes a different note. In those countries there can be no talk of by-passing capitalism or completely missing out the stage of relatively developed capitalist society. This is why in those countries the slogan of non-- capitalist development, if it is used, simply implies the setting up of a national-democratic government, the implementation of wide-scale and consistent general-democratic, antifeudal and anti-monopolist transformations to be followed by a clean break with capitalist development. The slogan of non-capitalist development in these conditions becomes a platform for cohesion of all progressive social strata.

The possibility that this popular slogan may well be used to serve demagogic ends by forces quite alien to the revolutionary movement must also be borne in mind.

In countries where the formation of capitalist relations is already far advanced the slogan of non-capitalist development can be applied in two ways: either in the context of the revolutionary vanguard's striving for unification of all progressive social forces by means of a militant democratic programme or in attempts by opponents of social progress to turn the popular masses away from socialism with the help of reformist conceptions and undermine the influence of Marxist-Leninist parties. It goes without saying that in the two cases the slogan of non-capitalist development is interpreted in different ways and only the concrete implications attributed to the term provide an adequate basis for evaluating its relevance to the revolutionary movement.

Non-capitalist development represents a transitional stage in historical development. In the process of such development a tremendous task has to be achieved, namely, the countries have to be brought to the threshold of socialism starting out from a situation of socio-economic backward-

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ness. The achievement of this complex task requires tremendous effort. The non-capitalist path is no short-term slogan, no temporary political manoeuvre but a revolutionary strategy calculated to cover a whole historical period which is an organic part of the transition from capitalism (and also pre-capitalist relations) to socialism.

In order to appreciate that this course represents a whole transitional epoch all that is required is to conceive of the scale of the tasks that have to be achieved once a country has opted for non-capitalist development: the colossal gulf has to be overcome between early-capitalist, or sometimes early-feudal patriarchal-communal society, complete with its complex of outlived relations, superstitions and ideas, and the stage immediately prior to socialism without as yet the direct dictatorship of the working class and leadership from Marxist-Leninist parties. Moreover this epoch is inevitably characterised by acute political struggle, incessant conflict between incompatible trends, the coexistence of which, it must be noted, constitutes the very essence of noncapitalist development.

In all spheres---politics, economics, culture, ideology--- problems of non-capitalist development are solved in the struggle of contradictions. Only lengthy evolution, in the course of which consistent socialist elements will gradually take firm root, can smooth out these contradictions.

In the conditions pertaining in the developing countries, in particular while advancing along the non-capitalist path, the danger of voluntarism is considerable. Backwardness in general and particularly as far as ideological and political concepts are concerned predisposes to voluntarism, to noisy promotion of unrealistic projects for rapid transformations, and an abrupt leap from economic poverty and illiteracy to social prosperity. However, pseudo-revolutionary experiments of this kind that are based on a disregard for objective reality are bound to prove themselves to be not merely Utopian but also detrimental in relation to the given country's gradual advance in the direction of socialism based on responsible and real policies and the people's constructive and disciplined labour.

Thanks to the determining role of the world socialist system in the present epoch conditions favourable for the

revolutionary process in all parts of the world have taken shape. Assistance of the socialist system has opened up tremendous new opportunities for the newly independent countries. This determines the enhanced role of the progressive anti-imperialist state, the progressive political party, correct leadership in all aspects of the advance along a course of national and social progress. Lenin's concept of non-capitalist development supported and elaborated by the world communist movement is based precisely on recognition of the special role and significance of these new factors connected with the national-democratic stage of the revolution. When the political organisation of the working people is inadequate and the working class does not yet enjoy sufficient influence the prospects for non-capitalist development depend in large measure on the position adopted by the representatives of the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia heading the regime. However the recognition of this fact does not imply in the least that objective conditions have no effect upon the national democrats, that the latter can ignore them. On the contrary, it is precisely objective conditions (in particular the decisive role of the socialist system and the firmness of the internal social support) that provide their growing scope for revolutionary action; then again, the degree to which the leadership is prepared to base its policies on real conditions and take all aspects of the latter into account after detailed analysis determines the success of non-capitalist development and the prospects for advance in a socialist direction.

A lack of experience and the endeavour to accelerate radical change sometimes give rise to over-hasty decisions and political declarations, which at first glance may appear of a most revolutionary character, but which in practice prove detrimental and ill-advised in that they are based on the urge to obviate a necessary stage of development that has not yet been passed through. Attempts to overcome contradictions stemming from non-capitalist development in this way lead nowhere. Both Asia and Africa have already cognised this. In the light of this fact many far-sighted national democrats have regarded with mistrust any projects which were distinguished by radicalism but were in equal measure lacking plausibility and were as a rule foist-

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ed upon them by Leftist forces from outside the country. Contradictions are implicit in non-capitalist development and they can be overcome, however, not by means of decrees from above but rather as a result of painstaking, unhurried and constructive work as the political and economic prerequisites for the transition to a new stage of revolutionary development mature.

Grave danger is inherent in attempts artificially to accelerate non-capitalist development and after proclaiming appropriate slogans to press forward for the transition to socialism when the objective and subjective prerequisites for this step are not at hand. Pseudo-revolutionary haste of this kind can cause irreparable harm to the cause of socialism and non-capitalist development. There is no other way to solve the contradictions inherent in non-capitalist development other than a consistent, constructive struggle for economic independence, together with consolidation of the alliance with the countries of the socialist community, and the promotion of revolutionary-democratic and socialist tendencies, and with firm reliance on the support of the working people. Systematic, intensely creative work is a natural result of the very goals of non-capitalist development, the aspirations to build a socialist society. This is a hundred times more complex than any hasty proclamation of unrealistic slogans, reckless action or intoxication with ``Left'' phrases which without fail leads revolutionary forces to costly defeats. Appeals to reject a united national front of progressive forces as a foundation for non-capitalist development, simplify its class structure and refuse an alliance with certain bourgeois strata and even the proclaiming abroad of the greatest slogan---the dictatorship of the proletariat--- can only lead to setbacks. Adventurist slogans of this type are put forward by the Maoists; trying to put their radical ring to good use in pursuing their own objectives, the latter attempt to gain ever wider influence in the Afro-Asian countries.

National democrats everywhere reject Leftist adventurism of this kind, although often only after internal struggle. The experience of the world revolutionary movement, that of the international communist movement and their own now far from negligible experience convince them that

since their backing is extremely inadequate and they have no opportunity to make use of the support of a well-- organised working class, they should not refuse to turn to even temporary allies or fellow-travellers. This would lead to a split in the united anti-imperialist front, to a strengthening of the position of reactionaries, and would push into the enemy camp those elements that are still capable of supporting anti-imperialist policies. Pseudo-revolutionary adventurism of this kind using socialist slogans can well undermine non-capitalist development and the real prospects for advance towards socialism that have opened up before the economically backward countries. This course requires cohesion of all those forces that are capable of contributing to the struggle against imperialism and for social progress.

The heterogeneous social foundation of non-capitalist development is an objective factor stemming from the very nature of this phenomenon. It would be wrong to assume that this factor might be eliminated in a short period or overcome by means of any political, volitional decisions. Political strategy cannot be based on illusory hopes of rapidly overcoming this factor by using radical methods, but it must depart from a sober evaluation of all its implications.

Non-capitalist development relies on a broad bloc of class forces interested in furthering independent progressive development, promoting the reconstruction of the national economy and intensifying the struggle against imperialist expansion. As stressed earlier this means mainly generaldemocratic, anti-imperialist transformations. The latter are important for all vital forces in the young states that have not linked their fate with imperialism and these include representatives of national capital. The less developed the emerging national capital, which strives to exploit the internal market and oust foreign capital, the nearer it is to the anti-imperialist front, the more it will be interested in developing an independent economy. Initially (for a period running into years) the as yet weak national capital sees the state sector as its only source of support in the struggle against imperialism. This means that the objective coincidence of interests brings considerable sections of the national (middle and petty) bourgeoisie to associate themselves with the forces working to promote progressive development. But

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at a definite stage of its maturing national capital starts to see the growing state sector as a direct threat to its very existence. Class contradictions become more acute and strife breaks out within the national-democratic front. Representatives of national capital demand greater participation in state power, in the administration, the army, police, security organs, and seek a more influential voice in foreign policy. The need for a change in the country's political development arises and with it the necessity for putting an end to the influence of the national bourgeoisie on state administration. In this connection it is of course important to take into account as well the opportunities for neutralising the big and middle bourgeoisie at the period when the national liberation revolution resolutely embarks on a national-- democratic, non-capitalist course of development.

The economic aspect of the non-capitalist course is equally contradiction-prone. The emergence of a mixed economy and the parallel development of the state and private sectors inevitably sooner or later lead to conflict. The private sector attempts to expand and surmount with all available means at its disposal the restrictions placed in its path by the state, going all out to find loopholes that might enable it to get round laws and regulations. For such purposes bourgeois elements often make use of the corrupt individuals in the state apparatus. The implications of allowing private capital scope for development undoubtedly hold out danger for the as yet young seedlings of the socialised economy; nevertheless in the national-democratic countries the existence of a private sector in the early stages is an economic necessity. The non-capitalist path of development presupposes such an economic policy which, while restricting the scope for the development of private capital, stimulates the rapid growth of the public sector.

It is no problem to announce an uncompromising drive against private initiative, the private sector, the national bourgeoisie as such, and then implement broad nationalisation schemes, even covering the sphere of retail trade, as has been the case in a number of countries such as Burma and Guinea. However in view of the weak economic basis in these countries, their lack of experience in national administration of the economy and their desperate shortage

of qualified personnel for this work, such policies often lead to a curtailment of production and disruption of the elementary links between town and country, between the country in question and the world market, factors which create obstacles not only in the face of the country's advance towards socialism, but for any kind of development whatever. Nationalisation for which no groundwork has been carried out and badly planned construction of new factories lead to the appearance of unprofitable enterprises that constitute nothing but a burden for the economy. In view of this it is vital to find the correct correlation between the state and private sectors, while at the same time constantly promoting the economic effectiveness of the initial forms of socialised production.

One of the most urgent tasks in this context is the scientific elaboration of the most suitable economic course to be followed once a country has opted for non-capitalist development. As yet this question has only been discussed in Marxist literature in general terms in connection with basic principles and trends. The time is now ripe for more thorough analysis of the economic experience already amassed and of the failures recorded in a number of developing countries.

The non-capitalist course of development within those countries that have opted for it gives rise, essentially, to the problem as to what the correlation between politics and economics should be in the new and complex historical conditions. Here the role of the political superstructure is exceedingly active. As in connection with socialist transformation, so here, the political organisation of society and the state form corresponding to it are the main instrument, or to use Lenin's phrase, the main prerequisite of revolutionary changes. The specific correlation between politics and economics in the context of non-capitalist development stems from the specific tasks of the non-capitalist path and is also shaped by the specific features of the basis and political superstructure in the countries that have recently attained their independence, and by the utterly objective dialectical contradictions implicit in the very essence of non-capitalist development.

An inescapable feature of non-capitalist development are the considerable contradictions between economic and politi-

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cal interests. On the one hand, the main objective is seen as economic progress, while, on the other, not all kinds of economic growth promote the advance towards socialism. This contradiction underlies the need for certain restrictions on private enterprise and for control measures to keep such initiative in check. However the financial and organisational opportunities for economic development are most limited and therefore make it impossible to ignore the potential and experience of the private sector. Use of the private sector, although with certain restrictions and while attempts are made to plan and control its activities, is an economic necessity, and what is more, over a long period. This inevitably leads not only to the preservation of the private sector, but also to its expansion and consolidation within definite limits. The most rapid possible economic progress so vital to these countries demands this. Meanwhile the socialist perspective demands of politics, of the state-political superstructure something diametrically opposed to this, namely, the consolidation of the political positions of the working people, the weakening of the influence enjoyed by bourgeois elements, and increasingly consistent introduction of socialist elements and conceptions into all spheres of the nation's life. In the light of this a correct political course, its active implementation by the state-political apparatus, close adherence to the ideals of socialism on the part of the leadership and all civil servants, enhanced organisation of the working people and their growing voice in affairs of state, the unity of all progressive forces and, finally, the close alliance with the world socialist system together provide the most important guarantee of the success of non-capitalist development with its socialist perspective in both domestic and foreign policy. In fact these phenomena are the only things which guarantee that national and foreign capital, whose power is growing despite the restrictions to which they are subject, will not overstep the limits imposed upon them and put paid to the opportunities for progress in the direction of socialism that have now opened up before the newly independent countries. Thus, in a definite sense and at a specific stage economics and politics develop in different directions. Political advance being, as it is, steered by a national-democratic state should put a stop to the negative results stemming from the

growth of the economic influence enjoyed by national and foreign capital. The successful carrying out of this difficult task depends on whether or not the leadership follows a correct political course and whether or not it is able to mobilise, rally together and activise the working masses, moulding the latter into a truly decisive political force.

Tasks of this nature have been carried out in the course of socialist construction (one only has to recall the New Economic Policy) but in quite a different and, as should indeed be pointed out, much more favourable setting as regards the conditions obtaining within the country, where the dictatorship of the proletariat had already been established and where there existed a working class which, while numerically far from strong, was distinguished by its level of organisation and political awareness. The heterogeneous social basis in the countries pursuing a course of noncapitalist development and the negligible influence of the proletariat in these countries, together with the class contradictions inherent in the political forces leading the proletariat, all give rise to substantial additional difficulties.

The ideology of the national democrats also constitutes a source of intense struggle. There the past and the future clash, for the national democrats come not only under the influence of scientific socialism but also under that of the latest currents of bourgeois thought and the age-old traditions based on religious concepts which are firmly rooted among the masses. Both the forces of reaction and those of progress attempt to turn these religious traditions to their own advantage.

The attitude that should be adopted to bourgeois currents of thought is quite clear: such ideas are hostile to any consistent anti-imperialist policy, to social progress and revolutionary change. Furthermore they by no means always stem from internal conditions but are often imported from outside. As for religious outlook it is in contradiction to scientific socialism and weakens, as it were, its influence on national democracy and gives rise to a situation in which only some of the final objectives of scientific socialism are apprehended while its scientific method is not assimilated. Sometimes the question is asked as to whether the position of the national democrats would not be stronger, if they ceased to advocate

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the ideas of social equality and the struggle against foreign oppression inherent in Islam and Buddhism.

It cannot be denied that in the specific conditions obtaining in the developing countries the proclamation of a drive against religious outlook dooms to failure any political force anxious to gain the confidence of the middle strata, the urban and peasant masses. In countries where almost the whole population consists of believers and where 75 to 90 per cent of it is illiterate, the time is still far from ripe for any atheistic appeal to the masses and such a move only plays into the hands of the enemy camp. The peasants, artisans, urban poor, the working class and civil servants simply will not respond to such appeals. This means that the nationaldemocratic regime, even its Left wing, has no other choice open to it but to use, to a certain extent, the motifs of social equality and opposition to foreign oppression implicit in the religious outlook in the context of its positive social policy so as to gradually bring round the popular masses to an appreciation and later to active involvement in the implementation of its temporal policy and socio-economic programme. It would reflect a highly doctrinaire attitude, a gross departure from the elementary foundations of Marxist dialectics, from the concrete-historical approach, if MarxistsLeninists failed to find a common language with the religiously-inclined leaders of national democracy and with the faithful masses of the working people, instead of joining forces with them despite different approaches to matters of religion. This is indeed precisely what both internal and external forces of reaction would be happiest of all to see.

The CPSU, in its dealings with the Church, found itself up against a specific historical situation. During the Civil War the reactionary clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, which for centuries had been in league with the monarchy, owned vast tracts of land, enjoyed tremendous social, political and economic privileges and possessed a ramified centralised apparatus, took an active part in counter-- revolutionary activities and on frequent occasions even organised plots against socialism, against the dictatorship of the proletariat. The influence of Buddhism and Islam, for example, in political affairs is of a somewhat different nature. Events developed in such a way that these two religions during the

last hundred or hundred and fifty years have been the religions of oppressed peoples in Asia and Africa numbering hundreds of millions, while Christianity was usually the religion of the colonialists. It should also be taken into account that at the present time a far-reaching process of social stratification is at work among the millions of Moslems and Buddhists reflecting the growing urge of the peoples of Asia and Africa to achieve complete national liberation and to enjoy the benefits of social progress.

Religious concepts, particularly in the East, have always shaped the outlook of the peasant masses and at certain tense periods have provided an additional impetus for the struggle against feudalism and foreign oppression in the name of national liberation. It would now be quite wrong to refuse to make use of the traditional beliefs of the working people when substantiating the struggle for liquidating the exploitation of man by man. Of course this requires a progressive interpretation of the basis underlying these traditional beliefs and a consistent and resolute struggle against attempts by reactionaries to exploit religious feeling to promote their own class interests.

There is at the same time no guarantee in certain situations in those countries that have opted for a course of noncapitalist development, that representatives of the church hierarchy will not adopt an out-and-out reactionary stand with regard to social transformations. Initial manifestations of such tactics have already come to the fore in certain instances. The Arab countries and Burma, where Islam and Buddhism respectively are the predominant religions, are already familiar not only with open clashes between revolutionary political regimes and a conservative priesthood, but also with attempts to incite fanatical masses of believers against the national-democratic leadership. In such situations the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the people has adopted all vital measures called for, ranging from propaganda drives to enlighten the deluded masses to coercive measures directed against counter-revolutionaries acting under cover of various fanatical sects or under the influence of reactionary leaders.

It should not however be overlooked that blind obedience to religious leaders and obsolete traditions and fanaticism

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shall start to die out among the Buddhist and Moslem peasantry only when the latter, in the light of their own experience, come to appreciate that pro-landowner, procapitalist and anti-popular activities are encouraged by specific groupings among the clergy. Until the believers amass the necessary experience in their immediate surroundings and have the opportunity to assess the true stand adopted by the clergy in a wide variety of critical situations, it is difficult to imagine that the forces of progress will succeed in gaining anything like a decisive hold over the minds of the masses and extending their influence over the latter. This is why work among the religious masses in the countries of Asia and Africa requires such tact and patience.

A model of the tactful and patient approach has been provided by the CPSU. The Soviet Government did not abolish the Shariat courts immediately after the triumph of the revolution in Central Asia; nor did it do away with the religious schools. Instead it introduced a parallel network of Soviet courts and Soviet schools. It was up to the children's parents and those who sought legal arbitration to decide which schools and courts they should turn to. Meanwhile in European Russia where the proletariat was more developed and the working people's level of political consciousness was considerably higher, the Soviet Government immediately separated church and state and secularised the education system. The Party engaged in wide-scale propaganda to enlighten the population on such matters, waiting patiently for the time when the population's social consciousness and experience of the struggle to establish a new social order would be on a level with the political ideals and objectives of the new state power. Religious views of a certain section of the population which do not possess a fanatical or counter-revolutionary character do not represent an insurmountable obstacle for socialist construction.

These are the internal contradictions inherent in the noncapitalist course of development which set it apart from the immediate implementation of the tasks of socialist revolution. It would be wrong to regard these contradictions as a temporary obstacle on the path of non-capitalist development and to attempt to remove them artificially. They can only be removed in the process of lengthy class struggle,

Quantitative changes will emerge in the course of time within the limits of these contradictions, which can pave the way for a qualitative leap, namely, the transition to the socialist construction of society on the basis of scientific socialism. However once this qualitative leap takes place it will mean that the non-capitalist path of development has already been traversed.

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS

THE UNITED ANTI-IMPERIALIST FRONT OF PROGRESSIVE FORCES IN THE NEWLY INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES

The world revolutionary process is one of the main subjects of theoretical study in the international communist movement. One of its important aspects is the unity of all anti-- imperialist progressive forces in the Third World countries.

The expulsion of colonialists from more than 70 countries does not mean that the goals of national liberation have all been attained. It is vital at the present time to consolidate the victories of the national liberation revolutions and the power of the anti-imperialist forces and shield progressive regimes from imperialist and nee-colonialist encroachment. Objectively the prerequisites for this task exist: progressive social forces in the former colonies, supported as they are by the world revolutionary movement, are endeavouring to utilise the present situation propitious for the consolidation of national independence and the channelling of national liberation revolutions on to the path of social progress.

opment are upsetting the imperialists' neo-colonialist plans. Nevertheless their efforts to impose capitalist development on the young developing countries, in order to preserve their economic power and political influence in these areas and bring these states into the orbit of the world capitalist system show no sign of abating.

The far-sighted imperialist politician Chester Bowles, who has twice been US Ambassador to India and who in the interlude between these two appointments held the post of Assistant Secretary of State, a man with a professional knowledge of Third World problems, cherished a dream of dovetailing US foreign policy interests with social, economic and political revolution in the countries of the Third World. In the past 20-25 years the imperialist countries have gone out of their way to take the national liberation movement under their wing and implant capitalist socio-economic relations in the underdeveloped countries. However while trying to implement these schemes the ideologists and politicians of imperialism have come up against what was for them the usual insurmountable problem. They have not been able to come up with any social doctrine or political trend that holds out any appeal for progressive elements in the Third World, that is sufficiently resolute, original or forward-looking. This ideological and political helplessness is by no means accidental. Imperialism is inseparable from colonialism regardless of the form in which it appears---old, traditional, or new, neo-colonialist.

Nowadays, in order to hold down the former colonies in the world capitalist economy, it is essential not only to take away from the peoples of these countries but also to restore to them part of what is plundered, and no negligible part either. In the past there was no need for this, since the colonies and dependent countries virtually had no alternative other than capitalist development open to them. Now the new, socialist prospect of development has opened up for the Third World and this has served to consolidate the antiimperialist forces in the liberated countries one hundred times over.

Yet the question arises as to how the imperialists are still able after the collapse of the colonial system to pursue their former colonial policy, and at times successfully, albeit in a

The anti-imperialist trend of the national liberation revolution not only remains unchanged but is becoming more marked in view of which the progressive transformations and tendencies which have recently emerged in the countries of the Third World are meeting stubborn resistance on the part of imperialist and internal reaction. The consolidation of progressive, national-democratic regimes and the increase in the number of countries embarking on non-capitalist devel-

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veiled form. The answer to this question is to be found by analysing international economic ties which are shackling the development of the young national states.

The world capitalist economy and the world colonial system took shape at more or less the same time. The emergence of the capitalist mode of production coincided with the formation of the colonial empires. These interrelated processes were completed in the era of industrial capitalism, in particular during its highest, imperialist stage. The final colonial division of the world took place only after the industrial basis of capitalism had been established and the world capitalist economy had taken shape.

By the middle of this century the old colonial empires had collapsed under pressure from the national liberation revolutions but the world capitalist economy continued to exist. This gave the imperialist states the opportunity to adapt their tactics to the new world situation, preserve and even intensify the economic dependence of the former colonies which they now proceeded to mask with highflown statements on the subject of aid to the Third World.

It is important to bear in mind however that neo-colonialist policies imply the preservation of the economic dependence of the newly free countries during the period of the collapse of political forms of colonialism and their struggle to gain economic independence. The very fact that the imperialists are obliged to implement their neo-colonialist plans under cover of aid programmes points to the weakening, rather than the growing power of the imperialists, although it also testifies to their considerable political, economic, military and ideological opportunities for bringing pressure to bear on the Third World.

The struggle against neo-colonialism to achieve real economic liberation from imperialism in present conditions objectively leads to a search for other, anti-capitalist paths of development for the liberated countries. However, work towards this end will only be enduring and irreversible when it stems from the deliberate, fully conscious action of the peoples and their revolutionary vanguard.

At the present time there are already no, or hardly any, mass popular movements that do not possess socialist potential. Such is the nature of our age. It is not accidental that

nearly all the popular revolutions which took place in Asia and Africa after the last war were not only anti-imperialist in character but also revealed certain anti-capitalist features. Historical experience has borne out this essential truth, that attempts to solve basic socio-economic problems in the developing countries by capitalist methods and under the leadership of a national bourgeoisie have proved to be generally untenable. Experience has also shown that in all cases where the working masses in the course of the national liberation revolution have succeeded in setting up a popular or national-democratic regime, the question immediately arose of transition towards development in the direction of socialism.

These processes also served to stress most forcefully the specific role of the state in the underdeveloped countries, the importance and influence of the parties and groups in power and of certain progressive leaders determined to break with the capitalist system. This meant for the most part nationaldemocratic leaders, whose policies constituted a feasible alternative to bourgeois administration. Such leaders came to power as a result of the dissatisfaction of the masses with the fruits of capitalist development and their policies reflected to a certain extent the masses' hopes and aspirations.

By its class nature the political power of national democracy in the Third World countries reflects in the main the interests of the Left-democratic bloc, which incorporates representatives of the peasantry, the petty and sometimes middle bourgeoisie in the towns, the working class and also of the radical intelligentsia and student community. This does not however imply that all these groups are represented in the administrative organs. When it comes to the political groupings possessing real power and administering affairs, rather than just the general political line followed by national democracy, then certain typical features, particularly in the early stages of leadership, should be taken into account. The most salient feature is the relatively homogeneous composition of the leadership, who, as a rule, are all former officers or members of the local intelligentsia. They are bound together by their common social origins, upbringing, outlook and life-experience. They are intimately acquainted with each other after long years of common struggle culmi-

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nating in their joint accession to power, usually resulting from a coup d'etat.

Another characteristic of these groupings is their isolation to a certain extent from the social classes. They are not bound inseparably to any one particular class, nor subordinate to any specific social forces. National-democratic regimes seek support not so much from the political organisation of any specific class but rather from the army and the administrative apparatus. As a rule they constitute military-revolutionary dictatorships out to promote certain interests of a wide bloc of class forces. The emergence of such military dictatorships can be explained by the traditional dismemberment of the peasants and small urban commodity producers and the heterogeneity of the component elements forming the basis of national democracy. In their policies the leaders of these regimes often balance between the various classes, groups and strata and turn to their own ends contradictions existing between them. These features of national democracy are called forth by the insufficiently precise class differentiation in a number of these countries, by the weakness of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the backward nature or total absence of their class organisations.

The relative independence of national-democratic power does not, of course, imply in the slightest that it is not affected by class struggle. The march of events obliges the national democrats to define their policies more clearly. The need to choose between different class approaches to specific political problems is making itself felt more and more. This has led to a considerable step forward in the development of national democracy at the present stage, to the revealing of various political trends within it, to differentiation and inner stratification.

taken with regard to agrarian reform? Which sectors can be relied upon to support consistent implementation of agrarian reform in the interests of the peasantry, and which hold it back and obstruct it? Who will be prepared to promote wide-scale co-operation with the socialist states and who, on the other hand, will press for close ties mainly with the bourgeois West? Who sees consolidation of the state sector as the means to securing independence and progress, and who prefers to promote capitalist enterprise? Who is anxious to spread socialist ideas among the masses and who seeks to foster isolation, nationalism and let religious fanaticism and anti-communism flourish? Stratification is taking place on all these issues in the context of national democracy.

At first glance it may appear unjustified to raise the question of different trends within national democracy. After all from the very outset national democracy was always distinguished by its rejection of the classical bourgeois path of development, the political domination of the landowners, compradores and exploiter capital. Nevertheless this stratification is an undeniable fact and indeed a development to be expected. Intermediate strata (such is the environment of national democracy) are always prone to vacillate between Left and Right, which means that their revolutionary potential is of a limited character.

At the same time it would be wrong to assume that the Right wing of national democracy embodies the interests of social reaction firmly allied with the neo-colonialists and the bourgeois and landowner upper echelons. This would be blatant exaggeration and we would no longer be dealing with national democracy. However, on the other hand, there is good reason to point out that with the given deployment of class forces some sectors of the national democrats through certain of their actions clearly play into the hands of reactionary circles that are well aware of their position in society and the state once they have lost political power and there has been a considerable deterioration of their economic positions. The bourgeoisified pro-Western upper echelons of the intelligentsia, the officialdom, senior officers, clergy and the new military-bureaucratic bourgeoisie constitute the Right wing of national democracy. Reactionary forces, anxious to hold in check the advance of the national liberation revolu-

With the advent to power of national democracy class and political differentiation becomes more clearly marked, since the need arises to take fundamental decisions with relation to the country's development, to formulate and implement a specific political course.

A survey of certain aspects of internal and foreign policy is quite sufficient to bring this out. What stand should be

9---919

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131

than not they prefer to campaign for influence not on the masses but on the leaders, trying in this way to solve urgent socio-economic problems. It is precisely for this reason that Right-wing forces are often able to keep power out of the reach of these Left elements without arousing widespread and determined resistance on the part of the people.

Stratification within national democracy is a perfectly natural stage in the development of the revolutionary movement, in the evolution of the intermediate strata of the societies in question and the political parties representing their interests. This evolution was always determined by the course of the revolutionary process, its objective and subjective conditions.

Thus the practical activity of the national-democratic party aimed at implementing a course of non-capitalist development is frequently accompanied by profound internal contradictions, which in the course of struggle can cause a split in the party. Some national-democratic leaders, under the influence of local traditions and customs, show inclinations to ambition, vanity and careerism. The various approaches adopted by national democrats to the choice of methods and tactics and also to the timing of the implementation of certain transformations are complicated by tribal and religious contradictions, personal rivalry and mutual distrust. These differences are constantly encouraged and promoted by reactionary forces both abroad and on the spot in order to undermine the very foundation of the national-democratic regime. Making capital out of conflicting trends and personal ambitions and playing national-democratic leaders off one against the other, the reactionaries provoke them into taking action against the groups forming a bloc with MarxistLeninist forces, thus undermining the possibility of the regime's democratisation and the further consolidation of its relations with the socialist community. In this situation it is not difficult to imagine the ``cook-house'' in which all manner of anti-communist prejudices are concocted which cause serious harm to the national liberation movement.

It is impossible to understand and appreciate the objective social role of the national democrats and the situation in which they find themselves without defining the present stage of development reached by the Afro-Asian countries, the

tion and reverse it, resort to all manner of manoeuvres so as to secure what is for them an acceptable relationship with the government in power, to be on a close footing with it and encourage the national democrats to pursue an anti-- communist, anti-Soviet line.

There is also another side to the situation. In so far as the Right section of national democracy obstructs consistent implementation of social changes and tries to hold back the country's revolutionary advance, putting forward blatantly nationalistic goals as opposed to social progress, replacing socialist ideals by calls for economic progress at any price, it objectively paves the way to rapprochement with the forces of reaction. Stagnation is alien to revolution: marking time always means regression. As the anti-capitalist revolutionary spirit of the new regime becomes more and more diluted, and in place of the democratic policies characteristic of the period of initial radical transformations, bureaucratic methods become more and more firmly entrenched, the reactionaries striving for power have less and less cause for voicing their discontent. Compromise becomes possible between them and the Right-wing national democrats.

The Right-wing group of national democracy does not promote the consolidation of non-capitalist trends but on the contrary undermines their very manifestation, fanning at times bellicose nationalism and religious fanaticism. It opposes joint action with Communists and rejects the establishment of a national-democratic front uniting all progressive forces against which it often pursues a policy of repression.

Another section of national democracy, which is consistently anti-imperialist and reflects the interests of the masses, comes out in favour of socialist orientation, seeing it as the only perspective for the country, and is ready to form an alliance with the Communists, thus providing the latter with an opportunity to take an active part in the united front of progressive forces.

Left circles in national democracy oppose the Right-wing detachments. However even they frequently underestimate the significance of political action of the working masses, their active participation in the elaboration and adoption of important state decisions. Left national democrats as a rule rally behind leaders and statesmen of their country: more often

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position and significance of the various class forces and the correlation between bourgeois and proletarian elements.

Not one of the Afro-Asian countries, unlike Latin America, has reached the stage where the working class has become the central, leading force of the revolutionary movement. In so far as capitalism as a system of social production relations does not yet hold sway in Africa and the majority of the Asian countries, the question arises as to which social force is capable of giving voice to the true interests of the vast majority of the working people. At the present stage this force is the bloc of revolutionary-democratic classes and strata---the working class, the peasantry, the radical intelligentsia and the petty bourgeoisie in the towns.

Yet, in the course of capitalist development in some of these countries and non-capitalist development in others, a social transformation of the predominantly pre-capitalist social relations is taking place, resulting in an enhanced role of the working class. In the course of the last twenty years its numerical strength^ organisation and political awareness have made considerable strides. Its influence on the development of social relations has also increased. Yet despite these developments the working class has not yet taken definitive shape. Until this happens progress in the direction of socialism will demand, and indeed now does demand, a national-revolutionary, Left-democratic bloc as the leading force of the revolutionary process.

In the light of the above it is clear that the guiding principle for Communist Parties or Marxist-Leninist groupings in the Afro-Asian countries will be the formation of alliances uniting all forces capable of upholding national independence, democracy and social progress in the struggle against imperialism and the forces of reaction. This applies even to those countries where a capitalist system is already firmly established, where the working class has already taken up its position as the leading force in the revolutionary movement, the role for which it is historically predetermined. Lenin in his day pointed out that ". . .the proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side".* What, however, when it comes to those

states in which capitalism has not yet asserted itself and the proletariat has not yet become the leading motive force? In such conditions an alliance of all national anti-imperialist forces---from the working class to the middle bourgeoisie included---becomes an objective necessity.

From this it follows that the anti-imperialist front should include all national-democratic elements, regardless of the stratification taking place within their ranks, and the antiimperialist forces outside the national democracy. However it goes without saying that the character of this front, its potential in the anti-imperialist struggle and its ability to promote progress in the direction of socialism depend upon the alignment of forces within it, and upon who calls the tune in national-democratic circles, upon the extent of the influence which consistently democratic, Left and socialist organisations and groupings can exert on the political course. It is precisely in this context that the stratification at work within national democracy is an all-important factor.

The historic mission of national democracy is to create, together with all progressive forces, the prerequisites for the subsequent transition to the construction of a society based on principles of social progress. It is obvious that the more thorough the assimilation of the historical experience of scientific socialism and the closer the co-operation and ties with Marxist-Leninist parties the easier this goal will be to attain.

The selfless struggle against imperialism and colonialism in the name of national independence which the Communists of the Third World have been waging has provided ample demonstration of their patriotism and their loyal devotion to the cause of national liberation and social progress. Side by side with other patriots the Communists, when necessary, have taken up arms to fight for the overthrow of colonial, feudal and monarchist regimes, they have been subjected to the most cruel repression and made tremendous sacrifices. Both before and after the securing of national independence Communist Parties have gone out of their way to co-operate actively with all national-patriotic forces. They make a major contribution to the struggle against neo-colonialism

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 265.

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and the domination of foreign monopoly capital, for the consolidation of national sovereignty and the democratisation of social life in the developing countries. In certain countries of Asia and the Arab East Communists hold posts in progressive coalition governments which are based on a bloc of anti-imperialist parties.

Marxists-Leninists are in the same camp as the revolutionary democrats. Their co-operation is of vital importance, in so far as the Communists possess considerable theoretical and practical experience and are well equipped not only to spread the ideas of scientific socialism among the masses, but also to implement in practice anti-capitalist transformations.

However, in some countries of Asia and Africa attempts to achieve unity between Communists and national democrats have so far not produced the desired results for a number of reasons. This points to a lack of the necessary mutual understanding and a temporary failure to exploit situations propitious for the formation of a firm united front.

The danger lies in the fact that some representatives of the progressive forces have not appreciated the temporary and transient character of the contradictions that have arisen, have not grasped the objective need for rapidly surmounting misunderstandings and differences. On the contrary, sometimes we find instances of attempts to inflate these differences, making of them a regular system of insurmountable and essentially hostile relations, which inevitably gives rise to splits and to antagonism. Some leaders in the newly independent countries, still clinging to long since outlived sectarian misconceptions, stress the impossibility of joint action involving Communists and national democrats, the latter allegedly representing only the anti-communist wing of the petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, some of the national democrats occasionally adopt an openly anti-communist stand, giving voice to their distrust of consistently democratic forces.

Within the orbit of the national liberation movement anticommunism is exploited by the imperialists in order to split the ranks of the patriots and thus impede the further development of national liberation revolutions, emasculating their anti-capitalist significance. One of the main aims behind anticommunism is to cut the national liberation movement off from other revolutionary forces in the modern world, in

particular from the socialist countries and the international working-class and communist movement.

The anti-communism that is cultivated in a number of Third World countries possesses certain specific features stemming from the class structure of society, the social composition of the administration and local traditions. Anticommunism is propagated in certain developing countries not only by the Western-oriented big bourgeoisie and feudal landowners, who find themselves ousted to a large extent from the economic and political spheres, yet have retained some of their influence over their country's ideology and mass media. A rich breeding-ground for anti-communist germs is also provided by the large and motley class of the petty bourgeoisie. As a result of its dual nature its representatives are by no means unanimous or consistent in their attitude to scientific socialism. The most progressive among them campaign for unity of the democratic, anti-imperialist forces and strive to glean their support from the working people, to grasp and adopt the ideas of scientific socialism. However for one reason or another a tendency for development in the opposite direction is also to be observed. Certain strata of the petty bourgeoisie are particularly receptive to Western propaganda directed against socialism and even attempt to blame socialism for the difficulties which their country may happen to be experiencing. Meanwhile anti-communist propaganda from the West using fairly subtle methods encourages precisely such anti-communist delusions.

Events of recent years have shown that those groupings and leaders in the Afro-Asian countries who have let themselves be carried away by anti-communism are merely isolating themselves from the masses. Finding themselves unable in this situation to solve any problems of national importance these groupings lose the support of the masses, their position within the political set-up is being weakened and in the final analysis they run the risk of disappearing from the political scene altogether.

Whether leaders in Third World countries like it or not, by basing their policies on anti-communism they inevitably become involved in co-operating with neo-colonialist forces. This co-operation leads to a loss of national prestige and often to irreparable economic loss. Even large Afro-Asian

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countries with rich natural resources and populations running into many millions find themselves frequently unable to avoid this situation.

Once anti-communism comes to the forefront, this, as a rule, is a sure sign that the national-democratic movement is veering to the Right. The logical outcome of anti-communist sentiments is a degeneration of former progressive economic and social policy and a transition on the part of leading groups to traditional bellicose bourgeois nationalism which will lead their country into the clutches of the neo-- colonialists. Initial anti-communist trends and measures usually testify to the fact that within the ruling national-democratic, party Right-wing reactionary elements are trying to take the upper hand. All talk of loyalty to socialist ideals and refusal to compromise with the reactionaries and imperialists cease to mean anything the moment repressive measures are taken against the true supporters of scientific socialism, against consistent opponents of imperialism, and pro-Western elements come to dominate decision-making with regard to domestic policy.

There is hardly any need to stress how all manifestations of anti-communism in the Third World play straight into the hands of the imperialists who never let slip a single opportunity to cast doubt upon the radical changes, that have been introduced in many newly independent countries, and to reverse their development. By paying tribute to anti-- communism, certain representatives of national democracy discredit their own socialist declarations. Their own actions serve to demonstrate that stratification is proceeding increasingly rapidly within the national-democratic movement and that its attitude to the socialist perspective is far from unified.

In connection with the emergence of varying trends within the national-democratic camp the question of the correlation between revolutionary and national democracy assumes particular interest. The concept "revolutionary democracy" is open to a wide variety of interpretations and is used in relation to all who advocate revolutionary policies, i.e., radicalism, and democratic policies, who uphold the interests of the majority as opposed to the minority. Given this definition the class range of "revolutionary democracy" is very wide, gince; it embraces both those sections of the bourgeoisie

who favour national revolution and the proletariat. This means that the designation of any political trend as revolutionary-democratic without a qualifying class delineation is insufficient to pinpoint its actual social essence. Experience has shown that the mounting tide of revolution usually serves to narrow down the range of classes capable of revolutionary and consistently democratic activity. Bourgeois revolutionary democracy of the classic variety can now safely be called a thing of the past. The revolutionarydemocratic potential of the bourgeoisie was exhausted in a number of countries after bourgeois revolutions had been accomplished. After that only isolated manifestations of this revolutionary democracy are possible, and only in connection with specific questions. Yet it should be noted that in the light of their anti-imperialist character the bourgeois-- democratic revolutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America differ substantially from the classical revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America. In many of these countries the class range of revolutionary democracy still remains fairly wide as a result of the incomplete nature of the general-democratic transformations.

Yet there also exists another, narrower definition of revolutionary democracy as a trend which directly precedes Marxism, prepares the ground for it, a trend which is the most revolutionary in conditions where the vital prerequisites for the broad implementation of scientific socialism have not yet taken shape. The transition of the more progressive sector of radical-democratic parties to the stand of the proletariat and scientific socialism is not merely desirable but theoretically and practically plausible. History has shown on a number of occasions that this evolution on the part of revolutionary democrats is possible.

The understanding of revolutionary democracy in its wider sense is evidently more applicable to national democracy as a whole. As for revolutionary democracy as a precursor of Marxism the term can naturally only be used in relation to those progressive strata within the national democracy which are moving nearer and nearer to scientific socialism. Any contrasting of national democracy and Marxism-Leninism, attempts to obstruct its dissemination and

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substitute it with any bourgeois ideas are incompatible with genuine revolutionary democratism. Moreover, in an age when progress towards socialism has become a universal process it is impossible to be a revolutionary and democrat and uphold the interests of the majority while opposing Communists. This would involve exposing to attack not only the adherents of scientific socialism but the forces of revolution and democracy in general.

A firm alliance of the progressive forces, which is one of the vital conditions for the success of the anti-imperialist movement and non-capitalist development, requires compliance with a number of joint demands on the part of both the national democrats and the Marxists-Leninists, a common striving for co-operation and willingness to make concessions and settle differences satisfactorily. One of the main cores of contention that in the past and also, on occasions, at the present time come between Communist Parties and national-democratic forces in the Third World is the question of leadership. In this connection much tact, subtle pliability and mutual understanding is required; sectarianism which usually finds expression in a priori demands for the recognition of this or that party's leading role making no allowances for the actual concrete situation is out of the question. Communists have stated on frequent occasions that recognition of the leading role of Marxist parties by revolutionary democrats is by no means a prior condition for a firm alliance and co-operation between them. In both word and deed Communists have time and again made clear their desire to cleanse their relations with the national revolutionaries of all past extraneous differences, to forge closer co-operation and concentrate their efforts in the joint struggle against imperialism and reaction, in order to embark on a path of non-capitalist development and make possible fruitful and constructive co-operation.

A split, particularly if it is accompanied by persecution of progressive elements and repression of Communists, does tremendous harm to the common cause and can lead to the people's defeat in its struggle to build up a just social order. In this context the warning contained in the final document issued by the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties is most relevant: "A hostile attitude to

communism, and persecution of Communists harm the struggle for national and social emancipation.""' As pointed out later in the document the interests of the national liberation movement and social progress in the countries newly liberated from colonialism call for "close co-operation between the Communist and Workers' Parties and other patriotic and progressive forces".*''*

We are quite justified to ask why in the relations between the Arab countries, even those with more or less socially and politically homogeneous progressive regimes, it has long proved impossible to attain united action of optimal effectiveness that is so vital in view of the present international situation, particularly in view of the struggle against Israeli aggression and against imperialism and reaction.

It would appear that the main reason for this state of affairs is that within each individual Arab country antiimperialist, progressive and democratic forces were divided, artificially opposed to one another, even fighting one another. In many Arab countries this situation still obtains and at the present time there is strife rampant within the anti-- imperialist, progressive camp.

More likely than not firm unity of the anti-imperialist, national-democratic, progressive forces within the Arab world as a whole is only possible given cohesive unity of these forces within each individual country. Appeals for unity in the struggle against imperialism are important and most necessary but when this unity has not been attained in the political life of the individual Arab countries, such appeals often have a more or less abstract ring to them and resemble castles in the air when expressed in relation to the Arab world as a whole.

1. The history of the Arab countries, particularly during their actual struggle for national liberation and independence, provides numerous examples of close unity and solidarity of the masses.

* International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, Moscow 1969, p. 29. ** Ibid.

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Yet during the last 10-15 years of the national liberation movement in such Arab countries, as for example Iraq or Syria, parties of a similar national-democratic trend with similar class roots and attitudes to questions of basic policy have frequently been working against each other. Differences of secondary significance were artificially blown up and subjective contradictions impeding the achievement of political consolidation on a broad anti-imperialist and social basis were given undue prominence. In other words, such contradictions became the stumbling block on the path to the creation of a united anti-imperialist front of all democratic and progressive forces. Differences of a serious nature and sometimes bitter in-fighting among the progressive forces have been the order of the day at certain stages of the history of the national liberation movement in a number of countries in the Arab world.

The assumption of power by one progressive nationaldemocratic party was usually accompanied by its endeavour to exclude other progressive parties and organisations from the country's social and political affairs and secure for itself an unassailable monopoly. This party or its most powerful faction heading the regime would devote considerable effort to undermining other organisations of a progressive character that would be viewed as its rivals, although they were laying no claim to power but merely anxious to serve the people honestly together with other detachments of the gntiimperialist forces, and to co-operate with the ruling party. Such conditions in the political development of these countries naturally did not bring the fulfilment of the masses' hopes and dreams any nearer, but on the contrary obstructed their involvement in active social and political affairs and the implementation of constructive state policies. In the final analysis political struggle was reflected in ever more acute contradictions within the ruling party, in the restrictions imposed upon the activities of other national-democratic and progressive parties, or even their banning, and in the persecution of the adherents of scientific socialism. All this gave rise to a situation in which potentially anti-imperialist regimes were hanging in mid-air, so to speak, being without the vital firm social support they required and thus obliged to rely in the main on the army which still contained a good

number of Right-wing opposition and openly reactionary elements eager to reverse the course of their country's development.

In recent years a noticeable step forward has been made in the relations of the progressive parties and organisations, including the Marxist parties, in some of the Arab countries, in particular Syria, Iraq and the People's DemocraticRepublic of Yemen, i

The dialogue between anti-imperialist, progressive forces in these countries aimed at bringing about their close cooperation has been going on for several years. The effectiveness of co-operation between national-democratic and Marxist forces and their joint support for the people's interests shows a marked improvement when this dialogue assumes definite political and organisational shape in the form of a united national front of progressive forces. In a number of countries in the Arab East the complicated process of the formation of such coalitions is now under way.

2. An important event of the socio-political life in the Arab East was the formation of the Progressive National Front in Syria. It incorporates several progressive parties and organisations including the Syrian Communist Party. 1'his step gave organisational form to political co-operation between the progressive and patriotic forces of this country. The forces of reaction in Syria and their henchmen within the national liberation movement had always gone out of their way to oppose such co-operation. Now that the formation of the PNF is a fait accompli reactionary elements are attempting to belittle the importance of this alliance and its role in the political life of Syria.

The PNF Charter announces a political course aimed at the socialist reorganisation of society by means of more intensive implementation of the socio-economic transformations that are being introduced under the supervision of Syria's Arab Socialist Renaissance (Baath) Party, and by furthering the development of the national economy by consolidating the leading role of the state sector, promoting the democratisation of the state-political structure, enhancing the role of public organisations and introducing public control over the activities of executive bodies. The mobilisation of material and manpower resources in Syria and the other Arab countries

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to work towards the liberation of the territories occupied by Israel in June 1967 is put forward by the PNF as one of its top-priority tasks. The Charter underlines the PNF's endeavour to promote all-round inter-state co-operation with all progressive Arab regimes in order to set up a united Arab anti-imperialist front.

Syria's PNF regards the anti-imperialist struggle of the Arabs as a component of the world's national liberation movement. In the Charter special emphasis is laid on the fact that "the friendly socialist countries headed by the Soviet Union constitute the main international source of support for a just solution of our problems". The PNF parties and organisations greatly value the political, economic and military assistance afforded the Arab peoples by the socialist states and declare their resolve to consolidate still more the ties of friendship and co-operation with the countries of the socialist community in the interests of the ultimate victory of national liberation and socialism.

A number of propositions contained in the Charter and the Statutes of Syria's PNF testify to the fact that some members of the Front, in particular the Communist Party, have made certain concessions to the ruling Baath Party, moves which reflect a correct understanding of the real situation within the country. In the Charter and the Statutes recognition is accorded the leading role of the Baath Party in both state and society. The ruling party is acknowledged as the leading force within the PNF. It has been accorded the majority of seats in its governing bodies and the post of Front President is set aside for the General Secretary of the ASRP. All this gives the ruling party the chance to exert decisive influence over the Front's practical activity.

The setting up of the PNF was an important and indisputably positive step towards the strengthening of national unity and consolidation of all patriotic forces and democratisation of Syria's social and political life. It opened up new opportunities for joint activity between the Baathists and Left political parties and organisations thus virtually meaning recognition for the latter. Representatives of the parties and organisations included in the PNF were admitted to the government and participate in the work of the People's Council (parliament) and local administrative bodies.

Rallying of broad sections of the people, as represented by their political parties, on the platform of consistent struggle against imperialism and reaction and for social progress and co-operation between all detachments of progressive forces within the framework of a united national front: such is the essential implication of this new development which ushered in the latest stage in the advance of the Syrian national liberation movement.

3. Socio-political developments are taking a similar course in another Arab country, namely, Iraq. This can be seen quite clearly in the Charter of National Action published at the end of 1971 by Iraq's ruling party---the Arab Socialist Renaissance (Baath) Party. This document which has on the whole been approved by all anti-imperialist forces contains an appeal for cohesion of all progressive and patriotic organisations in Iraq within the framework of a national-- democratic front.

The Charter, which defines the main national tasks as the struggle against imperialism, Israeli aggression and local reaction, and the consolidation of the country's political and economic independence, makes provision for intensified socio-economic transformations, underlines the inacceptability of the capitalist path of development for Iraq and calls for the creation of the preconditions required for the construction of a new, socialist society. The urgent need for a peaceful settlement of the Kurdish problem through a complete implementation of the March 1970 agreement is acknowledged. A prominent place in the document is accorded the propositions regarding the need to promote friendship and co-operation between the Republic of Iraq and the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, to further the unity of all progressive, patriotic forces of the Arab world in the struggle against imperialist and Israeli aggression and for the liberation of the occupied Arab territories.

It will only be possible to implement the progressive programme outlined in the Charter of National Action if it is supported by all progressive, anti-imperialist forces in Iraq and if they actively participate in its implementation. This is why consistent practical introduction of the measures envisaged would create a solid basis for the co-operation and unity of these forces within the framework of a national-

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democratic front. The government includes representatives of the Iraqi Communist Party.

The ruling National Front in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen which virtually constitutes a nationaldemocratic party confirmed its intention at its congress held in March 1972 to follow a course of non-capitalist development, of unity with the progressive Arab countries and of alliance with the socialist world, drawing attention to the need for closer links between the anti-- imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-capitalist forces within the country. The National Front also called for the creation of a vanguard party to provide its ideological and organisational nucleus.

These examples demonstrate how a number of Arab countries that have embarked on the path of social progress are clearly endeavouring to achieve a rapprochement between the national democrats, Marxists-Leninists and other progressives, taking into account the specific requirements of each, and promote their co-operation within the framework of national anti-imperialist fronts and coalitions.

The above-mentioned documents put out by the Iraqi and Syrian Baath parties make quite clear the positive change in their stand, their recognition of the importance of the unity of all progressive parties of their respective countries for the common struggle to build a new society. Although both these ruling parties, whose past evolution is well known to the international working-class and communist movement, retain for themselves the right to a leading position and control over the activities of all organisations within the united progressive front, these documents do not reflect a hostile attitude to scientific socialism or to the international workingclass and communist movement. There is reason to believe that all the positive elements contained in these policy documents were not prompted by tactical considerations but reflect a logical stage in the development of the national liberation movement, in the evolution of the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties themselves. Practice is the test of any programme. The implementation of the policies outlined in these documents will be welcomed by all who support the Arab peoples in their struggle for national and social liberation.

4. The objective historical necessity for the formation of a broad front of progressive forces of not merely an anti-- imperialist, anti-colonialist character but also of a social, class character, stems first and foremost from the recognition of the fact that no single class force or single political party in any of the newly independent countries that are entering the stage of national-democratic revolution is in a position on its own, even with the firm support of the army and the government machine, to accomplish the tasks which such a revolution places before it.

The ruling circles of national democracy as a rule come to power as a result of military coups. In order to implement the constructive programmes of progressive reform which they themselves have announced they are obliged to extend their social basis, to turn the military-political dictatorship of the army which had executed the coup into a national-democratic dictatorship of the popular masses, without whom the construction of a new state and new society is impossible. The solution of fundamental problems connected with the reconstruction of the country inevitably demands the active committed participation of the broad masses of the working people, who are vitally interested in the successful outcome of the revolution.

The national-democratic character of the new regimes after the setting up of a front of progressive forces does not change in principle. They remain blocs of social forces opposing imperialism and standing for social progress. However the setting up of such a front enables the new regime to consolidate its position and win a wider social basis, including the working class, the peasantry, the working intelligentsia, the petty bourgeoisie, and in some cases even,the middle bourgeoisie, when the latter does not come out against revolutionary transformations connected with property relations (in agriculture, industry and other spheres), or against the government's domestic and foreign policy. This extension of the regime's social support facilitates positive changes in the nature of the activities and organisational forms of the executive organs, their democratisation and also that of the army, police, people's militia and security organs.

In addition the consolidation and broadening of the national-democratic regime's social basis as a result of the for-

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tives, campaign for the creation of a united front without the participation of the Communists, or, given their participation in such coalitions, insist that Communist and other Left parties should be disbanded. The aim behind these schemes and manoeuvres is obvious: to disrupt the natural unity of all forces in favour of non-capitalist development and thus seriously prejudice the vital interests of the peoples who have chosen precisely this path of development.

The need for a firm, united front of all progressive forces of the national-democratic revolution and non-capitalist orientation is now recognised in the majority of countries that have embarked on the path of social progress. A considerable number of the leaders of the Left wing within the national liberation movement admit that all citizens, political parties and organisations opposed to imperialism and in favour of socialist construction, regardless of their convictions, nationality, religious affiliation or philosophical outlook can find a broad common basis for joint action in the interests of socio-economic progress and the consolidation of their countries' independence. During the last ten to twelve years the idea of this unity has come to be accepted and supported by ever wider sections of the popular masses involved in the national liberation movement. Everywhere there is a shift to the Left to be observed, more and more voices opposing capitalism are to be heard and the national liberation movement has entered a new socio-economic stage of more farreaching implications.

This growing appreciation of the need to set up a progressive front finds expression above all in the acknowledgement of the fact that in present conditions no single class or political party is able on its own, with no more than the support of the military, to accomplish the tasks that national revolution renders imperative. The solution of fundamental questions raised by the need to reconstruct the country demands the participation of the masses in the anti-- imperialist and social struggle, and first and foremost that of the working class.

What exactly does the- front of progressive forces represent? Some of the leaders of the political parties and organi-

mation of a united front of progressive parties and organisations make possible more effective and more resolute leadership of the working people's struggle against the capitalists and landowners, against exploiters at home and from abroad. For the Arab countries which have embarked on a path of social progress this is an extremely important factor: in these countries internal forces of reaction, making capital out of the difficulties which made themselves felt after the defeat of June 1967, are going out of their way, at times not without success, to hold up and bring to a standstill the socioeconomic transformations and to regain their former positions in order finally to force their country to abandon its new course of progressive social advance and follow Western capitalist patterns once more. This aim is also behind their efforts to sow distrust of the Soviet Union in the international arena and to set patriotic circles against it.

A united front of progressive forces that ensures the national-democratic regime wider support is capable not only of resisting the onslaught of both internal and external reactionary forces, but also of ensuring their crushing defeat. This step would bring them much nearer their ultimate goal ---namely, the removal of imperialist influence and that of reaction in the country's domestic and foreign affairs, the active implementation of socio-economic and political changes in the interests of the masses---and it is with this end in view that progressive parties and organisations join in a voluntary union, though their outlooks and ideologies have certain, sometimes essential differences, while retaining their organisational and political independence.

A pledge of the success of the progressive front is mutual trust, genuine co-operation and militant unity of all members, particularly the ruling national democrats, who constitute its nucleus, and the Communists, who are being drawn into active joint work of implementing the progressive programme of fundamental social transformation advanced by the ruling party.

It is no coincidence that enemies of the national-democratic regimes both at home and from without go out of their way to fan all manner of conflicts between the participants of these progressive coalitions. This explains why the enemies of social progress, while carefully masking their real objec-

10*

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sations joining this front consider that it is merely the outward manifestation of the temporary co-ordination of the efforts of all those capable of taking up the struggle against imperialism and internal reaction. Others contend that it is necessary for all organisations and parties apart from the ruling party, which already enjoys monopoly of power. Voices are also to be heard maintaining that the formation of a front of the progressive forces is expedient but only as a means of creating more room to manoeuvre for the ruling party, in view of the fact that within the front the ruling party is able to balance between the forces it incorporates in order to make capital out of the contradictions between them in the interests of its own political struggle. Finally, there are those who, while admitting the undeniable need for the creation of such a united front of progressive forces and its usefulness, hold that steps should be taken to restrict their political activity among the masses or even ban the activity of the non-ruling parties altogether.

There is no need to state that all these and similar points of view virtually deny the possibility of creating a united progressive front as a militant alliance capable of providing the broadest possible social foundation for the national-democratic regime in its struggle against imperialism and the forces of internal reaction. The atmosphere in a genuinely united front should be one of complete trust, sincere co-operation and militant unity of all progressive forces of the revolution and particularly that of its nucleus---the ruling national democrats, and the Communists actively cooperating with them. The national front is a voluntary coalition of parties and organisations that retain their organisational and political independence and ideological adherence to their chosen world outlook while deliberately and sincerely working together in order through their joint efforts to ensure the success of the national-democratic revolution and implement its anti-imperialist and social programme under the leadership of the ruling party. The united national front of the progressive forces is not an organisation opposed to the government but, on the contrary, its main source of support. It is based on an alliance of the working class, peasantry, working intelligentsia, the petty bourgeoisie---and in some cases the middle bourgeoisie as well, when the latter

does not oppose the fundamental progressive social transformations.

The creation of a national front of the progressive forces is not aimed at the setting up of a single party out of ideologically disparate parties and organisations. Nevertheless, far from excluding, it presupposes patient painstaking effort directed towards the gradual drawing together of parties in the course of the mobilisation of the masses for the struggle against all pro-imperialist and reactionary forces in order to carry out the most vital social, economic and foreign policy tasks. The purpose of the national front is to promote democratisation and involve all those capable of participation in the construction of a new society in that work, namely, all politically aware and progressive-minded citizens. The implementation of the tasks laid down in the officially announced programme documents of the national-democratic parties and socialist unions of certain liberated countries, aimed at the complete transformation of the social order by liquidating exploitation of man by man, clearly necessitates not only the participation of the broad masses themselves in this work but also their appreciation of the need for and the development of the struggle against imperialism, reaction, ignorance, socio-economic and cultural, backwardness. From this point of view the creation of a united and broad socio-political coalition of progressive forces in which each party, while retaining its ideological, political and organisational independence, takes up its own appropriate position in the ranks of the champions of a new society, is a demand of the times.

The ruling party, while actively participating in the progressive coalition with other friendly organisations, retains its prerogative of state power. In those countries where there are several progressive parties the ruling party naturally cannot impose its own ideology on them and demand their disbandment or their rapid merging with its own organisations. Such demands would be unjustified, incorrect and hasty. They would without doubt exclude the possibility of the normal functioning of the united front of the progressive forces. Precisely such conflict between the ruling party and its allies is what the internal and external enemies of the national-democratic parties are striving to bring about.

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Experience of recent years clearly warns the progressive forces in the Third World of the danger of a split in the united front, of the possible rejection of joint action against common enemies, the advancement of inacceptable demands to other members of the common alliance, discrimination against coalition partners and the exaggeration of the role of this or that particular party.

The common struggle of the national democrats and the Communists to achieve socialist goals, together to surmount the formidable difficulties and problems on the path to construction of a new society and honestly serve the people will undoubtedly do a great deal to facilitate the further ideological drawing together of the various progressive parties on a basis of scientific socialism. When considerable experience in the practical implementation of socialist programmes will have been gleaned in the course of the anti-imperialist struggle and vestiges of the past will have been done away with, then mutual trust will come into its own and, given increased cohesion and fraternal co-operation between the national democrats and the Communists, negotiation for voluntary organisational rapprochement can begin with due acknowledgement of the complexity of the problem. Objectively the path to this goal is already open.

LENIN, SOVIET EXPERIENCE AND THE NEWLY INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES

Leninism is the heritage of all true champions of democracy, social progress and national independence. It is to Leninism that all those who aspire honestly to serve the cause of progress, their people and toiling mankind, undoubtedly turn. Leninism represents a supreme treasure-house of ideological and practical experience, possessing outstanding significance for every genuinely progressive democratic movement of the modern world. At the present time there is not a single political party, school or ideological system which could stand comparison with the Soviet people and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as regards the wealth of revolutionary experience, experience that has been amassed under the banner of Marxism-Leninism in the course of the heroic struggle and intensive work over more than half a century.

A number of circumstances possessed of fundamental importance make Lenin's teaching and Soviet experience particularly relevant and close to the champions of national liberation and independent progressive development in the countries of Asia and Africa.

In his works Lenin devoted particular attention to the international significance and interaction of all component parts of the revolutionary movement. Lenin put forward an extremely bold idea, permeated by the dialectics of the class and national liberation struggle, namely, the idea of a single world revolutionary process directed first and foremost against imperialism, but in the final analysis aimed against

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capitalism as a social formation. All complex and at times even contradictory components of this process---general-- democratic, national liberation and social---are closely linked with each other and serve to support each other. In his Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East, Lenin pointed out: ".. .the socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie---no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-- oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism."*

Lenin did not see the national liberation movement as something isolated; he saw it as part of the socialist revolution and considered that only socialist revolution would be able in the long run to put an end to imperialism as a world system. Lenin's internationalism knows no bounds; it is so striking and so concrete that it puts paid once and for all to the concept of socialist revolution as no more than a struggle "of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie". According to Lenin, socialist revolution involved a struggle of all oppressed by imperialism, "of all dependent countries, against international imperialism". This broad, one might say, universal concept of world socialist revolution was utterly original. Before Lenin no one had approached the problem from this angle, no one before him had elaborated the principles and tactics of the interaction of the international struggle of the proletariat with the struggle of the oppressed countries and peoples.

In a far-sighted analysis Lenin drew attention to the highly revolutionising impact of the socialist changes implemented in Europe on the course of the national liberation movement. In his work "A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism" (1916) he wrote that the liberation of the colonies was "realisable in conjunction with a socialist revolution in Europe".""* In 1920 in his report to the Second Comintern Congress he put forward the idea that it was necessary to defend the interests of national liberation movements for the triumphant socialist revolution.

He said: "We in Russia are often obliged to compromise, to bide our time, since we are weaker than the international imperialists, yet we know that we are defending the interests of this mass of a thousand and a quarter million people" (of colonial and dependent countries.---Auth.).*

Lenin's tenet regarding the need to defend the interests of the peoples oppressed by the imperialists and dependent on the latter has always been and indeed will continue to be the guiding principle of Soviet foreign policy. The economic, political and military might of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries and their enhanced authority in the international arena restrain neo-colonialist expansion, protect the young countries of the East from imperialist encroachments. In those conditions where such encroachments develop into undeniable intervention, into aggressive, local, anti-popular wars of long duration the imperialists are not in a position to achieve military victory over the newly liberated and struggling peoples supported by the Soviet Union, by the socialist community. The example of Vietnam is selfexplanatory.

At the same time Lenin also considered that the rapprochement between European socialism and the national liberation movement, the merging of their interests in the common struggle against world imperialism also consolidated the standing of socialism: "We shall exert every effort to foster association and merger with the Mongolians, Persians, Indians, Egyptians. We believe it is our duty and in our interest to do this, for otherwise socialism in Europe will not be secure. We shall endeavour to render these nations, more backward and oppressed than we are, 'disinterested cultural assistance', to borrow the happy expression of the Polish Social-Democrats. In other words, we will help them pass to the use of machinery, to the lightening of labour, to democracy, to socialism."** The point at issue is therefore the coincidence of the "fundamental interests of all peoples suffering from the yoke of imperialism".*** But this objective coincidence of interests does not at all eliminate the need to

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 159. ** Ibid., Vol. 23, p. 66.

* Ibid., Vol. 31, p. 233. ** Ibid., Vol. 23, p. 67. *** Ibid, Vol. 31, p. 491.

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undertake deliberate efforts in order to reach mutual understanding and fruitful co-operation. "Complete victory over capitalism cannot be won unless the proletariat and, following it, the mass of working people in all countries and nations throughout the world voluntarily strive for alliance and unity."* Up to the present day these words of Lenin's ring like an appeal to all progressive, anti-imperialist forces to work towards unity and solidarity.

In those far-off days the leaders of European SocialDemocracy rejected any kind of equal rights for the colonial peoples and approached them with the offensive condescension of latter-day chauvinists that had betrayed the principles of proletarian internationalism and were driving the backward colonial peoples into the clutches of the capitalists. Lenin, anticipating the future triumph of socialism in Russia, in Europe, was concerned above all with bringing closer together the politically conscious European proletarian and the colonial slave, to ensure their merging together so as to consolidate "socialism in Europe" on a firm basis: this consolidation would then in its turn help the colonial slaves to throw off the yoke of imperialism and make the transition "to democracy, to socialism". The interaction of these two basic currents within the world revolutionary movement comes to the fore particularly clearly in this context. Lenin's interpretation of the unity of the main revolutionary forces was free of the slightest shade of condescension or arrogance; it reflected pure, unsullied proletarian internationalism that found expression in a drawing together and merging of the anti-imperialist forces and the duty of the advanced to help the backward and the coincidence of the "fundamental interests" of all peoples.

Leninism is in accord with the national liberation movement in its faith in the revolutionary and creative potential of mass movements, in their capacity, given the support of the triumphant socialist revolution, not only to put an end to the domination of imperialism but also to take concrete steps along the path to socialism. Leninism---as is fully appreciated in the Third World---is distinguished by its remarkable sensitivity to all new opportunities for social progress, to the

specific nature of the historic course of development and national traditions obtaining in the former colonies and hence astute awareness of new methods and ways of solving the common task ahead, namely, the transition to socialism.

In connection with his immortal theory of socialist revolution, the ways and forms of the transition from capitalism to socialism for the whole of mankind, Lenin also elaborated a special concept substantiating the tangible opportunities for non-capitalist development, available to those peoples that were liberating themselves from imperialist domination, opportunities which open up new paths to socialism for those countries which are economically underdeveloped. The essential aspect of this concept is the attainment of socialism, not via capitalism, as in Europe and America, but by-passing it completely or at least drastically curtailing its developed phases---industrial and monopoly capitalism. This concept envisages an interruption of capitalist development at the stage of primary accumulation of capital, co-operation and manufactories, the embryonic stage of industrial capitalism, i.e., precisely at the moment when the transition to the bourgeois socio-political system is about to take place or is actually taking place.

This concept is a brilliant example of Lenin's political dialectics combining the general and the particular, the international and national in supreme unity, and bringing closer together the goals of the proletarian and the national liberation revolution which in the course of its long path of noncapitalist development finally develops into socialist revolution.

Lenin was closely acquainted with the ideas expressed by his teachers Marx and Engels to the effect that after the social revolution in Europe the peoples of Asia and Africa would become free from foreign domination. The concrete situation obtaining at the time, the onslaught which had begun against European capitalism, the revolutionary situation in the major countries of Europe and Asia, and finally, the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, all led Lenin to pay even closer attention to the issues involved in the liberation of the colonial peoples than had Marx and Engels before him. Approaching this issue from a practical point of view he was concerned with the question

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 151.

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as to what the future held for these peoples when, as a result of the victory of socialism in Europe or simultaneously with that victory, they would gain their national independence. Would they follow the capitalist path as a result of pure inertia stemming from long years of domination by foreign capital? Would they open the doors for a new heyday of capitalism in its gigantic outlying districts and would not then this latter-day product of capitalism be turned against European and international socialism?

These perfectly justified fears with regard to the future of socialism, to the destiny of the newly independent peoples which the foreign and home-grown bourgeoisie would be striving with all their might to lead straight into a capitalist hell (fears which are still relevant to this day) pointed incontestably to the need to find a scientifically substantiated solution to this profound contradiction, a solution rooted in an understanding of objective conditions, of the actual nature of modern capitalism and in particular of the law of its uneven development, making it possible to wrest from the capitalist camp the weakest links in the chain.

A solution to this problem was theoretically elaborated by Lenin in his conception of the development of economically weak countries and peoples in the context of their advance to socialism, not by way of capitalism, but by-passing it and moreover, not only in the context of Soviet Russia, i.e., in the country where the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established. Lenin evolved this concept to take into account the countries struggling to attain their liberation from the colonial yoke, whose peoples after ousting from power feudal, pro-imperialist, bourgeois and pro-capitalist elements opted for the path of democracy, social progress and an alliance with world socialism.

The non-capitalist path constitutes a path of advance towards socialism for peoples and countries that are in the main at a pre-capitalist stage of development or in the midst of the transition to capitalism and whose working class is weak and small in number. The struggle in these countries is directed mainly against imperialist interference from outside and vestiges of pre-capitalist, feudal practices, rather than against local capitalism which, as a rule, has not yet taken definitive shape. The aim of this struggle is, while

overcoming backwardness, not to let capitalism become the dominating economic structure of the bourgeoisie, the dominating political force, but rather to make it possible for the country to accomplish the transition to socialist development in the future. The non-capitalist path therefore requires a combination of the tasks of the general-democratic and socialist revolutions. During the initial stage general-democratic transformations will inevitably predominate but their full implementation will pave the way for gradual consolidation of consistently anti-capitalist, pro-socialist trends. At the Third Comintern Congress Lenin pointed out: "It is perfectly clear that in the impending decisive battles in the world revolution, the movement of the majority of the population of the globe, initially directed towards national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and will, perhaps, play a much more revolutionary part than we expect."""

Non-capitalist development is a complex phenomenon requiring a lengthy coexistence of contradicting tendencies. Some of these are not merely not consistently socialist, but on occasions even contradict socialist principles. It is precisely this which sets non-capitalist development apart from the directly socialist path however. The goal of non-- capitalist development is to gradually bring the productive forces and popular masses of backward countries to socialism, although in the light of objective factors they are not yet ready to embark on immediate socialist construction. Given their present-day level of development there is simply no other way for surmounting the contradictions existing in these countries other than the preparation for and gradual leading forward of the popular masses to socialism.

This explains the dangers inherent in pseudo-revolutionary attempts to ``outstrip'' the masses' level of development, a level determined by socio-economic factors, and, relying purely on the executive apparatus in its function as vanguard although lacking firm support in the popular masses, to embark on direct and immediate implementation of socialist

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 32, p. 482 (author's italics.---

R.U.).

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principles disregarding the need for circumspection, caution and an intermediate stage. Lenin warned against delusions of this kind: "We must realise that the transition to communism cannot be accomplished by the vanguard alone. The task is to arouse the working masses to revolutionary activity, to independent action and to organisation, regardless of the level they have reached... ."*

The bulk of the population in the newly independent states consists of the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie among whom nationalist sentiments run high. In an address to representatives of the Eastern peoples Lenin stressed: "You will have to base yourselves on the bourgeois nationalism which is awakening, and must awaken, among those peoples, and which has its historical justification.""^^01^^" Lenin underlined the fact that in those countries ``pure'' social revolution was not feasible. This is particularly true in relation to the former colonial countries and the non-capitalist path of development, as is also Lenin's definition of the petty bourgeoisie's role in the revolution: they will "bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively, they will attack capital... ."*** This assertion of Lenin's to the effect that "objectively they will attack capital" is extremely important. It possesses fundamental independent significance for it points to a real possibility in the future: an onslaught against capital, both local and foreign, and hence the possibility that capital will be eliminated by the forces of the developing and expanding national liberation revolution that is stirring the workers and peasants to action.

In these highly complex conditions history makes it imperative for the revolutionary parties and leaders of national democracy in power in those developing countries, which are endeavouring to make a break with capitalism, to evolve a correct policy finding expression in consistent opposition to imperialism, in loyalty to the interests of the working people and socialist ideals, andjn an unassailable alliance with the socialist community. Mature political leadership and a well-

defined correct policy provide guarantees important for the successful advance of the newly independent states of the East along the non-capitalist path. The failures experienced by Ghana and Mali can be explained to a considerable extent by the substantial deviations from this course, by a slopingoff of vigilance with regard to the imperialists and the subversive activities of pro-Western elements. The consistent struggle against imperialism, the main enemy, is particularly important in so far as the consolidation of national independence in both the economic and political spheres at the present stage is the main factor in non-capitalist development. Once independence has been proclaimed, sometimes illusions take root as to the possibility of the existence of "good, cultured", so to say, ``tolerable'' colonialists. Hopes that mutually advantageous ``co-operation'' with the imperialists will be possible and that contradictions between former colonies and mother countries will be ironed out are voiced. Illusions as to the existence of "kind colonialists" are a disease most harmful for national revolutionaries. The emergence and cultivation of these false conceptions provide a useful loophole for the neo-colonialists. Lenin foresaw this danger and warned against it. It is all too likely an eventuality for many countries of Tropical Africa, the Arab East, Southeast Asia and Latin America where the neo-colonialists are making every effort to spread their nets.

Lenin drew attention to the great variety of forms of dependence, to the possibility of the purely formal creation of independent states: "Colonial policies and imperialism are not unsound but curable disorders of capitalism ... they are an inevitable consequence of the very foundations of capitalism."*

In his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin wrote: "The questions as to whether it is possible to reform the basis of imperialism, whether to go forward to the further intensification and deepening of the antagonisms which it engenders, or backward, towards allaying these antagonisms, are fundamental questions in the critique of imperialism."** Indeed to this day it is here that the watershed

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 162. ** Ibid. *** Ibid, Vol. 22, p. 356.

* Ibid., Vol. 21, p. 358. ** Ibid., Vol. 22, p. 287.

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lies between the revolutionary and the reformist, essentially defeatist, approach to the struggle to uphold national independence, and resist imperialism. Although direct political domination of the imperialists has come to an end in the newly liberated countries, the danger that they might establish indirect domination through a neo-colonialist system making these countries militarily, economically, and financially dependent on them not only remains a possibility but is being felt more and more unmistakably in a number of countries and regions. A far from small group of countries already find themselves, or are about to find themselves, in a state of neo-colonialist dependence; some representatives of the ruling circles in these countries relinquish their sovereignty and independence and are prepared to become imperialist lackeys.

A consistent struggle against the imperialists presupposes solidarity and co-operation with the socialist countries, with the working class in the capitalist countries. Lenin drew attention to the fact that "the international proletariat is the only ally of all the hundreds of millions of the working and exploited peoples of the East".*

A correct definition of the internal alignment of class forces requires not only a rallying together of all sound elements in the struggle against the imperialists but also differentiation in the approach adopted to the various elements concerned: it is vital to take into account their different attitudes to general-democratic transformations and prospects for socialist development. In 1912 Lenin wrote: "China's freedom was won by an alliance of peasant democrats and the liberal bourgeoisie. Whether the peasants, who are not led by a proletarian party, will be able to retain their democratic positions against the liberals, who are only waiting for an opportunity to shift to the right, will be seen in the near future."** There is little doubt that these words serve to sum up the dilemma which to this day is facing many of the Third World countries. They are also in the midst of a struggle between a revolutionary, plebeian, peasant, i.e., popular trend, that is to a certain extent anti-capitalist in nature, and a

conciliatory, liberal-bourgeois trend. The success with which a border-line is drawn between the two, leading on to support for the first and isolation of the second, will determine the feasibility of the socialist perspective in these countries, whose peoples, as represented by their foremost fighters, are aspiring to take the path of breaking away from capitalism.

Superficial critics of Leninism maintain that Leninist writings in this field addressed to Asian and African peoples advocate immediate establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. "Surely it is necessary first and foremost to create a proletariat in order to establish its dictatorship?" they exclaim, attempting thereby to refute the Leninist approach to this issue. In actual fact, however, Lenin and Leninist theory have never turned to the peoples of the countries breaking free from colonial dependence with the suggestion of immediate and direct establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The progressive forces in the Afro-Asian countries are faced now, just as they were in the past, first and foremost with the task, summed up in the following words by Lenin in 1919: "Relying upon the general theory and practice of communism, you must adapt yourselves to specific conditions such as do not exist in the European countries; you must be able to apply that theory and practice to conditions in which the bulk of the population are peasants... ."*

This is why Marxists-Leninists maintain that only the theory of scientific socialism with its general laws creatively applied to the specific situation obtaining in these countries can provide a suitable basis for the elaboration of correct solutions for the complex problems, which are confronting the national liberation movements and the developing countries.

Creative application of scientific socialism is actually gaining ground in current affairs, in the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the East today. The emergence of a large group of national-democratic states of a non-capitalist type constitutes an incontestable corroboration of Lenin's idea

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 162. ** Ibid., Vol. 18, p. 401.

* Ibid., Vol. 30, p. 161.

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with regard to the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the people embracing all strata of the working population, including the emergent working class, a dictatorship supported by these countries' largest class of toilers, namely, by the peasantry.

On several occasions Lenin drew attention to the fact that in the backward countries of the East what was meant was a popular, peasant system, not an exclusively proletarian one. At the Second Comintern Congress he pointed out: ".. .one of the most important tasks now confronting us is to consider how the foundation-stone of the organisation of the Soviet movement can be laid in the non-capitalist countries. Soviets are possible there; they will not be workers' Soviets, but peasants' Soviets, or Soviets of working people."* Substantiating his arguments with references to the Russian revolution Lenin demonstrated the prime importance of the alliance between workers and peasants. He regarded this alliance as absolutely essential for the revolutionary development of the countries of the East. He stressed: ".. .it was because the peasants and workers united against capitalism and feudalism that our victory was so easy. Here contact with the peoples of the East is particularly important, because the majority of the Eastern peoples are typical representatives of the working people---not workers who have passed through the school of capitalist factories, but typical representatives of the working and exploited peasant masses who are victims of medieval oppression."**

A correct political course presupposes the adoption in the sphere of socio-economic construction of decisions based on a scientific analysis of the alignment of class forces. In this respect the experience of socialist transformations already amassed in the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries possesses tremendous significance. Of course this experience needs to be studied with a view not to its blind imitation but to its creative assimilation: such is the elementary requirement of dialectics, the very core of Marxism-Leninism. This experience is valuable not merely because there exist general laws of revolutionary development but also because in

Russia there was much fundamentally similar to the conditions and tasks now confronting the Third World countries. Lenin himself was fully aware of this and pointed out: "Geographically, economically and historically, Russia belongs not only to Europe, but also to Asia."*

Russia pioneered new paths for the liberation revolution in the countries of the East: the experiment of revolutionary transformations carried out in the former colonies of tsarist Russia in formerly backward regions such as Turkestan where pre-capitalist conditions obtained that in principle differed little from those in a number of present-day Afro-Asian countries, for the first time in history demonstrated the aptness and feasibility of non-capitalist development within the context of the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. This experience also pointed to the fact that, to use Lenin's words, it was possible "to inspire in the masses an urge for independent political thinking and independent political action, even where a proletariat is practically non-existent".** In other words, Lenin considered that Soviet experience of noncapitalist construction in social, economic and cultural affairs was perfectly within the reach of these countries too and acceptable in those conditions where a proletariat is " practically non-existent" but where this was made up for by the independent political consciousness and activity of the broad popular masses. This is why the experience of the October Revolution, the New Economic Policy and subsequent socialist construction in the USSR possess such lasting significance for the developing countries.

Leninism and the experience amassed in the Soviet Union can point to the tasks ahead and practical methods for social transformations in the newly independent states. Indeed they are faced by a host of problems in principle having a great deal in common with those which in other, highly diverse conditions peculiar to an enormous multi-national country were tackled in the USSR. The most important of these are the creation of a new, socialist and genuinely popular state, the formation of a new apparatus of state power

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 232-33. ** Ibid., Vol. 30, p. 161.

* Ibid., Vol. 23, p. 251. ** Ibid., Vol. 31, p. 243.

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for central and local administration that has vital links with the working people, the setting up of a revolutionary, popular army and organs of socialist law and order. It is also essential in this situation to foster a new attitude to labour and to socialist property and to build up an independent, developed economy on the basis of industrialisation and efficient economic management. Another important goal is the social and technical reconstruction of agriculture on the basis of a consistent agrarian revolution (a land and water resources reform as, for example, was introduced in Central Asia), nationalisation of land, woods and water resources, the introduction of the co-operative plan along lines recommended by Lenin, aimed at the gradual co-operation of peasants and artisans by stages---from initial types of consumer, supply, and marketing co-operatives to collective production associations of peasants for land cultivation, stock-- breeding, fishing, hunting and the handicrafts. Also involved is the campaign to wipe out illiteracy and achieve a genuine cultural revolution including the introduction of compulsory nation-wide primary, incomplete secondary, and, later on, secondary education, the building up of a people's intelligentsia: both technical and creative personnel devoted to the revolutionary cause. Finally, there is the need for constantly ensuring a rise in the people's material and cultural standards, in particular for attention to be paid to matters concerning the welfare of women, children, young people, in other words, tens of millions.

In modern conditions the experience gleaned by the Soviet Union during the NEP period as regards the peasantry and later private capital---both local and foreign---acquires particular importance for those countries that are embarking on the non-capitalist path. The NEP represented first and foremost a concession to the peasantry, the numerically strongest class of simple commodity producers. The NEP also constituted a thoroughly deliberate and well thought-out temporary concession to capitalism, a sanctioning of domestic and, to a certain extent, foreign capitalist enterprise on terms advantageous for the socialist state and subject to strict state control, an activisation of market relations and simultaneously a new lease of life for the petty-bourgeois element in a predominantly peasant economy. This led in some respects to a

temporary intensification of capitalist private enterprise which inevitably raised the issue---who will win?

Lenin, the Leninist Party were convinced of the necessity of the implementation of this New Economic Policy while retaining and going all out to consolidate the state's hold over the "commanding heights" of the economy. The policy which was interpreted by Lenin's critics from both Right and Left as a wholesale regression of socialism, virtually a capitulation of Soviet power to capitalism, proved in fact to be the most reliable means for ensuring the success of the socialist economy and for ousting capitalist elements at a time when a head-on attack against capitalism, while perhaps leading to the latter's temporary defeat, would in the long run have been disastrous for the socialist revolution in so far as it would have exhausted the country's economic and sociopolitical resources.

The New Economic Policy which made use of private capital and peasant initiative under control of the socialist system, made possible the solution of two vital and closely connected tasks, essentially the very same tasks which urgently confront the developing national-democratic countries now that they have embarked on a path of non-capitalist development: the development of productive forces, recuperation of the economy, ensuring its effectiveness and a steady rise in the material conditions enjoyed by the working masses. To the latter problem Lenin attributed prime importance for he reasoned that a revolution can only count on the support of the working people when it brings concrete improvement into their living conditions. Amelioration of the situation in which the working masses find themselves, the growth and consolidation of the industrial proletariat and the gradual reconstruction and expansion of the economy were the factors which Lenin regarded as the economic foundation for socialist state power in the struggle against capitalism.

If we turn to the economic situation pertaining in the countries of non-capitalist development, it should be noted that among all those countries which are embarking or have already embarked on this course, fairly stable economic growth, based on the building up of a national industrialised economy and an infrastructure within the framework of the

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state sector, as well as agrarian reform, are to be observed in three Arab countries. These countries are Egypt, Syria and Algeria although agrarian reform in Algeria's traditional sector has yet to be introduced. Each of these countries embarked on its course of non-capitalist development from a different starting-point, the branch structure of their economies, sources of accumulation, rates and extent of social changes and finally external conditions revealing considerable differences. Two of them are experiencing conditions of military tension and their economic development has been distorted to a considerable extent in recent years and initially even largely slowed down. All three countries maintain friendly political relations with the Soviet Union and other socialist states and promote close, mutually advantageous economic co-operation with them. They profit from assistance afforded them by the Soviet Union in building up their armed forces.

A critical economic position now obtains in Guinea and the People's Republic of the Congo---countries with a relatively primitive economy, dominated by patriarchal-- cumtribal patterns in the village, and starting out from a low level of development. Economic building up in these countries is proceeding most slowly and facing enormous difficulties, given the active opposition from foreign capital and attempts to oust progressive regimes through conspiracies and even direct military intervention (Guinea). Tanzania is also embarking on a non-capitalist course: as yet it is difficult to draw any conclusions regarding its progress along this new path but so far the prospects seem promising.

Non-capitalist development furnishes a subject for fierce controversy in the struggle between opposed class forces in Somalia and South Yemen. In these countries revolutionary democrats are gaining more and more influence and engaged in wide-scale constructive activities. In all these countries some of the most burning issues are the consolidation and stabilisation of power and the social system that is in keeping with the people's interests, consolidation of the new nationaldemocratic state and the rallying round it of patriotic and all anti-imperialist forces, and secondly, the problem of the transition to far-reaching construction activity in all branches of the economy.

Burma, the only country in Southeast Asia following a noncapitalist course, is in a somewhat particular position. Consistent socio-economic transformations have been introduced in that country: foreign and large-scale national capital have been nationalised, all the private capitalist bank and credit system, wholesale and semi-wholesale trade likewise, and the owners of large and middle-sized landed estates have been deprived of the right to demand rent from peasants and prosecute tenants. The position of the village moneylender has also been largely undermined. Nevertheless despite the large scale of these changes in the people's interests economic development in Burma is facing most serious problems. The implementation of certain reforms, although demanded by economic and political necessity, was not sufficiently well prepared for, particularly in the sphere of trade, monetary and commodity turnover, and thus led to a disorganisation of the market and disruption of economic ties between town and country. The internecine war that has been going on for over twenty years has most heavy repercussions for the country's economic development, disrupting economic and political life, making it impossible to enjoy the benefits which would otherwise ensue from the profound social transformations.

Relevant in this connection are certain considerations as to the main trends in the economic policy of the non-capitalist countries with due account of the experience that has been acquired. The expansion of a state- and co-operative-based national economy constitutes the economic core of non-- capitalist development. The growth of productive forces in any country, including those which have embarked on the noncapitalist path of development, can proceed mainly due to the all-out utilisation of local manpower and natural resources, through increasing labour productivity and gradually providing more machinery, through all-out strengthening of labour discipline, the fostering of new attitudes to manual labour, the discovery of new sources of accumulation, including a reduction of the share of the non-productive strata in the national income.

Only by means of all-round analysis of concrete conditions pertaining in each country and a discriminating approach to various types of capital (trade, banking, industrial capital, etc.) is it possible to solve such problems as the forms and

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scale the involvement of private domestic and foreign capital in the development of productive forces should assume, what state measures should be adopted to ensure the control of such participation, which methods should be employed to restrict the accumulation of such capital and at what stage of development it should be partially and then increasingly ousted from the national economy. There is no doubt that progressive politicians and economists in each individual country can best solve these problems by turning to the experience already gleaned in the sphere of economic development by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

The countries following a non-capitalist course are peasant nations. Non-capitalist development as such is aimed at winning over to the cause of socialism the peasantry, the bulk of which lives and works in pre-feudal (patriarchal-cum-- tribal) and feudal conditions and in some cases conditions peculiar to the transition to capitalism. This diversity of structures lies at the heart of the problem. Thus, as experience has shown, the development of a peasant agriculture functioning in different economic structures possesses tremendous importance for the economy of the agrarian national-- democratic states. Precisely this factor will, throughout the lengthy period of non-capitalist development, constitute the basis for the national economy with the social forms of its existence undergoing radical change, i.e., the gradual transition of the peasant economy in all existing structures into a single cooperative structure.

In this connection it is vitally important for the newly independent states to promote all-out development of the raw material branches of their agriculture, including those geared to exports, and at the same time that part of its agriculture producing foodstuffs so as to ensure their country's independence of imported produce.

Gradual improvements in agricultural machinery, the transition from primitive implements for land cultivation to more productive ones (the hoe and wooden plough still dominate Asian and African agriculture), the introduction of artificial fertilisers and wide-scale selection work, the organisation of professional advice for peasants and co-operatives, the extension of irrigation facilities, improved credit arrangements, first and foremost for toiling peasants, are all essen-

tial features of the agricultural policy pursued by regimes that have adopted the non-capitalist course. These points constitute, as it were, the so-called "green revolution" programme aimed at promoting the interests of the toiling peasantry, not those of the landowner, rich peasant and capitalist farmer.

In a number of national-democratic states ever since the initial period of non-capitalist development considerable attention has been paid to the extension and consolidation of the system of consumer, marketing, and credit cooperation, and to some extent of agricultural production co-operation in the village. The sum total of all these measures gradually expands the commodity character of the economy, enhances its efficiency, leads to a notable reduction in the scale of patriarchal and natural-economy patterns and hence to a rise in the living standards enjoyed by the rural population and to a self-sufficiency of these newly independent states when it comes to foodstuffs, and to wider export possibilities for the latter.

Agricultural and economic policy in rural areas is unlikely to be effective if it is not followed up by corresponding social policies---agrarian reforms---furthering the interests of the toiling peasantry. In all those countries following a noncapitalist course reforms of this kind are being introduced but at present it is clear that they have not yet been completed. Radical progress in the economy of these countries' agriculture has not yet been recorded. The most spectacular achievements in this sphere have been attained by Egypt, Syria and Burma.

Events have shown that the relatively tense atmosphere in internal trade emerges not always as a result of a lack of manufactured goods or in view of these countries' dependence on imports, but more often than not in view of the absence of a sufficiently organised trading network, the opposition encountered from trade capital or insufficient utilisation of opportunities for local handicrafts in the production of shoes, garments, domestic utensils, household goods, etc.

Nationalisation of the private trading sector and in particular that of private retail trade and semi-wholesale trade produces negative results, as has emerged from the experience of a number of countries, disrupts normal economic

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activities and the economic links between town and country, and at times gives rise to dissatisfaction. As was the case in the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1930, so too the experience of Egypt, Syria, Algeria and various other countries at the present time has shown that the retention of small and medium private trade capital (provided these are made subject to state control) appears necessary until such time as the state and co-operative organisations are ready to take over completely the functions of commodity distribution and supervision of exchange between town and country.

The experience of all non-capitalist countries has shown the need for careful attention to be paid to the organisation of foreign trade, to all-out expansion---under state control---of export resources. This is quite understandable if the need to accumulate currency resources for economic development and expansion of production funds is taken into account. Great importance should be attached to flexible foreign trade policy, expansion of trade links with the socialist world, the introduction of state control and regulation, and later, at the appropriate stage, of a monopoly of foreign trade which for all practical purposes has already been introduced in some of the countries that have opted for non-capitalist development. Foreign trade policy that furthers the development of productive forces usually goes hand in hand with curtailments on the import of luxury goods and other consumer commodities which can be replaced by locally produced goods and also with expansion of imports of industrial equipment and raw materials. Asian and African economists often draw attention to the fact that the import of luxury goods, expensive cars, beverages and other commodities purchased by the prosperous still account for a disproportionately large share of the foreign trade conducted by the national-democratic countries. Strict economy of government resources including hard currency stocks has not yet been universally recognised as a vital rule of economic affairs in all the countries following the non-capitalist path.

Experience gleaned in Syria, Algeria and Burma shows that another significant factor is centralisation of the banking system under state supervision and constant vigilance to ensure that the country's currency and financial situation is consolidated, while every effort is made to avoid inflation-

ary tendencies, first and foremost by all-out promotion of domestic production and commodity turnover. These measures have been introduced with varying degrees of success in all the countries concerned although their economic effectiveness is by no means uniform.

An indispensable base for progressive regimes engaged in implementing non-capitalist development is a firm and stable political system. This requires above all the existence of a progressive political party aspiring to scientific socialist principles, a strong and flexible state apparatus enjoying the support of the working people and finally an army devoted to the cause of revolution, the people's cause. This political system can only be firm if it is supported by the masses and the latter are actively involved in its work.

Most relevant to the needs of the national-- democratic countries are the requirements which Lenin named in connection with the political system in a socialist state: correct leadership of the working people, a state apparatus that will prove both cheap to run and be free of bureaucracy and concern to be shown for the needs of the working people followed up by constant readiness to afford them all possible assistance. "We must strive to build up a state in which the workers retain the leadership of the peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants, and by exercising the greatest economy remove every trace of extravagance from our social relations.

``We must reduce our state apparatus to the utmost degree of economy. We must banish from it all traces of extravagance, of which so much has been left over from tsarist Russia, from its bureaucratic capitalist state machine."* In order to facilitate such streamlining of the political system and to render it less of a burden on the state budget it is necessary to cleanse it of all elements alien to the objectives of the revolution.

The history of the activities of Afro-Asian national-- democratic states, that goes back over a good number of years, makes it quite clear that these basic demands put forward by Lenin with regard to the state apparatus, the army, the struggle against bureaucracy and the state's ties with the

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 501,

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working masses have in no way lost their relevance in present-day conditions. All the countries that have opted for non-capitalist development are going through the complex stage of formation as national states but not all of them are going out of their way to involve the working people in this work. The state apparatus and army are still divided by a considerable gulf from the people. The bureaucracy to be found in the old, and indeed new, civil services as well as among army officers and the corruption rife in a number of countries might well provide a source of social conflict and promote the emergence and growth of bourgeois trends. If tireless struggle is not waged against such phenomena and the progressive strata of the working people are not drawn into this struggle, then these negative tendencies may well come to constitute a serious threat, particularly during periods of military and socio-political crises, when out of the blue, so to speak, the people, state and national-democratic revolution find themselves up against cohesive strata of a military, bureaucratic or parliamentarian bourgeoisie. The egoism of these strata knows no bounds and they can all too easily become a tool of the neo-colonialists obediently implementing the subversive manoeuvres and conspiracies of the latter.

It is difficult to find any substantial problem connected with the socio-economic development of the Third World countries for the solution of which the experience amassed in the Soviet Union and Lenin's writings did not prove highlv useful and most relevant, provided of course that they artapproached with due consideration for the national, economic, cultural and historical conditions obtaining in these countries and also for the current international situation. In such countries as India and Burma, and in Africa, the intranational question is of prime importance. Here once again the experience of the October Revolution and the solutions found for the nationalities question and problems of language in the USSR provide invaluable material.

Russia was a country which found itself up against the nationality and tribal issues in a host of different manifestations, including the colonial variety. Lenin's approach to these problems was distinguished by a combination of unconditional recognition of each nation's right to sell-determination, including secession, with his championing of the interests of

progressive social development for the nationalities, tribes and other ethnic and language groups, and of the interests of socialism. Lenin held that the nationalities question in each individual case should be analysed from a concrete historical point of view, i.e., due consideration should be paid to socio-economic conditions, while "clearly distinguishing the interests of the oppressed classes .. . from the concept of the interests of the people in general", and an equally clear dividing line be drawn between oppressor and oppressed peoples. Lenin wrote that "the demand for democracy must not be considered in isolation but on ... a world scale"/^^1^^" In relation to the colonial countries and those countries which have recently freed themselves from foreign domination this means that it is vital to take into account, when solving the nationalities and the tribal question, the influence that this or that particular solution will exert on the overall course of the international anti-imperialist struggle.

The need to solve nationalities, tribal, ethnic and language differences in the newly independent states, or indeed between them, must never provide a loophole for the imposition of hostile separatism which the imperialists are never slow to exploit as has been the case in a good number of Afro-Asian countries such as Nigeria and Burma.

In the first instance imperialists from the United States and other countries hand in hand with bourgeois-cum-feudal tribe leaders, while ostensibly championing the cause of selfdetermination for the Ibos, attempted to split the most populous state of Tropical Africa and make Nigeria a plaything in the hands of the international monopolies. It took almost three years of armed resistance to the forces seeking to disrupt Nigerian unity before the Nigerian people with the assistance of socialist, non-capitalist and other friendly countries succeeded in vindicating their country's sovereignty as a single united state. Of course Nigeria still has to find a satisfactory solution for nationality and tribal issues but this does not in the least imply that separatism and the splitting up of a large viable state is the answer. The same can be said of Burma, where imperialist and other outside forces making capital out of existing tribal and feudal separatism

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 341.

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have been pursuing a single end over many years, namely aspiring in the name of self-determination to break up this multi-national state with a population of 28 million into individual tribes in keeping with feudal patterns, and thereby to strengthen their own influence in Southeast Asia.

This is why the right to ``self-determination'', as Lenin noted, "is not the equivalent of a demand for separation, fragmentation and the formation of small states. It implies only a consistent expression of struggle against all national oppression."* There exist many other forms of self-- determination making it possible to render compatible the interests of individual nationalities, peoples, and tribes with the economic and political advantages enjoyed by large states. The experience of intranational construction and of the transformation of patriarchal-cum-tribal societies in the remote regions of the USSR involving the introduction of various forms of national statehood within a large, powerful and united state of a centralised, socialist type provides a convincing and inspiring example in this respect for the Third World countries.

Of course this particular solution requires consistent democracy and equal rights for representatives of different national minorities, for, as Lenin pointed out, "the closer a democratic state system is to complete freedom to secede the less frequent and less ardent will the desire for separation be in practice".**

Scientific socialism and Soviet experience of building a new society does not demand that anyone should adopt a dogmatic approach to their own situation and still less that the Soviet course should be followed blindly. The ideological enemies of socialism attempt to present Soviet experience as a canon that Marxists allegedly demand all other countries should follow, regardless of the period, place or concrete historical situation. This assertion is an old, outworn tactic of the class opponents of socialism in their efforts to stir up nationalistic protest from the peoples of the newly independent countries against scientific socialism.

Socialist experience has been and is being amassed in the course of a tense and victorious revolutionary struggle which has known failures and certain temporary setbacks/However Lenin and his followers elaborated a theory of the general laws governing the advance to socialism, a theory which was corroborated in practice in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, in the course of the struggle waged by the working class and the working people of all countries, and is now finding expression in a new phenomenon, namely that known as the non-capitalist path of development. The theory and practice of scientific socialism and Soviet experience of the construction of a new society enrich and equip with an invaluable weapon the present-day national liberation movement which is striving not to stop ``half-way'' at national, state independence, but to march boldly forward to social liberation.

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 146. ** Ibid.

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SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM AND IDEOLOGICAL ISSUES IN THE NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT

SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM AND IDEOLOGICAL ISSUES

that the progressive strata of the working people and the national revolutionary democrats should embark on? What scientific theory of a new social structure can be used to put an end to the socio-economic and cultural backwardness of peoples that have gained their political independence? Scientific socialism which has proved its viability on both a national and international scale is the only theory which can fill these requirements. It therefore does not come as a surprise that the leaders of the democratic camp in the newly liberated countries, in particular the Left-wing leaders, turn precisely to scientific socialism, the principles of which they adhere to, however, with varying degrees of consistency. They attempt to find answers to the burning issues of the present in the theory of scientific socialism, in the practical experience of socialist construction amassed in the Soviet Union and other socialist states.

There is not a single country where the national liberation struggle should have begun with a proclamation of the task of socialist construction. Only in the course of that struggle and during the process of inner stratification of social forces did socialist ideas grip the imagination of the foremost champions of national liberation. These were sometimes progressive workers, the finest representatives of the numerically weak and poorly organised working class, sometimes members of the revolutionary intelligentsia attracted by scientific socialism and also consistent peasant revolutionary democrats who saw socialist theory as providing a happy combination of the goals of the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle with those of the struggle for social emancipation. All these groups attempted in varying degrees to apply certain principles of scientific socialism to the revolutionary struggle in the context of the underdeveloped social structure of their particular country. This was an inevitable stage of embryonic development, to a certain extent an ``adaptation'' of scientific socialism to pre-capitalist conditions or conditions of the transition to capitalism in agrarian-peasant countries where the strata of the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie only represented negligible forces.

After the victory over fascism in the Second World War and the formation of the world socialist system, at the time when the colonial empires started to collapse, scientific social-

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SOME THEORIES OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEWLY LIBERATED COUNTRIES

The victory of the October Revolution ushered in a farreaching process of intensive political, economic, military, cultural and technical interaction of the forces of the socialist revolution and the national liberation struggle of the oppressed peoples. The ideas of scientific socialism, of socialist and anti-imperialist revolutions started to gain countless adherents throughout the whole world. Even in the world's most remote and deserted corners these ideas began to grip the minds of the masses, coming to represent a leading force in the twentieth century. They are thus turning into a great material strength of the revolutionary process.

As the national liberation revolutions gained ground, national-democratic and revolutionary-patriotic elements from widely diverse social strata, including intermediate strata, started to appreciate more clearly that the achievement of political independence and the formation of a national state did not yet signify the end of economic exploitation at the hands of the imperialists or that there was no longer any danger of former colonial practices being restored. Tens of millions of those who had opposed the imperialists came to realise that political independence was a fiction if the newly independent people did not accomplish radical changes in the socio-economic structure of society and embark on the construction of a stable national economy.

In this situation what social theory, what ideological system can provide a true source of revolutionary understanding of present-day processes and the practical course of action

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ism became the world's most influential ideology. An analysis of the impact scientific socialism had on the socio-political orientation of the leaders in the newly liberated countries is an essential prerequisite for any study of its influence on the national liberation movement.

eties have always lived and evolved in the context of an empirical natural socialism which might be termed instinctive; b) European socialism has shown itself to be the ally of the colonial peoples and they in their turn . .. have seen it as a means of anti-imperialist struggle; c) finally, socialism in Africa is often regarded as an instrument of economic development."* This spontaneous irresistible aspiration of the masses to social justice which leads to dreams of a return to "natural, instinctive socialism" of the primitive communal system and the recognition of the outstanding role of socialism in the struggle against colonialism and the appreciation of socialism as the decisive factor in economic progress are among the other reasons explaining the wide popularity of socialist ideas in Africa, to which Doudou Thiam draws attention.

In this connection mention should also be made of another major factor: importance should be attached not merely to the attraction exerted by socialism but also to the growing unpopularity of capitalism. To millions of people who have recently shaken off the yoke of foreign domination, capitalism is inextricably linked with colonial exploitation. Ahmed Sekou Toure, President of the Republic of Guinea, writes that "colonialism is a form of government that stems from the nature of a regime, the capitalist regime"/^^8^^'*

However it would be wrong to reduce the reasons for the emergence and development of socialist trends in the newly liberated countries to nothing but considerations of an ideological, emotional or simply voluntarist character, as certain Western bourgeois social scientists in this field are sometimes prone to do. Progressive ideologists in the newly independent states have every reason for objecting to such interpretations of the situation.

Among the reasons which lie behind the option for socialism that has been made in a number of African and Asian countries are those of a socio-economic nature. Many leaders in these countries, Left-wing democrats and active opponents of imperialism and neo-colonialism are convinced that only

The search undertaken by each individual people to find its own path to socialism is inevitable and historically justified. Persistent attempts by democratic, progressive leaders and political parties supporting the interests of advanced social strata in the newly liberated countries to find and elaborate their own paths and approaches to the reconstruction of society in a socialist direction should be welcomed. It is quite a different matter, however, when searches for paths of their own and their own approaches to socialism give way to their absolutisation or ``invention'' of their own kind of ``socialism''. Socialism can then lose its significance and reactionary bourgeois regimes can exploit it while pursuing their own ends.

Indeed in present-day Africa and Asia there is a wide variety of ``socialisms'' serving a variety of purposes. We find the ``socialism'' of the old Indian National Congress Party, "Khmer socialism" of Cambodia, "Burmese socialism" as propagated by U Nu, Indonesian ``socialism'' of the Pancha Sila variety, Nigeria's "pragmatic socialism", "African socialism" as practised in Senegal, Kenya and other countries of Central Africa. The emergence of these and many other types of ``socialisms'' can be explained by a variety of historical factors.

The study and assimilation of the basic principles of scientific socialism proceed against a background of acute struggle between its adherents and opponents, in conditions where the numerically strongest groups are the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry, the non-proletarian working masses. This struggle in itself is a highly positive phenomenon. It testifies to the fact that the political leaders of Asia and Africa are by no means indifferent to socialist ideas.

Doudou Thiam, a well-known political figure in the Republic of Senegal, explains the popularity of socialist ideas in Tropical Africa by the following factors: "a) African soci-

* Doudou Thiam, La politique etrangere des Etats africains, Paris, 1963, p. 33. ** Horoya, October 31, 1965.

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socialism can ensure economic progress and put an end to backwardness.

This approach to the question which bears the mark of the revolutionary epoch is objected to by Right-wing socialists in the West who see socialism as the fruit of gradual reformist evolution. The following statement by Robert Rocher, secretary of the Socialist International's subcommittee for developing countries, illustrates this: he maintains that "socialism depends for its fulfilment on a sound basis of congruent and highly developed economic, political and cultural conditions"/^^1^^' By "congruent conditions" Rocher means a high level of capitalist development which so far not one African or Asian state has achieved.

There is a striking resemblance between the view put forward by Rocher and the ideas on prospects for socialist revolution expounded by N. Sukhanov in his Notes on Revolution. Lenin criticised Sukhanov for his "slavish imitation of the past", for his absolutisation of the path of development of capitalism and bourgeois democracy found in Western Europe and for the fact that his notes "are complete strangers to the idea that while the development of world history as a whole follows general laws it is by no means precluded, but, on the contrary, presumed, that certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development"/^^1^^""" Many Western students of modern history of Asia and Africa ignore the fifty years' experience in socialist construction in the borderlands of former tsarist Russia and also that gleaned in the Mongolian People's Republic.

Opponents of socialism in a number of newly independent states, like their Western colleagues, often try to make capital out of the fact that the transition to socialism requires relatively developed productive forces, i.e., that these forces should have attained at least a medium level of development. Capitalism should have attained this, they maintain, but failed to do so since it was of a colonial, plundering and foreign variety. These ``theoreticians'' then go on to draw

the conclusion that since the capitalism in these countries is not developed, consequently there is allegedly no economic basis for socialism.

Yet the question as to the creation of the material, technical and social prerequisites for the transition to socialism should not be approached without due place being given to the existence of the world socialist system, the new role of the international working-class movement and the alliance of both with the national liberation movement. The collapse of the imperialist colonial system and the weakening of imperialism under the impact of the countries of the socialist community, the international working-class and national liberation movements lead to qualitatively new conditions for laying the foundations of socialism. Appreciation of this fact permeates the policy documents and statements of the leaders of national-democratic parties.

Scientific socialism is the theory of the social emancipation of the proletariat. Yet just as the national liberation movement has always been a close ally of the international working class, just as all general-democratic movements directed against monopoly capitalism, colonialism and reaction are now becoming close allies of the international working-class movement and the world socialist system, so the socialist views of the anti-imperialist intelligentsia, the urban poor, the progressive strata of the working peasantry and the semiproletariat in both town and country are drawing closer to scientific socialism.

Most relevant in this context is Lenin's remark to the effect that Communists, if they want the majority of the people to commit themselves to scientific socialism, must show themselves capable "to link up, maintain the closest contact, and ---if you wish---merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people---primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people"/^^1^^" This process reflects the common prospects for the future, ultimate objectives and destiny shared by the international working class and the non-proletarian working masses, which constitute the main nucleus of the fighters in the ranks of the national liberation movement.

* Socialist International Information, Vol. XIV, Nos. 27-28, 1964, p. 319. ** V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 477.

Ibid., Vol. 31, pp. 24-25,

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Scientific socialism, that meets the fundamental interests of the working class and broad popular masses in the socialist countries and the developed capitalist countries, is also in keeping with the fundamental interests of the proletarian and broad non-proletarian working masses participating in the national liberation movement. If this was not the case, if scientific socialism and its central political and economic principles were alien to the working masses, and in particular to the toiling peasantry, the urban poor and the intelligentsia in the newly independent countries, then it would not have been able to have such a tremendous revolutionary impact on hundreds of millions of people in the Third World.

Scientific socialism is coming increasingly into its own as a unifying force in the world arena. Both the international working-class movement and the foremost sector of the national liberation movement, namely, its Left flank, find in the ideology of scientific socialism that which unites them, ensures their fruitful co-operation and advance in the struggle for social progress. Precisely this factor has enabled the national liberation movement to amplify on such an enormous scale the scope of its revolutionary objectives, its front, composition and the numbers of militants who constitute the army of anti-imperialist and potentially social revolution.

In the present-day national liberation movement there is another tendency to be observed as well---a tendency not to "drawing together" with scientific socialism, but rather away from it, to self-isolation from scientific socialism, from the international working-class movement and the socialist community. It would be wrong to ignore the fact that this latter tendency has won considerable popularity: in a number of newly independent countries it even dominates, although this state of affairs would appear to be temporary. Objective laws of the struggle against imperialism demand unity of action and adherents of this latter tendency are gradually losing their ground.

However fundamental the differences between social and national liberation revolutions might be, both these movements are searching for and indeed finding their true vocation to lie in the struggle to put an end to the exploitation

of man by man, one class by another, one country by another and at the same time to wipe out hunger, poverty and suffering.

It goes without saying that anti-imperialism---the central feature of the modern national liberation movement---shows a natural tendency to grow over into anti-capitalism. At the present stage this tendency is reflected in the activities of the national-revolutionary democrats, many of whom are gradually drawing together with scientific socialism. Lenin put forward and substantiated the principle of constant interlinks, close mutual assistance, growing community between the forces of national liberation and social revolution and finally their merging together on the basis of joint struggle for social progress.

In the present epoch socialist trends in the newly liberated countries are gaining ground, above all in a distinctive national guise. The specific and sometimes even exclusive character of a large number of national conceptions of socialism can be traced back to various historical and social factors. This should not merely be ascribed to the specific conditions obtaining in Africa and Asia. In the past similar or comparable phenomena appeared in Europe and America and the same also applied to some extent to pre-revolutionary Russia. This is a typical feature of bourgeois-democratic and nationaldemocratic movements, particularly at the early stages of their development.

The struggle to consolidate political independence inevitably leads to opposition to the imperialists, who are anxious at all costs to prevent the new states from finding their feet. This is why "national socialisms" to a certain extent obstruct the penetration and imposition from outside of alien ideological ideas propagated by the colonialists or their agents. Herein lies their positive aspect in so far as they are anti-imperialist in character and directed against the ideological influence of the neo-colonialists.

Conceptions of "national exclusiveness" however have another, negative side. After taking shape in the course of a nation-wide democratic movement they gradually become elevated to the status of irrefutable truths by those strata in

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the new nations who are interested not in promoting the further development of the national liberation revolution but rather in rechannelling it along a course of reformism, i.e., compromise with the imperialists. At the same time genuinely democratic forces search for and find common ground with scientific socialism. Hence it is clear that theories of "national exclusiveness" acquire increasingly negative significance as the national liberation revolution develops and approaches a new historical borderland---the transition to social revolution.

Lenin wrote: "All nations will arrive at socialism---this is inevitable, but all will do so in not exactly the same way, each will contribute something of its own to some form of democracy, to some variety of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the varying rate of socialist transformations in the different aspects of social life."* Lenin's thesis with regard to the diversity of paths for the transition of various nations to socialism does not rule out, but, on the contrary, confirms the existence of general historical laws. According to the adherents of the conception of the ``exclusiveness'' of their "own brand of socialism", the distinctive features cancel out the general laws of historical progress, and affirm the isolated, self-contained essence of the newly liberated countries in their socio-historical development.

Some types of socialism of a national variety are based on the idea that a scientific, class analysis is inapplicable for instance to the study of paths of development for a number of African countries. This idea reflects in an unusual way certain phenomena present in the African reality of today. Concepts of classless society in Africa can be explained by the widespread communal landownership and land cultivation, the embryonic level of class stratification, the dominance of patriarchal, clan and tribal relations and obscurity of the crystallisation of the class structure. This low level of class stratification and a certain unity of interests among various class groups with regard to imperialism provide the ideological basis for the concept that a class approach is ``inapplicable'' to the African context. Western bourgeois ideologists have good reason to add weight to and consoli-

date these ideas since they can be used to further their own class objectives.

The limitations to which certain ideologists of national versions of socialism fall prey stem mainly from the fact that they attach too much importance to special historical features and to present conditions, and, rather than paying attention to the overall patterns of the modern stage of development, stress the almost mystical, natural psycho-physiological `` exclusiveness'' which makes the African, Arab, Indian, Indonesian and countless others immune to general historical laws.

The most striking expression of the "philosophical basis" of so-called African socialism is provided by the concept of ``negritude'', that affirms the exclusiveness not only of Africa's historical destiny but also of the psychological make-up of the "African personality". One of the ideologists of ``negritude'', Leopold Senghor idealises traditional African society attributing to it an inherently socialist character: "Socialism had already been realised by us before the coming of the Europeans. This leads us to conclude that our vocation now is to regenerate it, helping it to re-establish its spiritual criteria.""' Senghor is concerned first and foremost with cultural values, with their integration with socialism: "Can we integrate with socialism the cultural values of Negro Africa, in particular religious values? This is the question which we must answer, once and for all, with an unequivocal yes."*""

Socio-political thought in the Afro-Asian countries is evolving fairly rapidly. In the process of that evolution more and more serious effort is being made to avoid exaggerating the importance of the ``negritude'' theory and national exclusiveness.

Ahmed Sekou Toure subjected the theory of ``negritude'' to harsh criticism: "When face to face with other cultures, Africa must take resolute steps to rid itself of all its complexes including that of `negritude'."*** Sekou Toure contrasts the conceptions peculiar to the ``negritude'' theory with

* L. S. Senghor, Nation el vole africaine du socialisme, Paris, 1961, p. 71.

** Ibid., p. 42. *** Horoya, September 15, 1965,

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23, pp. 69-70.

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the theory that there exist objective laws governing social development. He talks of the involvement of man in the "socio-historical process that is independent of his will", and takes as the "basis of life in human society" economic relations between people that are subject to "laws of production and consumption". Sekou Toure affirms the principle of the common features linking the various paths of human development and calls upon his fellow Africans bravely to renounce irrational concepts and speculative conclusions that have little bearing on service of the people of Africa.

A useful guide for distinguishing between the host of ideological and political trends in the Third World that are presented as socialism is provided by their scientific classification. The basis for such a classification is of course the class content of socialist theories. In modern conditions, when real opportunities are opening up before many newly liberated countries for them to choose a path of development, the class significance of ideological and political trends looms very large in relation to the central question: to which of the two leading world systems---socialism or capitalism---does this or that political platform lead?

If this, the sole reliable criterion is taken as a startingpoint, then three main trends should be singled out in the non-proletarian socialist theories found in the Afro-Asian countries: national reformism, petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism and national democracy.

1. National reformism, in which bourgeois tendencies are disguised by socialist concepts and slogans, makes use of West European and American bourgeois apologetic theories sometimes in conjunction with concepts taken from Right-wing, so-called democratic socialism. National reformism is not directed against capitalism as such but against its 19th-- century variety, while socialism is presented as the means for securing economic progress through state control. National reformism is openly opposed to scientific socialism and prone to compromise with the neo-colonialists. Unmistakeable examples of this trend in Africa are to be found in the ideology of the ruling parties of Senegal, Kenya, Tunisia and certain other countries. Another typical feature of national reformism is the attempt to find non-Marxist alternatives to capitalist society. "We support a middle way... open

socialism",* maintains Leopold Senghor, which according to its ideologists should be directed against both capitalism and communism.

This "middle way", if its nationalistic packaging is left to one side, turns out in practice to be a synonym for bourgeois economic progress based on state programming and regulation of the economy. Its ideological kinship with reformist trends encountered in the West is obvious. Senghor and many other similar statesmen in Africa and Asia have on numerous occasions stressed their affinities with "democratic socialism", with the non-Marxist socialist movement in Europe. American sociologist C. Andrain points out the similarity between socialist conceptions widespread in Tunisia, Kenya, and the French-speaking members of the Organisation Commune Africaine et Malgache (OGAM) and the ``welfare-state'' approach of the British Labour Party, the French Socialists, etc.**

On closer analysis this attempt to search for a "middle way" to socialism also turns out to be anything but original. Its roots can be traced back to the conceptions that have been current in Europe for about a century and which during that period have shown themselves to be groundless and sterile from a practical point of view. It is revealing to note that some representatives of "democratic socialism" in the newly liberated countries have already acknowledged the extremely limited relevance of reformist experience in Western Europe to the countries of Africa and Asia.

Supporters of the "middle way" look upon the class aspect of the transition to socialism as something alien. "The theory of class struggle has no relevance to our particular situation here,"*** maintains Jomo Kenyatta. This is not a rejection of the uncritical transfer to Africa of concepts of classes that have taken shape in Europe, but a rejection of class struggle in principle, of those manifestations of the latter which are making themselves more and more clearly felt in both Africa and Asia.

* L. S. Senghor, Nation et voie africaine du socialisme, pp. 67 and 87. ** C. F. Andrain, "Patterns of African Socialist Thought", African Forum, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1966, p. 51. *** Jomo Kenyatta, Harambee!, Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 24.

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189

A typical example of petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism is to be found in the book The Elements of African Socialism:'' by Nigerian pastor Bede Onuoha, who comes out in support of the concepts of African exclusiveness, ``negritude'', and contrasts "African socialism" with both capitalism and scientific socialism, opposing the concentration of property in the hands of both private individuals and the state. Onuoha recommends the socialisation of property according to the principles of egalitarian use without nationalising it or handing it over to society or the state.

It is revealing to note that, despite Onuoha's desire to draw up what he terms as an "original model for socialist society", he merely provides a mixture of long since familiar elements of Utopian socialism and bourgeois reformism that can be traced back to socio-political and economic thought in Europe, Asia and America. In this respect Onuoha has nothing original to say and merely rehashes old, outworn social theories that have failed to prove themselves. At the same time Onuoha assures us that solidarity between workers and employers is an illusion and declares that class conflict is inevitable unless legislation is introduced to radically democratise the corporation law allowing workers to become shareholders.

Onuoha acknowledges that the father of this "skilful plan" for establishing social justice without nationalising the means of production was the not unknown F. Maxwell, thus giving his readers every reason to doubt the originality of his conception of "African socialism". Onuoha appears not to notice how dangerous his plan is both for the newly independent states and for the destiny of socialism in these states. Nevertheless there is one aspect of Onuoha's writings which favourably distinguishes his theory from those put forward by representatives of Right-wing bourgeois-reformist trends. After taking his model from the bourgeois West, Onuoha then proceeds to lend it profound subjective intransigence in relation to capitalism. In his opinion, capitalism is "legalised robbery", a system in which wealth is always concentrated in the hands of the minority turning the majority into proletarians. These views of Onuoha's are

* Bede Onuoha, The Elements of African Socialism, London, 1965.

2. Representatives of modern petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism interpret social justice as the extension to contemporary society of the principles underlying primitive communal communism expanded on a national scale. Peasant Utopian socialism differs from national reformism in its loyalty to popular ideals, the principle of equality, its refusal to tolerate manifestations of social injustice, severe criticism of present-day capitalism from a subjective-socialist position and a rejection of bourgeois-reformist illusions. At the same time however peasant Utopian socialism (and this brings it near to national reformism) is characterised by a failure to understand the true paths necessary for the establishment of social justice and the role of genuinely scientific concepts.

Scientific socialism is rejected on the grounds that with its theory and practice of the class struggle and with the leading role it assigns to the proletariat it is ill-adapted to the conditions obtaining in the Third World, to the needs of those peoples, to whose history the spirit of the class struggle is allegedly alien and who are thus in a position to build socialism based on "national unity", on the traditions of communal life. Petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism is subject to internal contradictions. Loyalty to the working men's ideals of social justice, hatred of capitalism would naturally lead it to scientific conceptions of revolution, but at the same time its distrustful, sometimes semi-hostile attitude to MarxismLeninism provides a basis for its proximity to national reformism. One of these two tendencies inevitably gains the upper hand and this leads to a loss of the trend's intrinsic independence, to its merging with other ideological and political trends. Marxists-Leninists are of course interested in seeing that the representatives of petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism evolve in the direction of scientific socialism.

A model of petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism is provided in the ideology of the Tanganyika African National Union party prior to the adoption of the Arusha declaration at the beginning of 1967. This document which acknowledges the existence of the class struggle in Africa and the class character of political power under socialism pointed to a shift of this party in the right direction---towards national revolutionary democracy.

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establishment of socialism if one was to believe that socialism cannot be built without first building capitalism.

The ideology of foremost national democrats is characterised by acceptance of socialism as a class phenomenon demanding a special alignment of political and social forces. Socialism as viewed by the national democrats asserts itself as society's internal contradictions are being solved in the context of the class struggle. The acknowledgement of the class struggle constitutes the supreme achievement of the ideology of national democracy and is precisely what lends it its revolutionary content. Egypt's Charter of National Action contains the words: "The class struggle which is natural and inevitable cannot be ignored or refuted." Similar statements are included in the policy documents of Burma's Socialist Programme Party. The Tanganyika African National Union's Arusha declaration is also permeated with the spirit of the struggle against exploiters.

The need to unite all forward-looking forces in the struggle against capitalism leads certain ideologists of national democracy to support the idea of nation-wide unity. However the acceptance of the need for a united anti-colonial, anti-imperialist front is not necessarily tantamount to concepts of a class truce, for, on the one hand, feudal and compradore elements naturally remain outside any united antiimperialist front, and on the other, allowances are made for certain class contradictions within such a front.

The most far-sighted ideologists of national democracy see a correct political orientation and political organisation of the masses and cohesion of the class forces supporting non-capitalist development as a guarantee against any reintroduction of former practices and as a guarantee of the preservation and consolidation of revolutionary gains. A major role is assigned to the ruling party and to the state as the most important forms of political organisation, the decisive instrument for social change. Ideologists of national democracy characterise revolutionary statehood as " democracy of all the working forces of the people, all national forces of the people", as "national democracy" or the "dictatorship of the people", the "democratic dictatorship''.

Here we are concerned with the advancement of the idea bearing upon the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of

worthy of our attention since they reflect a predominantly peasant radicalism which is not to be found in the writings of ideologists of socialism in Kenya or Senegal.

3. National, or revolutionary democracy is the most progressive Left wing of national socialism in the countries of the Third World. In fact the categorisation of revolutionary democracy as national socialism is not really precise since it represents a trend which extends the framework of fetishist concepts of the exclusive and separate nature of paths for national historical development. National democracy accepts a number of tenets of scientific socialism. Its cornerstone is recognition of the class struggle in the Third World and its identification of socialism with the power of the working people. National democrats pursue a consistently anti-imperialist policy, appealing to the people to rally to the struggle against the forces of both external and internal reaction. The adoption of certain Marxist tenets and a somewhat individual interpretation of the latter is by no means a new phenomenon in the history of thought. Yet never before has this process advanced so far, exerted such a fruitful and revolutionising influence on the national liberation movement nor done so much to shape the basic trends of that movement's development.

Ideologists of national democracy often formulate their own interpretation of scientific socialism that differs, sometimes as to a whole number of central issues, from the Marxist interpretation but which with regard to matters of principle has much in common with Marxist concepts. Without shaking itself free of substantial vestiges of pettybourgeois socialism and illusions of national ``exclusiyeness'', the ideology of consistent revolutionary democracy is gradually developing and will continue to do so in the direction of perception of scientific socialism.

Taken all in all national democracy adopts a positive attitude to the idea of the transition from the colonial precapitalist stage of social development to socialism by-passing the capitalist formation. In the Arusha declaration it was pointed out that this line was bound up with the strategy aimed at ousting private capital: the policy of attracting capitalists to create industry might well be helpful in creating the industry needed but it would also serve to hinder the

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the working people. This is a dictatorship which objectively expresses the interests of the bloc of revolutionary, anticolonial, anti-feudal and anti-capitalist forces. Yet in a number of policy documents an increasingly major role is being assigned to the workers and peasants. The Arusha declaration, for example, calls upon the population to remember above all that the TANU is "a party of peasants and workers". Attempts to oppose the revolutionary-- democratic dictatorship of the working people to the dictatorship of the proletariat and to erect an insuperable wall between the two, ignoring the historically transient nature of each for the particular stage of revolution, in this context prove groundless and bear a dogmatic character. Any genuinely revolutionary power with a socialist orientation, i.e., one which reflects the working people's essential interests, has at the present period much in common with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry in its aims, forms and action methods, although it is not identical with that t dictatorship; it is not its replica but merely its historical antecedent. In this sense the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship is at one and the same time both the consequence of the already existing international dictatorship of the proletariat in the shape of the world socialist system and the antecedent of that particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat which will eventually take shape in its own country. Summing up the results of more than a decade of nationaldemocratic development it can safely be said that a class and political orientation is permeating the national democrats' conceptions of socialism to an ever increasing extent.

Socialism as understood by the ideologists of the nationaldemocratic parties is the domination of social ownership of the means of production, the ousting of private property from the major branches of the economy and the undermining and elimination of exploitation of man by man. These tenets find . expression for example in the Arusha declaration which ' states that the principal means of production should be under peasants' and workers' control (through their government and co-operatives).

As mentioned earlier revolutionary aspirations sometimes lead the national democrats in certain countries to adopt over-hasty measures often relating to a broad front of their

social struggle, for example, to nationalisation in the sphere of retail exchange, the service industries, small and mediumscale industry that is not economically justified, although in principle they acknowledge the expedience and inevitability of the continued development of private capital for a certain period. Yet the national democrats stand apart from the advocates of a "middle way" in that they see an ultimate goal behind their action. After announcing and starting to implement revolutionary socio-economic transformations they attempt to take the ground away from under the feet of the exploiting forces in both political and economic affairs and to establish new social relations. The national democrats do not by a long way always take into consideration all the difficulties of socio-economic transformations. Indeed if such transformations are inadequately prepared for from the economic point of view and implemented with major errors, more often than not from above, in a bureaucratic spirit, without the support of the popular masses and without their active participation, then they can substantially complicate the country's economic position and even produce temporary deterioration in the people's living standards. Capital is of course made out of such development by reactionary forces at home and abroad in the hope that they might restore the former order. However, consistent revolutionary democrats nevertheless believe that the way to surmount difficulties is not to renounce the transformations but rather to adopt more flexible, astute, well-grounded and consistent methods for their implementation making sure they are supported by those classes and strata of the population whose vital interests are at stake when it comes to the affirmation of a new way of life.

The national democrats acknowledge the outstanding role of theory in the revolutionary process. L'Essor, the official organ of the Sudan's Revolutionary Democratic Alliance, states that "there is no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory"."" Statements of this kind are most important, for many advocates of the so-called "middle way" adopt quite the opposite approach to revolutionary theory. Tom Mboya of Kenya, for instance, assumed that "there is no need

* L'Essor, November 23, 1965.

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in Africa to argue over ideologies.... African socialism consists in practice, not in theory... .* This explains the concern of revolutionary democrats over the promotion of a foremost ideology and the people's social education, which the revolutionary democrats see as one of the major means for achieving the socialist re-orientation of the working masses.

National democracy and its finest representatives embody those forces in the Third World countries, which opt for noncapitalist development, for a socialist orientation. These are the ruling parties in Algeria, Syria, Somalia, Guinea, Burma, the People's Republic of the Congo and other countries.

The classification outlined above makes it possible clearly to define the position of the various trends with relation to paths of development, a question of fundamental importance in the Third World countries. The national democrats support the non-capitalist path. National reformists lean toward capitalism and the petty-bourgeois Utopian socialists occupy an intermediate position typical for those political forces which have not yet opted for a path of development and not yet formulated a precise political platform.

Of course this classification should not be regarded as the last word on the subject: it should not be assumed that there is nothing in common between these various trends and that they are divided from each other by inseparable barriers. In actual fact there are a good deal of common denominators making it possible for relatively rapid changes in political courses to take place and also transitions from one trend to another. All of them are united by having certain common aims in the anti-imperialist struggle, by national-historical traditions, such as those relating to the liberation movement for example.

The influence of petty-bourgeois ideology makes itself clearly felt in all these trends: to a certain extent it provides their common ideological foundation which for many years to come will continue to predominate in all searches for ideological and political solutions for problems facing the Third World countries.

The influence of scientific socialism is gaining ground everywhere, but not always to an equal extent. In those contexts where its influence is strongest and conditions are particularly favourable for its dissemination old concepts and social theories are being subjected to searching reappraisal. This applies above all to proletarian and revolutionarydemocratic circles, where the spread of scientific socialism is leading to certain organisational and political consequences including the gradual drawing together with scientific socialism of the more consistent and best-grounded revolutionary leaders, groups, parties and their adoption and implementation of initial socialist programmes.

In many countries of Asia and Africa the spread of scientific socialism goes hand in hand with attempts to link together its conceptions, on the one hand, with Utopian socialist concepts and, on the other, with concepts of social equality widely represented in the great religions of the countries of the East (Islam, Buddhism) and iii their social thought. There is no insurmountable barrier between these two forms of development of socialist thought. Religion as yet deeply permeates social thought in these countries. Tendencies of both the first and the second line to further the influence of scientific socialism in civil and religious social thought are highly relative and they are frequently to be found alongside each other over rather long periods. Such is the actual state of affairs in these countries and it is imperative that both Marxists and national democrats should take this into consideration.

It should be noted that in both the first and the second case the attitude to a scientific comprehension of socialism is gradually coming to be the criterion of the attitude to social progress as such, of the ability to pursue a realistic internal and foreign policy that meets the people's needs. The approach to scientific socialism is coming to represent the objective class basis and plumb-line for distinguishing between political and class forces and for rallying together the supporters of the Left bloc against the forces of imperialism and reaction.

The complexity of the situation and the acuteness of the social struggle surrounding the question of socialism in its true form should on no account be underestimated. Petty-

* Socialist International Information, Vol. XIV, No. 10, 1964, p. 114.

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bourgeois aspirations are very strong in national democracy, aspirations which in one form or another are based on the theory of class conciliation. As a result much time is wasted to no effect in searching for ways of conciliating the forces of reaction and progress, which frequently leads to political miscalculations and sometimes to crises.

The incompatibility of class interests of the old and the new is not always appreciated at first glance but rather over the course of years, in part, by stages, in certain spheres of ideology, politics or economics. This is evidently an inevitable process given the specific nature of the class struggle in conditions of social backwardness.

There are quite a number of shortcomings to be found in the socialist conceptions of national democracy, yet nevertheless there is no doubt that they reflect a sincere desire to break away from capitalism and engage in a consistent antiimperialist struggle, so as to oppose capitalism and the influence of the Western and national bourgeoisie by the struggle for social progress and peace. This has been and will continue for a long time to be the essential element in the alliance and rapprochement between the adherents of scientific socialism and national democracy.

Among the national democrats who are in the lead of the initial general-democratic stage of non-capitalist development the idea is often widespread that every country striving to turn its back on capitalism has its own particular path of transition to socialism, its own "national model" so to speak, which is in no way subject to the influence of general patterns governing the transitional period and which indeed has no need of the latter. The urge to demonstrate that these countries are bound to pursue a path different from the one along which other peoples have advanced towards socialism, and are now doing so, is common to the leaders and ruling circles of a number of national-democratic states. On closer perusal it emerges that literally all progressive social changes undertaken by national democrats in countries following a non-capitalist course---whether this be in order to restrict or expropriate landowners and home or foreign capitalists, in the field of agrarian or industrial policy or with regard to labour legislation---are closely bound to the overall patterns expounded in the theory of scientific socialism

bearing on the revolutionary-democratic stage of the national liberation revolution and the transitional forms this revolution assumes as it evolves in a socialist direction. One's own "model of socialism" turns out to be no more than a temporary and historically explicable tribute to ideological immaturity and those nationalistic views which stem from the class situation and the development of the class struggle in the particular country.

National democracy is searching for solutions, struggling and moving forward: it is now in the process of the difficult transition to social changes and on the whole is evolving in a historically correct direction. Stagnation is alien to genuine national democrats and this gives us reason to hope that in the future too they will make the most of those ideological and revolutionary opportunities opening up before them, bearing in mind the requirements of revolutionary development, their own and international experience in the course of advance towards social progress. Revolutionary democrats while loyal to national, historical and cultural traditions seek to synthesise these with the ideas of scientific socialism. National democracy is advancing along a difficult but promising path in the struggle for independence, democracy and social progress for the newly liberated peoples.

The question as to the correlation and interpenetration of national and social factors in the liberation struggle has always been and remains infinitely complex. It requires of Marxists-Leninists a wide political outlook, ideological maturity and experience and a profound and historically concrete analysis of the facts. Only if these conditions are observed will the Marxists-Leninists be able to establish a correct correlation reflecting the situation as it really is. correct proportions between the two trends within the united revolutionary struggle---the national anti-imperialist trend and the class-based anti-capitalist trend---without attaching too much or too little importance to either of the two. As a result of the spreading of scientific socialism in the East we are now witnessing the inspiring process of the social awakening of the Asian and African peoples following on their victories in the liberation struggle for national inde-

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pendence, an awakening for which among others the adherents of scientific socialism---the Marxists-Leninists--- have worked and are working so hard and selflessly.

The Marxist Approach to Non-Marxist Socialism in the Developing Countries

A definition of a scientifically and politically correct approach to non-Marxist socialist trends is an essential prerequisite for solving the central problem connected with the attitude of the vanguard of the working people, taking as its guide the scientific socialist world outlook, to the broad democratic strata which at the present time show a preference for non-Marxist political programmes.

In the developing countries non-Marxist trends have become widespread and at the present period they play a leading role in the political life of a number of countries. As a rule this role is a progressive, anti-imperialist, revolutionising one---a state of affairs which sets apart petty-- bourgeois democracy in the Third World from that to be found in Europe and America.

For the Third World countries---and this also sets them apart from the capitalist states of Europe and America---the strong influence of non-Marxist socialist trends, mainly antiimperialist and democratic, although manifesting various tendencies and veering in varying degrees towards either petty-bourgeois or consistently socialist ideas, is an objective and inevitable phenomenon at the present stage. In Europe petty-bourgeois ideology, that naturally enough has never disappeared completely from the horizon, finds new leases of life and at times gathers considerable momentum as a result of insufficient attention paid to work with the masses that have a natural propensity for petty-bourgeois attitudes, or as a result of an inapt approach to such work. Circumstances favourable to upsurges of petty-bourgeois moods come and go and together with them fashions for various versions of petty-bourgeois socialism. The petty-bourgeois tide is subject to ebbs and flows: it is always present in social affairs but by no means always plays an influential role. Petty-bourgeois ideology does not have a sufficiently firm foundation to be able to exert a steady influence over the masses, the prole-

tariat included. Class polarisation makes this impossible, the clear shaping of the two leading political forces, the bourgeoisie and the working class.

In the Third World (even the more developed of the economically underdeveloped countries, such as India) we find quite a different picture. From the economic, political, social and ideological point of view the Third World is a regular ``ocean'' of petty-bourgeoisdom. This can be explained by the tremendous numerical preponderance of the peasantry, gradually undergoing class stratification, and of the petty bourgeoisie in the towns, which together account for up to 80 or 90 per cent of the population. The petty-- bourgeois ideology mainly of a nationalistic type and having an anti-imperialist trend and deeply religious roots, in one form or another constitutes the predominant form of mass consciousness and will evidently continue to do so for a long time to come. Wide scope for action is open to the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie. In many countries of Asia and Africa forces in a position to lead the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie (the bourgeoisie or the working class) have not yet fully detached themselves from the petty-bourgeois milieu, made a clean break with it, and are still weak and ill-prepared for action. This state of affairs characterises the social structure of those countries which have not yet become completely capitalist once and for all. Among these countries a certain group can already be singled out in which the petty bourgeoisie, on coming to power, has started to put pressure to bear on capital and shows no desire to let capitalism take root.

There is no problem about deciding which course is better ---Marxist or non-Marxist socialism, or which of the two is based on science and which on illusions, and which corresponds more closely to the demands of progress.

However a real problem is presented by the question as to the role of the various (sometimes fundamentally quite different) trends of non-Marxist socialism in the modern revolutionary process and as to the attitude that should be adopted to them by Marxists-Leninists: this problem is always most complex and highly important in view of the

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tremendous influence which all manner of socialist trends have acquired in the developing countries.

This problem must not be approached without a clear understanding of the socio-political essence of the stage which the countries that have gained their independence in the course of the last fifteen to twenty years are now going through. The issue of non-Marxist socialism in the Third World cannot be correctly analysed without taking into consideration the prospects for non-capitalist development.

Sometimes assertions are made to the effect that the national liberation revolutions have become an inseparable part of the world proletarian revolution. Strictly speaking this is inexact, indeed wrong. Lenin spoke in this context of social revolution, not of proletarian revolution and drew a distinct line between the two. For Lenin the struggle of the colonial peoples to achieve their national independence constituted part of the world revolutionary process, an important stage in the social transformation of the world, but not a part of the world proletarian revolution. Socialist revolution and the national liberation movement are two revolutionary currents objectively destined to come together, having a common enemy---imperialism, and sharing common interests. Opportunities for co-operation between the two are inexhaustible and wide horizons for such co-operation are opening up before them, as a result of the fact that the national liberation movement, as foreseen by Lenin, after originally embarking on a struggle to achieve political independence inevitably directs its efforts, if of course it is consistent and revolutionary, against imperialism as a whole, and in the final analysis against capitalism as such. Hence Lenin outlined the task of "bringing together" these two revolutionary currents, without ever actually identifying the two, ever mindful of the qualitative definiteness of the component parts of the world revolutionary process and the specific character of the tasks before each of them.

The attitude to non-Marxist socialism in the newly liberated countries depends to a large extent on the stage of historical development already reached by the former colonial countries, and also on the way in which the link between the national liberation revolution and socialism is interpreted. If the national liberation movement is regarded

as part of the world proletarian revolution then non-Marxist socialism is basically inacceptable and should be categorically rejected, for in that case it would reflect the penetration of the proletarian socialist movement by concepts alien to true, i.e., scientific socialism. If however the national liberation movement, representing one of the currents of social revolution, is of a general-democratic character and is a movement of the broad popular masses directed against imperialism, feudalism, the monopolies and reaction, and is inspired by subjective-socialist aspirations of the proletarian and non-proletarian working masses and the best section of their leaders, then the existence of trends of non-Marxist socialism is quite logical and it goes without saying that some of these trends---the revolutionary-democratic ones---are or will be finding themselves a role, sometimes of prime importance, among the supporters of social progress and revolution.

Thus it can be seen that any evaluation of non-Marxist socialist trends in the newly liberated countries must start out from a qualitative definition of the stage of historical development in question and following on from that---of the strategic aim of the movement. Herein lies the basis of all possible theoretical differences in approaches not only to the issue of non-Marxist socialism, but also to the national liberation movement as a whole. Herein lies the watershed between the Leninist course advocating co-operation with all revolutionary anti-imperialist forces and the policy which, as practical experience has shown, leads objectively to the isolation of the proletarian vanguard.

Precisely this question is being solved in a Leninist spirit by the present-day Marxist conception of non-capitalist development which was confirmed and elaborated more fully at the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU.

The non-capitalist path of development, as pointed out above, is not universal or binding for all countries of the Third World, but in so far as the transitional stage of noncapitalist development has already become a historical necessity for many of those countries, and in so far as it opens up for them the prospect of social progress, it is historically inevitable that some forms of revolutionary national-democratic ideology will for a long time play a

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leading role, and what is more a progressive role in these countries.

There is no doubt that socialism in the countries of Asia and Africa will of course be built on the basis of the merging of scientific socialism and the working-class movement. Yet if this question is approached from a concretely historical point of view and thought is devoted to the fact as to which steps in the direction of socialism can be made by these countries today, then it becomes quite clear that one cannot be confined to the thesis recognising the necessity for the merging of scientific socialism and the working-class movement, despite the enormous and decisive importance of such a task. In the majority of the African and Asian countries the working-class movement is too weak and too poorly organised and its links with the petty bourgeoisie are too close, while the influence of scientific socialism is too small for the future to be staked on these factors alone. Such an approach would be tantamount to apprenticing 70 per cent of mankind to the capitalists, ushering in a new stage of world capitalist development and merely waiting until that capitalist development gave rise to the emergence of a powerful working class in the Third World, that would be capable of directing its political struggle according to the principles laid down in the theory of scientific socialism. To adopt this stand would in fact mean that the Third World could advance towards socialism only by way of capitalism, "a line fundamentally contradicting Marxism-Leninism and the theory of non-capitalist development.

A realistic revolutionary approach to this issue reveals that time and time again socialism has to be built up not from ideal material, as can only be the progressive working class, but from the imperfect material which objective reality places in the hands of the revolutionary. As far as the majority of Afro-Asian countries are concerned, this means that the first steps in the direction of socialism can only be undertaken with the support of the petty-bourgeois, nonproletarian working masses, the peasantry, the pre-- proletariat and the semi-proletariat. These masses are as yet objectively not in a position to assimilate scientific socialism as an integral world outlook, but in so far as they are spontaneously drawn to socialism and in practice oppose the capitalists,

they can be gradually brought round to an understanding and appreciation of scientific socialism. It is necessary to pick out, uphold and develop the features of genuine socialism in the petty-bourgeois theories, which are almost certain to dominate in many Afro-Asian countries for many years to come. It appears that precisely this course has been charted by the international communist movement in its concept of non-capitalist development, which presupposes that the parties of national democracy, non-Marxist parties, particularly their Left-wing groups, are capable to advance in the direction of scientific socialism and in the end, in the course of their struggle, surmounting the contradictions in their path, to assimilate its principles despite having started out from a non-Marxist national socialism.

This possibility of a transition from Left trends of national socialism to scientific socialism should on no account be underestimated, as happens when all nonproletarian socialist schools of thought in African and Asian countries are presented as searches for a ``third'' or ``middle'' way between capitalism and socialism. It is vital to adopt a discriminating approach to the socio-political thought of Afro-Asian countries. The classification given earlier in this chapter can provide a useful starting-point for such an approach. Revolutionary democracy is not a search for a ``third'' way. In a number of countries revolutionary democracy is taking the first practical step towards socialism. With regard to prospects, and to the interests of the present day and the future, the most important phenomenon is the national democrats' active anti-imperialist struggle and their constructive steps to build a new society together with theii' struggle against capitalism as a social system, not the fact that the national democrats still represent a non-Marxist trend. The finest representatives of national democracy are drawing nearer to scientific socialism and this opens up broad possibilities for co-operation and mutual understanding.

In his article "An Attempt at a Classification of the Political Parties of Russia" (1906) Lenin, in an analysis of the course and prospects of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, pointed out that its outcome "depends most

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of all on the political conduct of the small producers". He went on to write: "That the big bourgeoisie will betray the revolution is beyond doubt (they have already betrayed it two-thirds). After October and December, no further proof is required that, as far as the Russian workers are concerned, the proletariat will be the most reliable fighter. The petty bourgeoisie, however, is the variable quantity which will determine the outcome. Social-Democrats must therefore watch very carefully its present political oscillations between abject Cadet loyalty and bold, ruthless, revolutionary struggle; and not only watch that process, of course, but as far as possible bring proletarian influence to bear upon it."*

Much is different in the Third World, in particular in Asia and Africa, from what it was at the time of the first Russian revolution. Yet Lenin's tenet to the effect that the outcome of the revolution is predetermined by the position of the class of petty-bourgeois producers applies just as much to the Afro-Asian countries today, if not more so, than it did to Russia at the beginning of this century, for these countries have an infinitely lower level of capitalist development, and a much weaker working class, while the Marxist-Leninist parties in that small group of countries where they exist enjoy only most limited ideological and political influence. In most Afro-Asian countries Marxist-Leninist parties have not yet appeared. This accounts for the rare degree of relevance that the task outlined by Lenin for the Russian SocialDemocrats possesses for the Asian and African countries: to influence as far as possible the behaviour of the petty-- bourgeois masses in the spirit of proletarianism.

In the modern national liberation movement in the countries of Asia and Africa it is the peasant and the urban semiproletarian, petty-bourgeois masses who are one of the most vital revolutionary forces. The elaboration of a correct attitude to them that will promote the unification of all supporters of progressive, revolutionary change is a most important task for the Marxist-Leninist vanguard. This is the milieu among which allies should be sought, with which a common language should be found, and whose support and understanding is absolutely vital for advance towards socialism.

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 228 (author's italics.--- R.U.).

This special role of the petty-bourgeois masses and the petty-bourgeois political forces in Africa and Asia makes it imperative to adopt an attitude to them, new in many respects.

Of course petty-bourgeois parties and petty-bourgeois ideology are by no means uniform in character. Lenin exhorted his followers to distinguish between the parties of the revolutionary petty bourgeois and the parties of the opportunist petty bourgeois. Of course, it can only be a question of alliance with and support from the revolutionary pettybourgeois parties. Lenin pointed out that "the very idea of a bloc with the petty bourgeoisie, who are supported by the capitalists, is a betrayal of socialism"."" It goes without saying, as Lenin made a point of stressing, that "the petty-bourgeois masses cannot help vacillating between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat",""* and this applies not only to the opportunist sections but also to the revolutionary sections of the petty bourgeoisie. These considerations are as correct as they are now topical, which fact obliges Marxist-Leninist parties to adopt a discriminating approach to the petty-bourgeois masses, aspire after mutual understanding with them and ally themselves with all those petty-bourgeois forces which are capable of playing a positive role in the revolution.

From a practical point of view at the present stage the question of relations with national-democratic parties assumes prime importance. While remaining unconditionally loyal to the theory of scientific socialism, Marxists-Leninists must promote the overcoming by the masses of those elements of Utopian, supra-class conceptions that are still peculiar to national democracy, counteract its inconsistency and its tendencies to compromise, etc. Yet this is not the sum total of the tasks of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard, its role extending much further as regards national democracy. "Being aware that its class interests differ from the interests of the revolutionary democrats, the proletariat is compelled to organise in a strictly independent class party," Lenin wrote. "But its duty to criticise idle dreams never causes the socialist proletariat to forget its positive duty to do all it can

* Ibid., Vol. 24, p. 156. ** Ibid., Vol. 25, p. 118.

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to support the revolutionary democrats in their struggle against the old authorities and the old order, warning the people against the instability of the liberal bourgeoisie, and counteracting the harmful effects of this instability by its fighting agreement with the revolutionary peasantry."* "Today there is nothing more important for the success of the revolution than this organisation, education and political training of the revolutionary bourgeois democrats."** These words of Lenin's dating from May 1906 and referring to the situation in Russia are extraordinarily relevant to conditions now obtaining in all Afro-Asian countries without exception.

The prospects of non-capitalist development bring to the forefront, as the decisive factor of success, the alliance of Communist and national-democratic parties. Such an alliance does not mean that there are no contradictions between the two; however, it is important that every effort should be made to ensure that these differences do not assume anything like an all-important character at the present stage, and that they be removed or held back to a later time, when the course of historical development may be such that these contradictions will be surmounted not having acquired critical acuteness, an antagonistic character or that degree of acuteness which undermines and rules out any alliance between the two forces. This alliance is not a temporary phenomenon, but a long-term, lasting prospect. It is extremely important that having come into being at the " generaldemocratic stage it should continue and be consolidated at the socialist stage.

The need for this alliance is based on the fact that the national democrats represent a revolutionary force aware that in our epoch no advance is possible without specific steps in a socialist direction and boldly taking these steps, a force that is capable of not only anti-imperialist but also anticapitalist action, that opposes bourgeois conciliatory trends and on a number of fundamental questions is drawing nearer to a scientific socialist position.

This alliance with the national democrats is not a merging together; it signifies no loss of independence, it is not un-

conditional and is undertaken with specific aims in mind and thus possesses a relative character. It is an alliance against imperialism and reaction, against bourgeois national-- reformism, against petty-bourgeois opportunism prone to drawing closer together with the neo-colonialists. It is an alliance aimed at consolidating genuinely socialist tendencies within the framework of national democracy. Within these limits national democracy has every right to count on the all-out support of the Marxist-Leninist parties. Such an alliance presupposes the Marxists' ability to renounce all prejudice and evaluate the national-democratic parties by analysing their practical activities, looking forward not back, retaining the ability to pick out the various tendencies and currents and to establish contact based on mutual understanding at various levels.

Basing our assessment on the actual state of affairs in a number of countries it is important to recognise the ruling character of the national-democratic parties, to appreciate their leading role in the national liberation movement and in non-capitalist development. The problem of leadership---and this applies in equal degree to the Communist and the national-democratic parties---is decided not by declarations as to who has assumed a leading role or whose it should be, but rather by the actual condition of the parties, their real influence, their ability to win mass support and confidence.

Any alliance naturally acquires good will on both sides. Political struggle is bringing the national democrats to the conclusion that the Marxists-Leninists are their only reliable allies for the implementation of their progressive programmes, and it will continue to do so in the future as well. Any weakening of this alliance will lead to a weakening of the front of progressive anti-imperialist forces as a whole. This means that the national democrats, if they are aspiring to preserve and consolidate their revolutionary programme, have no other choice open to them but to renounce once and for all distrust and suspicion of Marxists-Leninists, to acknowledge the inevitability of their existence and their development as an ideologically and organisationally independent, but friendly and allied political force. It would be naive to assume that it is at all possible to remain loyal

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 456-57. ** Ibid., p. 413.

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to the ideals of revolutionary democracy while opposing the politically conscious proletariat and its party.

Breakdowns in relations with the Communists, which find expression in waves of repression against them, are still to be encountered in the activities of some national-democratic parties but they are not sufficient to alter the scientifically substantiated Marxist-Leninist policy. Proletarian parties do hot let themselves be swayed by emotions, they base their activities on objective class analysis. In July 1917 Lenin wrote: "It would be a profound error to think that the revolutionary proletariat is capable of `refusing' to support the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks against the counterrevolution by way of `revenge', so to speak, for the support they gave in smashing the Bolsheviks, in shooting down soldiers at the front and in disarming the workers. First, this would be applying philistine conceptions of morality to the proletariat (since, for the good of the cause, the proletariat will always support not only the vacillating petty bourgeoisie but even the big bourgeoisie); secondly---and that is the important thing---it would be a philistine attempt to obscure the political substance of the situation by ' moralising'."*

This idea of Lenin's is incontestably correct and possesses fundamental importance extending far beyond the confines of the particular epoch to which it refers. Of course anticommunist measures complicate the establishment of mutual understanding between Marxists-Leninists and national democrats, between progressive forces in general, and even when they are of a temporary nature they cannot but leave their mark both on the essence of national democracy and also on the course of the national liberation revolution. They should not be allowed to happen in any circumstances whatever. They should be ruled out of the practical dealings between two historically allied and friendly forces. They always play first and foremost into the hands of the imperialists and reactionaries. They always augur collapse of national-democratic regimes and hence an overall defeat for the front of progressive forces.

A firm alliance between Marxists-Leninists and national democrats is the fundamental condition for advance towards progress and socialism in the countries of the Third World. This factor is also one of the basic theoretical and practical aspects of the Marxist-Leninist attitude to non-Marxist socialism of revolutionary democrats in present-day conditions.

^::' V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 186.

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SOCIALISM AND NATIONALISM IN AFRICA

During the past decade Africa has, for the first time in its long history, become the arena of a most acute internal ideological and political struggle that much earlier had embraced all the other continents. Despite the diversity of the conditions in the different parts of the world this is, in the final analysis in Africa, too, a struggle between the forces of capitalism and socialism, of revolution and reaction, of national independence and oppression.

The uncompromising clash between the two social systems is unfolding throughout the African continent. Imperialism uses its political, economic and military strength to preserve its dominating positions, support the remaining colonialist and racist regimes in Africa, reinforce neo-colonialism and prolong the exploitation of the African peoples. As regards the Soviet Union and the entire socialist community they see their task and duty in abolishing the last centres of racism and colonialism, supporting the just struggle of the peoples of the former colonial countries for complete national independence and helping them to shake off the chains of economic bondage and win liberation from all forms of imperialist and neo-colonialist exploitation.

In Africa the struggle between the forces of capitalism and socialism is not confined to this conflict. It is wider and deeper. It is conducted chiefly by internal forces in the process of the internal social demarcation of the African population and under the impact of the main contradiction of modern times on a global scale. The mainspring of the

ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism in Africa is that the African countries that have won liberation from direct political oppression now face the problem of choosing the orientation for the life of the millions who have been awakened to political activity, of deciding what system---capitalism or socialism---ensures complete national liberation and social progress.

Unquestionably, capitalism is fighting for the minds of Africans under unfavourable conditions. It has discredited itself in Africa to such an extent and has associated itself so closely with the brutalities of colonialism and imperialist exploitation that it can no longer claim general recognition as a prospect for the continent's development. It is not accidental that today almost all African leaders have adopted socialist slogans. While being fully aware of the significance of capitalism's bankruptcy and of the great attraction of socialism, one cannot assume that a general verbal recognition of socialist ideals always signifies a genuinely socialist choice in practice.

In Africa, today, as in other parts of the world, they are finding that they have to camouflage both pre-capitalism and capitalism. The almost universal recognition of socialist slogans does not mean that capitalism has been ousted, that it has been finally eradicated and can be written off, that the struggle between capitalism and socialism has ended. On the contrary, this struggle continues day after day in all spheres of life throughout the continent. It is being conducted in the sphere of politics and in the sphere of theory over the interpretation of abstract socialist propositions, of some principles of socialism so to speak, within the framework of ``socialist'' ideology. In this context the African states are in some measure repeating the experience of other countries.

The history of many countries in Europe, Asia and America knows of innumerable instances where bourgeois and petty-bourgeois notions were injected into the theory of socialism in order to adapt it to the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie. In the same way as in these countries socialist thought developed in the ceaseless struggle between bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and proletarian trends, in present-day Africa the main content of political thought is determined by the struggle round the understand-

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ing of the real substance of socialism, this being inevitably linked with the attitude of the different class forces.

All the African countries have many tasks in common in consolidating national independence, ensuring economic growth and raising the living standard and cultural level of the population.

On account of the similarity of the initial level of development in many areas, some common features and principles, common social forms and institutions and methods of economic management and political leadership are to be observed in the economic and political life of many African countries. However, one can distinctly trace the formation of various class political trends, the gravitation of some forces towards a socialist orientation and of others towards bourgeois national-reformist "models of evolution". A comparative analysis of present-day political thought in the African countries clearly brings to light common features and a differentiation on the African political scene.

Practice, which alone makes it possible to determine the real significance of ideas, is the true test of every political doctrine. But when it is a matter only of development trends, their character is shown largely by the ideological platform of the persons or social forces backing them if, of course, this is not a deliberately demagogic platform.

A close examination of the platform of the governing parties and leaders of the African countries shows that several socio-class trends have formed or are taking shape in African political life and that in some areas the distinctions between them have become fundamental despite the common features often uniting all of them. In ideology these distinctions are frequently more pronounced than in the economic, political and social spheres.

Indeed, if we scrutinise the economic and political life of the young African states we shall see that in most of them there are a mixed economy, private enterprise (in varying degrees), state planning, a one-party system, a considerable centralisation of power, and so on and so forth. Although these are, at first sight, common features they are not identical and follow various orientations, which become self-- evident when we compare the prevailing political ideas. It is enough to compare, for instance, the notions about the eco-

nomic foundation of socialism, the private sector and its relationship to socialism as propounded by the ideologists of Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Tanzania and Guinea to see that these are trends in socio-political thought that differ from each other in principle.

In present non-Marxist African political thought we can clearly discern three trends: national-bourgeois reformism, petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism, and national democracy associated with the socialist orientation of new African states, i.e., with non-capitalist development. Despite the certain divergence on this issue in Marxist literature (some investigators feel that petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism should not be singled out as an independent trend), this division is by and large being recognised. There is every reason to distinguish anti-imperialist petty-bourgeois socialism as a school of African political thought. It inevitably appears in societies where patriarchal-communal practices are predominant or are strongly entrenched. The urban petty-bourgeois strata and the rural patriarchal strata comprise the majority of the population and it is not surprising that their ideas not only influence the ideological platforms of the African nationalist ideologists but also tend to form an independent trend of socio-political thought, albeit an unstable, intermediate trend between national reformism and national democracy.

African national-reformism, a typical manifestation of bourgeois nationalism under new conditions, is strongly influenced by modern Western bourgeois-reformist notions about the changes in the nature of capitalism and about the modern state, which, it is asserted, stands above classes. The ideologists of the national-bourgeois wing of African social thought deny the applicability of the Marxist analysis of the historical process to African conditions and are particularly dead set against the Marxist theory of classes and the class struggle. The thesis of national and, sometimes, racial exclusiveness is in the main used as a means, so to say, of refuting Marxism and transferring the bourgeois concept of a welfare society to African soil.

National, or revolutionary, democracy is a major trend in African political thought and practice. It flatly rejects modern capitalism and adopts many of the basic elements of scientific socialism. Most of the national-democratic schools and ideol-

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ogists recognise the general laws of historical development and the doctrine of the class struggle. They regard the struggle for socialism not as class co-operation and general welfare but as a bitter conflict between the working people and the exploiting elements in the nation. The national democrats are enforcing far-reaching social reforms that prepare the ground for socialism. They do not recognise the MarxistLeninist doctrine of the proletarian dictatorship; the working class and its leading role in social reforms has only been mentioned recently in the programme documents of some parties and in the pronouncements of some revolutionary ideologists (Somalia, the People's Republic of the Congo).

The petty-bourgeois branch of African Utopian political thought has stopped somewhere on the road (less than halfway!) between national reformism and national democracy. On the one hand, it is openly anti-imperialist, sincerely anticapitalist and devoted to the popular notions of equality and justice. But, on the other hand, the petty-bourgeois Utopians are still frightened of scientific socialism and still cannot shake off the bourgeois notions about scientific socialism. For that reason they have not rid themselves of distrust for scientific socialism, a distrust that has been to some extent or, to be more exact, is being surmounted by the Left national democrats. The subjective socialism of the petty-bourgeois branch of African political thought combines with reformist illusions that are largely patriarchal and Utopian.

One may get the impression that petty-bourgeois utopianism has its face turned entirely to the past. But a specific of backward agrarian societies lies precisely in the fact that at first glance retrograde notions, which are founded wholly on tradition, can work for the future and serve the interests of progress if they are not divested of revolutionary elements, i.e., democracy, anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-- imperialism. Lenin noted this circumstance in his analysis of the doctrine propounded by Sun Yat-sen. African petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism can also play a positive role when it preserves its devotion to the ideals of the working people. Where this is the case it joins hands with national democracy and sheds some of its illusions. If in the contradictory complex of petty-bourgeois notions the upper hand is gained by bourgeois

reformism, it aligns itself with the national-bourgeois wing and gradually loses its revolutionary potential. In that case, as had happened in Russia, petty-bourgeois Utopian socialism unavoidably slides into an imitation of the liberal-bourgeois brand of Narodism.

The three main trends in present-day African political thought (in speaking of the three trends, the author proceeds from the contention that Marxist-Leninist ideology in Africa is the subject of an independent study) should be analysed under headings such as philosophical foundations of ideology, the attitude to scientific socialism, religion and national traditions, the view on classes, the class struggle, the state, democracy, political parties and so on.

However, in assessing present-day African political thought the basic problem depends on its attitude to socialism and nationalism.

This is not a simple problem. In Africa calls for socialism have been and continue to be made under extraordinarily unique conditions. They spring not so much from acuteness of the class contradictions in local society as from the national liberation movement against imperialism, against foreign capitalist oppression. They are predicated not by the maturity of national capitalism but by its low development level, by the given country's overall backwardness in face of the external enslaving forces that penetrate deep into social life. Most of the African leaders adopt socialist slogans chiefly because they quite naturally regard socialism as the best if not the only method of fostering social progress. As the African leaders quite rightly see it, socialism's prime task is to ensure the rapid development of the young states and strengthen their independence.

Various social trends fuse with the socialist notions currently widespread on the African scene. These include the striving of the vanguard of the working people to achieve social justice by means of the class struggle, the illusions of the bulk of the petty-bourgeois population about a patriarchal golden age and family relations between classes, and the tendency of the national-bourgeois elements to use socialism's popularity for, what they term, the modernisation of society and the creation of the conditions for the swift growth of national capital. The contradictions and struggle between

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these trends are evident. But the fact that they are still capable of somehow getting along together even within one and the same political organisation is due not only to the inadequately precise class differentiation and the vagueness of the notions propounded by the African ideologists but also to the objective concurrence of the interests of the different social forces in the struggle against imperialism, for national independence and progress. Hence the heterogeneity of the class foundation of so-called African ideology, including the ideological trends that have adopted socialist slogans, and hence the intertwining of elements of socialism and nationalism in that ideology.

Small wonder, therefore, that in this situation the African politicians and ideologists as a rule intertwine socialist doctrines with African nationalism, and this type of socialism is placed in the service, as it were, of anti-imperialist and anti-racist nationalism. Besides, the very content of socialism is accepted only as a means of ensuring a given country's independent development regardless of the class character of the political regime and the social reforms. This understanding of socialism is very widespread in Africa and the bourgeois politicians and ideologists of the West naturally endeavour to turn it to account when, giving out the wish for reality, they assert that true socialism has no prospects in Africa, that Africa will inevitably embrace "Western democracy", meaning capitalism. Quite understandably, they ignore not only the subjective intolerance by many strata of African society of capitalism, which for them is synonymous with colonialism, but also the objective conditions inducing these strata to break with capitalism.

Many African statesmen cannot fail to see that the preservation of capitalist social relations, which dooms African states to ``integration'' with the world capitalist economy, is linked with the preservation of exploitation and unequal exchanges on the part of the imperialist states, with the luxurious flowering of new forms of colonialism and growing difference in the economic and material levels of the industrialised countries of Europe and America and the neocolonial African periphery. This is the circumstance making many African countries choose non-capitalist development and carry out radical social reforms of an anti-imperialist,

anti-feudal, anti-monopoly and, more and more frequently, anti-capitalist nature.

For the African countries non-capitalist development opens the road to socialism. One of its prime conditions is that no unfounded, erroneous internal policy should be permitted. It requires close friendship with the world socialist community and consistent anti-imperialism. For the peoples of the African continent selfless, creative labour is becoming the high road to socialism.

The problem of socialism and nationalism in Africa cannot be properly resolved without taking the actual possibilities of non-capitalist development into account. For that reason the ideological aspects of non-capitalist development, i.e., the ideological platform of national democracy, have become the main problem inasmuch as the doctrine of noncapitalist development contains the Marxist methodological approach to the correct solution of the question of the correlation between socialism and nationalism in Africa.

In assessing the socialist orientation of progressive African states there are two extremes that in effect lead to a repudiation of the present-day Marxist understanding of non-- capitalist development and are dangerous in any estimation of the ideological platform of national democracy.

One of these extremes is a striving to identify the platform of national democracy with scientific socialism on the basis of the innumerable assurances given by African political leaders that they recognise scientific socialism, when actually they only borrow some Marxist principles and tenets. This estimation is not in keeping with reality, does not take into account the complexity of the transitional period of non-capitalist development and gives an erroneous characteristic of the classes directing this, one may say, exceedingly important socio-economic and political experiment. It idealises national democracy and ignores the distinctions between national democrats and Marxists, distinctions which are considerable but not decisive at the present stage and do not inevitably lead to a split.

The other extreme is the dangerous nihilistic, sectarian repudiation of non-capitalist development as a step towards socialism. A logical outcome of this attitude is the complete rejection of any socialist content in national democracy. It

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refuses to see the revolutionary, anti-capitalist nature of national democracy and stigmatises it as a common manifestation of national-reformism, i.e., bourgeois nationalism, and makes no distinction between national revolutionary democracy and the other, reformist, national-bourgeois trends in African political thought.

In such cases people usually say that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It would be a wasted effort to try to find this golden mean, because it is simply non-existent. The Marxist concept of non-capitalist development is based on the contention that in many African countries the conditions for the direct building of socialism have not yet taken shape. Consequently, anti-colonial nationalism has not outworn itself, has not ceased to be a progressive factor in some areas of the struggle. Hence, in the struggle against imperialism, the combination of elements of socialism and nationalism, the drawing together of the tasks of two qualitatively different stages of the revolution---the national liberation, democratic phase and the socialist stage---is quite natural although it does not mean that one is growing into the other. Herein lie the most important, though far from all, qualitative specifics of non-capitalist development under the leadership of the national democrats.

National democracy may be linked with nationalism, as is done by the opponents of non-capitalist development. But by merely stating this one takes the risk of making a gross mistake. In itself nationalism is heterogeneous. There is reformist, bourgeois nationalism, which champions the interests of the privileged classes and is prepared to accept and arrives at compromises with imperialism to the detriment of the given country's independence. There is radical, revolutionary nationalism, which refuses to be reconciled with imperialism and neo-colonialism; it is permeated with a spirit of democracy and is capable of decisive action not only against foreign but also against local exploiters, and embarks on a change of the social mode of production. It thus ceases to be solely nationalism. This is the finest section of national revolutionary democracy. It is obvious that the real correlation of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist practice in these two cases is quite different. In the first case socialist ideas are used as a screen for a basically national-bourgeois platform

(although it should not be ruled out that through these ideas the democratic forces influence the leadership gravitating towards bourgeois ``models'')- In the second case socialist ideas serve as the foundation for a progressive popular movement that is not yet consistently socialist but is capable of putting into effect many of the reforms paving the way for the building of socialism and for a fundamental reorientation in the future. National democracy is contradictory and its policy is unstable. But it is radical, revolutionary and, in the long run, capable of successfully fulfilling the tasks of the present general-democratic stage of the development of the African states. Of course, the degree of consistency and the depth of the successes in carrying this important stage to completion are directly proportional to the firmness of the anti-imperialist policy, the democratisation of the regime, the extent of the reliance on the working masses, and the union with scientific socialism and the world socialist community. Friendly criticism of national democracy may be constructive. It would be wrong to think that by virtue of its pettybourgeois revolutionary character national democracy is negative and hostile to socialism. National-democratic, nonproletarian revolutionism is an historically necessary stage of development in cases when proletarian revolutionism has not appeared or has not matured to the extent of becoming the main factor of social development. Revolutionary democracy can be a firm ally of the proletariat if it does not slide into bourgeois nationalism, if it breaks away from the latter. The proletariat and the radical petty-bourgeois strata have always had many interests in common. On the ability of the proletariat and its party to correctly understand and, in co-- operation with the revolutionary democrats, express these common interests, take the position of their petty-bourgeois allies into consideration and strengthen the alliance with them depends, in the long run, the success of its mission as the vanguard of the revolutionary forces regardless of whether it is recognised as such by the petty-bourgeois masses and parties, especially in countries where the petty-bourgeois strata comprise the bulk of the population and where, consequently, their behaviour in many ways determines the orientation of development. Needless to say, as was noted by Lenin, "the petty-bourgeois masses cannot help vacillating between the

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bourgeoisie and the proletariat".* This applies not only to the reformist but also to the revolutionary section of the petty bourgeoisie. But all this by no means obviates the need for a differentiated approach to the petty-bourgeois masses, for understanding with them and for a durable alliance with all the petty-bourgeois forces capable of playing a positive role in the revolution without relinquishing political independence and the class position.

The future will show the direction in which African national democracy evolves. But today it is quite evident that it is heterogeneous. Two wings with a certain centre between them are gradually forming. One wing aspires to deepen the socialist trends and draw closer to scientific socialism, and comes forward against anti-communism and anti-Sovietism. The other is afraid of further progress towards socialism, preferring to mark time without realising that it thereby dooms itself to retrogression, to a return to the bosom of national reformism, the break with which has been a qualitative advance in the development of political thought and the revolutionary movement. Which of these trends will triumph? In the different countries the contradictions between them will probably be resolved dissimilarly. But it may be said quite confidently that in Africa, and to a certain extent in Asia, national democracy has played and its finest representatives will continue to play a progressive, revolutionising role, that it has awakened the masses to political activity, helped to spread the teaching of socialism, put into effect a series of radical social reforms and proved to be an historically necessary phase of development.

People are quite justifiably speaking and writing of the growing attraction of creative Marxism-Leninism. MarxismLeninism itself and its irresistible force of attraction are factors giving rise to the hitherto unknown and exceedingly important phenomenon that the anti-imperialist, anti-- colonialist, anti-racial general-democratic movements, which ideologically differ from Marxism-Leninism, strive to use some of its key ideas and provisions. This is indicative and, in most cases, it is effective. It is not surprising that some ideologists of these movements give out their theoretical and

political constructions as Marxist-Leninist without taking the trouble to make a deep study and understand MarxismLeninism as an integral, indivisible teaching, where all the components form an organic whole.

The Marxist-Leninist teaching does not tolerate dismemberment into isolated parts. Equally, it does not allow for a mechanical fusion of its own views with the ideological tenets of petty-bourgeois revolutionary nationalism, much less of national reformism.

Nevertheless a close political alliance between scientific socialism and the national liberation, anti-imperialist movement in any mutually acceptable political form in a given country or between countries is not only historically possible and desirable but prescribed by the course of the common struggle against imperialism. This alliance is one of the key guarantees of the common victory and of the ideological and political union between scientific socialism and revolutionarydemocratic, anti-imperialist nationalism in the Third World.

The demand of the day is not that the ideology of revolutionary democracy should be given out for scientific socialism ---this would be an inexcusable delusion, to say the least---or that scientific socialism should be brought down to the consciousness level of the petty bourgeoisie but that in action, not in words, in the process of the joint struggle against imperialism, for social progress the two should take the road of broad and close co-operation in the interests of the nation, of the working people.

There is no doubt that this road, no matter how difficult it may be, will, if it is followed without wandering in the dark, without deviating from dedicated service to the people, lead to the cherished goal, to socialism, and it will bring the forces fighting for it to union on the basis of scientific socialism.

This is not an easy road, but it is the only one if those following it ardently desire victory.

V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 25. p. US.

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SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM, GANDHISM AND MODERN INDIA

More than twenty years after the tragic death of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a victim of Hindu reaction, an evaluation of what the phenomenon referred to as Gandhism in literature and politics really is, still retains its significance.

Gandhism, the sum total of the political, moral, ethical and philosophical concepts which Gandhi put forward during the liberation struggle of the Indian people, is more than something inseparably connected, in the Indian national consciousness, with the long years of struggle for freedom from British imperialist domination. Gandhism is a factor that still makes itself felt in today's ideological, political and class struggle. It is used to influence the masses by almost all the political parties of contemporary India.

Gandhism is deeply rooted in the popular traditions of India, and its social ideals are in many respects of a peasant, petty-bourgeois character. The most important features of Gandhism, stemming from its close ties with, above all, the peasant traditions of Indian society, are its social ideal, Sarvodaya (the welfare of all), and the method for achieving this, Satyagraha (non-violent struggle).

Gandhi's social ideal was a petty-bourgeois, peasant Utopia, the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The establishment of social justice is presented by Gandhi in the light of a return to the "golden age" of self-contained, self-sufficient peasant communes, an age that refuses to accept the ``European'' civilisation of the machine age which he hated so vehemently, and the market-based economic relations hostile to the spirit of the patriarchal countryside

which doomed the commune of peasants and artisans to decline and disintegration.

Gandhi's doctrine of Sarvodaya is, primarily, the eternal yearning of peasants, rural artisans, the urban poor oppressed by foreign rulers and their own feudal lords, merchants and moneylenders, for the society of supposedly equitable human relations that is described with such profound and alluring beauty in the sacred writings of Hinduism. Efforts are made to discover what this society was like in cultural and historical monuments and survivals of the tribal and patriarchal traditions to be found among the different peoples of India. These traditions underlie the very thinking based on Hinduism, that to this day is the foundation of the social psychology of tens of millions of Indian peasants, artisans and petty townsfolk.

Sarvodaya is, at the same time, a completely natural, honest and sincere protest against the capitalist way of life, a protest by social strata which have not as yet grasped practical, scientifically substantiated ways of making society just, seeking but not finding a way out of the unbearable social and material conditions in which they live. This protest reflects the deep anguish of tens of millions of people crushed by the despicable caste system and enslaved by landowners and moneylenders. It reflects the suffering of people who do not appreciate the implications of their situation and hence cannot understand that escape from it lies through establishment of a firm alliance with the revolutionary working class the hateful ``European'' capitalist civilisation has produced. Gandhism denies that the appearance of such a civilisation was inevitable and that compared with the societies which preceded it this civilisation was progressive. Gandhism condemns the Indian peasants and artisans to nothing but sad memories of irrevocably vanished and obviously idealised primitive forms of public life.

Despite its obviously Utopian and archaic character, however, Gandhi's ideal of Sarvodaya objectively played a positive role in the Indian national liberation movement. It convinced wide sections of the rural and urban population that the fight against alien British rule for independence was their immediate concern because it was also a struggle to attain social justice, and a new society that would be based on

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principles whose implementation they yearned for so deeply. Gandhi did not intend to deceive or ensnare the popular masses when he linked the struggle against the colonialists with the attainment of Sarvodaya. His aims were perfectly honest and sincere.

India's independence and the elimination of imperialist domination, those tremendous achievements of the Indian people, are linked with the name of Gandhi, justly enjoying the highest respect. But the political independence won in 1947 did not lead to Sarvodaya. It did not give the working people of India an opportunity to establish a reign of social justice.

Non-violent resistance to colonial oppression is a method based on India's deepest traditions, on the psychology of the Indian peasantry. This tactical method of struggle, like Gandhi's social ideal, is a combination of extreme patience and protest, conservatism and spontaneous revolutionary activity, features typical for Indian peasants who for centuries have been brought up to approach the world from a fatalistic, religious point of view. These features of Gandhism were reflected in the doctrine of Swadeshi. The three aspects of Swadeshi, religious, political and economic, aim at preserving the institutions and customs handed down by history, these to be gradually transformed by non-violent means and lent new content. Here we have deep dissatisfaction with the present and faith in the stability of the past, a refusal to accept anything other than a return to the past and a fear of radical change. These are all classical traits of a mass peasant psychology, in which survivals of a traditional society are still strong, not so much in actual economic affairs though, as in the outlook of the peasants.

A powerful and distinctive feature of Gandhism as an ideology and form of practical politics is its loyalty to national, cultural, historical and religious traditions, its capacity to find in these traditions slogans, memories and images that appeal to the peasant and artisan, its capacity directly and convincingly to link the spiritual life of the peasant and artisan with the requirements of the country's independent development and social change as understood by tens of millions of ordinary people. This loyalty to popular traditions and conceptions of a just life is the secret of the tremendous

influence which Gandhi's ideas and his personality exerted on the Indian people.

The above circumstances allow us to define Gandhism as a profoundly Indian ideology the nature of which is essentially petty-bourgeois. Such an understanding of Gandhism, that is possibly open to question, does not by any means detract from Marxist research of this problem, which has demonstrated the close ties between Gandhism and the interests of the Indian national bourgeoisie and the way the latter has effectively used Gandhism to advance its own class objectives. It is merely important to bear in mind that the connection between the national bourgeoisie and Gandhism was more complex, or at any rate not so direct and immediate, as usually claimed.

The Indian national bourgeoisie would not have made use of the ideology of Gandhism, or such wide use, if it had not been in keeping with its basic class and political interests, its aim to replace British political domination by its own rule through peaceful means relying on the support of the mass movement headed by Gandhi for both nation-wide and, primarily, its own class purposes. Many things brought Gandhism and the Indian bourgeoisie close together besides the nation-wide anti-colonialist struggle for India's independence. There was the community of class interests in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology which, in the final analysis, determines the objectively bourgeois nature of Utopian "peasant socialism" in a country developing along capitalist lines.

Certainly the Gandhian ideal of non-violence, firmly linked with the religious beliefs of the peasantry, contributed to the development of a mass liberation struggle and helped to draw the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie over to the side of the national bourgeoisie. In the principle of non-- violent resistance the bourgeoisie found a way of using the popular masses against the colonialists, forcing the latter to leave India, while at the same time preserving their class control over the people. The petty-bourgeois features in the ideology and activity of Gandhi the thinker and politician were to a significant degree hidden from view by his political co-- operation with the bourgeois Indian National Congress and his position for many years as the universally recognised leader of the Congress.

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The combination of Utopian thinker, with roots in the Indian countryside, and sober, far-sighted politician, objectively furthering the interests of the national bourgeoisie, the natural exponent of the nation's aspirations, prevented the peasant features of Gandhi's ideology from consistently coming into their own. This combination often led Gandhi to make compromises that clearly reflected the contradictions peculiar to the different classes and social groups taking part in the nation-wide anti-imperialist struggle. This is why Gandhism should not be reduced merely to an objective expression of the interests of the national bourgeoisie in the Indian liberation movement. It is broader than this and possesses many features that contradict such an assessment. An involved assortment of conditions and social forces in the Indian liberation movement gave rise to Gandhism which embodied the differences and contradictions between those forces as well as their common interests. Gandhism was a phenomenon born of the national life of a peasant country and hence---this should be stressed once again----it could not but reflect in its own way the spontaneous striving of the Indian toiler for social justice, a striving which extends beyond the limits of bourgeois class interests.

Without taking this feature of Gandhism into account it is impossible fully to understand Gandhi's historical role, determined by his remarkable closeness to the Indian people. This closeness was the secret of his influence. Even when cooperating with bourgeois leaders on the ideological and political front Gandhi always strove to maintain his close links with the popular masses. What is more, his leading position and his special role in the Indian National Congress were a direct consequence of this closeness to the people, particularly the working people. Of major importance for an understanding of Gandhi's role and his relations with the Indian bourgeoisie and the peasantry is the principle which Lenin puts forward in his article "Democracy and Narodism in China": "The chief representative, or the chief social bulwark, of this Asian bourgeoisie that is still capable of supporting a historically progressive cause, is the peasant."* Gandhi and Gandhism were a strong connecting link between

the Indian bourgeoisie and the broad masses of the peasantry.

Literature of the pre-war period sometimes showed a lack of understanding for the diversity of national and historical forms of the mass struggle and their interconnection. In a number of eases some particular method of struggle was proclaimed and advocated to the exclusion of all others. Sectarians and dogmatists in the contemporary national liberation movement stand for only the armed method of struggle against imperialism, colonialism and racialism, rejecting all other forms of struggle, including peaceful, non-violent ones. Because of a one-sided approach to the appraisal and employment of tactical methods of mass struggle and enthusiastic support for the most radical of these forms the dialectics of this important problem has been forgotten. Gandhi, too, was one-sided in his approach to forms of mass struggle. He singled out non-violent resistance to the colonialists and racialists as the only form, a universal form. Many of his opponents at different stages of India's liberation movement were inclined to deny, just as categorically and one-sidedly, the positive significance of these non-violent forms of struggle. Non-violence was not infrequently equated with passivity bordering on reconciliation with the reactionaries and colonialists. Criticism of Gandhism was based on a fundamental rejection of mass non-violent resistance, Gandhi's philosophical credo, which is fully understandable, and correct, but the same indiscriminate rejection was also applied to the method of political struggle against imperialism, which was clearly incorrect.

Scientific socialism does not start out by advocating one particular form of struggle (peaceful or otherwise) to the exclusion of all others. On the contrary, it recognises the need for various forms of struggle to be used, combined and allowed to interact dialectically. It recognises the need constantly to renew and enrich the arsenal of revolutionary means and methods, to check, test and select effective new forms of struggle. Marxist-Leninist revolutionary tactics do not demand blind adherence to forms and methods of struggle established once and for all. They do not commit themselves to any one form of mass struggle, effective though that form may be, but constantly endeavour to achieve a balance be-

V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 165.

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tween the chosen forms and methods of struggle and the character, stages and goals of that struggle. Finally, MarxismLeninism demands that an advanced political party should be ready and able to make a resolute, rapid change in forms and methods of struggle when concrete historical conditions so require.

Scientific socialism is familiar with and Communists have always used the different methods of struggle, including, of course, non-violent resistance. For this reason, Marxists disapprove of Gandhi's principle of Ahimsa, non-violence, when it is set up as the sole correct method. It is impossible not to see that Gandhian non-violence in relation to the colonialists and racialists was highly contradictory, for active protest was combined with tolerance towards the enemy. This was the combination that Gandhi found the only acceptable and possible form of resistance to colonial-racialist oppression. In Gandhi's non-violence there is a purely metaphysical aspect following from religious dogmatism and the ascetic approach to life. Inherent in this type of non-violence, however, is undoubtedly the utterly realistic idea of the tactical use of peaceful forms of mass and individual struggle against imperialism, racialism and, less frequently, feudalism.

It is obvious that in the years of struggle against British colonial rule in India and racialism in South Africa the idea of Ahimsa, as interpreted by Gandhi and in its mass form, possessed considerable revolutionary potential. Gandhi's elaboration and practical implementation of distinctive peaceful forms and methods of struggle against the colonialists are of indisputable value. Gandhi took Ahimsa out of the sphere of individual action, making it a means for long-term and purposeful mass struggle, and linking it up with the antiimperialist and social demands of the popular masses. He elaborated methods of mass non-violent resistance that had the character of nation-wide offensive action against the practices and laws established by the colonialists, against the constitution they had imposed on a subjugated nation and oppressed people, against the tyrannical despotism of alien rulers. The large-scale campaigns of non-violent resistance which Gandhi led against British imperialism between the twenties and forties demanded great courage from those taking part

and placed the colonialists in an extremely difficult position. These campaigns rapidly revolutionised the situation throughout India.

Gandhi was a brilliant master of mass non-violent resistance. He knew exactly when a campaign should be launched, when calls for non-violent resistance would meet with wide support throughout the entire country and its participants would number tens of millions. While acknowledging Gandhi's qualities as leader and organiser of the liberation movement in its peculiarly Indian forms, attention should be drawn to the fact that no one in India understood more astutely than Gandhi the moment when it was time to end a mass non-violent resistance movement so that it did not develop into the very opposite, and, in the final analysis, into a social revolution directed against the ruling classes and foreign oppressors. Hence Gandhi never utilised to the full the revolutionary potential inherent in mass non-violent resistance. For reasons that require no explanation this potential was played down by Gandhi and the then leaders of the Indian National Congress. Indeed this potential represented the first step of a mass national liberation struggle, during which the elements of a revolutionary crisis take shape, a crisis which gradually develops into an immediately revolutionary situation, opening the doors to a victorious mass uprising against the colonialists.

Thus, criticism by Left opponents of Gandhi's considerable tendency to compromise was correct. It would have been more convincing, however, if it had not denied the potential of anti-imperialist non-violent resistance, as was often done between the twenties and forties, but had insisted that nonviolent resistance should not be held up as the only method of struggle against colonialism and racialism, something which was done with the help of religious dogmas and abstract ethical categories, irrespective of the social and class nature of the forces involved in the movement.

It is relevant here to examine the application of Gandhi's principle of non-violence in an international context. The specific nature of international relations makes Gandhi's concepts of non-violence more realistic in relations between countries than in class relations or the struggle for national liberation. Ahimsa in the international sphere, stripped of its

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metaphysical element, implies a refusal to resort to force, an outlawing of war, that is to say, an affirmation of the principle of peaceful relations between states. Religious, utopian ideas concerning the renunciation of force as an absolute duty did not prevent Gandhi from reaching fruitful conclusions with regard to the need to strengthen friendship among peoples, establish just inter-state relations based on mutual respect and non-interference, and settle all conflicts through negotiation. In this respect Gandhi's ideas had considerable influence on the foreign policy of the government of the Republic of India, whose creator was Jawaharlal Nehru.

Indians themselves have good reason for rejecting the extremes of Ahimsa, which in international questions led Gandhi more than once to adopt defeatist slogans calling for unilateral sacrifice of national interests in the face of aggression in the name of the non-violent principle, at the very times when the nation's supreme interests required that the entire people should take up arms to resist the aggressor. His abstract, non-historical interpretation of the problems of ensuring peace, irrespective of the aggressive aims of the enemy or direct aggression, proved untenable.

The idea of attaining full political independence that was put forward by the Indian National Congress party, and its call for an implacable struggle against the colonialists brought the bourgeoisie closer to the rest of the nation. This community of interests among different classes in the fight for political independence was what led to the thirty-year political alliance between Gandhi, essentially a petty-bourgeois democrat and Utopian, and the bourgeois leaders of the National Congress, anxious themselves to seize full political power after removing the foreign rulers.

Both sides---Gandhi and the National Congress---- recognised that this coincidence of their interests was temporary despite its relatively long duration, and each side naturally needed the other. In Gandhi the Congress found a popular national leader, a brilliant tactician and a man of amazingly strong will, who was capable of rallying together the active, energetic younger generation of fighters and, with their support, of stirring up and leading tens of millions of disinherited men and women. In the National Congress Gandhi had at his disposal a strong, experienced political organisation unlike any other in India. We shall not touch on the history of the relations between Gandhi and the National Congress, but merely note that in the final period of the struggle against British imperialism, when the goal---political independence---was already perceptible, the contradictions between Gandhi and the bourgeois Congress leadership, contradictions which had, of course, always existed beneath the surface, grew serious and dramatically acute.

After attaining power many Congress leaders forgot Gandhi's democratic, humanist ideals. He had fulfilled his mission by bringing the long struggle he had led for political independence to a successful conclusion.

Gandhi thought in terms of a new phase in the struggle after independence. He dreamed of non-violence campaigns for the attainment of still broader social ideals. He was profoundly disappointed by the results of his years of effort: the partition of India and the outbreak of Hindu-Moslem strife, accompanied by wide-scale bloodshed. He was depressed by the ubiquity of bourgeois greed, careerism and egoism. After the winning of political independence Gandhi, with every justification, advanced the task of fighting for

In discussing Gandhi's attitude to the Indian bourgeoisie it would be well to remember the specific features of the historical period in which they closely collaborated. Gandhi was the ideological leader of the Indian National Congress, and the Congress organised and carried out his projects, primarily mass non-violence campaigns under his leadership. That was the period when a bloc of all the anti-imperialist forces, including the national bourgeoisie, was objectively necessary. Characteristic of that period was the existence of a nation-wide anti-imperialist front which not only influenced relations between different classes, including those with conflicting interests, drawing them together by means of common goals in the fight against colonialist rule, but also for a fairly long time determined, to some extent, the political course of the struggle waged by these classes.

Gandhi worked in close collaboration with the national bourgeoisie which headed the national liberation movement.

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``economic, social and moral" independence, that is, for the principles of social justice, for the triumph of Sarvodaya.

Gandhi's attitude to the caste system, whose influence is still considerable, deserves attention. His views on the caste system and the problem of the Untouchables were influenced, on the one hand, by the spontaneous, democratic aspirations of the peasants, his sympathy for the common people and by his profound awareness that as many sections of the population as possible should be drawn into the antiimperialist struggle. On the other hand, these views were also coloured by a certain conservatism in Gandhi's thinking, his attachment to religious traditions, and his reformist theory of social evolution.

Gandhi repudiated the spirit of inequality and superiority that permeates caste practices. The multiplicity of castes, with the self-contained isolation that typifies them, and the ban on inter-caste contacts were inacceptable to him. According to Gandhi, however, all that was bad in the caste system as such did not refer to its essence, but to distortions of the system. He felt that the ideal form of social organisation was the ancient system of four Varna: the Brahman (priests), the Kshatriya (warriors), the Vaisya (traders and craftsmen) and the Sudra (tillers of the land). He was convinced that man's place in society was to a significant extent determined by hereditary capabilities. This non-historical, unscientific conception of Varna influenced Gandhi's basic sociological views. Varna substituted analysis of the social relations of a definite class society by abstract arguments about heredity, which also underlies Gandhi's theory of tutelage and paternalism, according to which landowners exist to be the fathers of the peasants, while capitalists possess indispensable gifts of economic management, so that the workers, destined by nature to perform physical work, cannot aspire to economic administration.

Concerning the Untouchables Gandhi was more consistent. He rightly considered the institution of untouchability a disgrace for India and put much effort into his fight for the legal equality of almost one-third of the country's population. Gandhi's admirable democratic stand on this question considerably influenced Indian public opinion, contributed to the legislative proclamation of the civil rights of the Untouch-

ables, and stimulated efforts to improve the intolerable conditions in which they lived.

No matter how petty-bourgeois, peasant and therefore inconsistent the idea of a society of "social justice" may seem, an open, full-scale struggle to achieve it, even by Gandhi's specific methods, would have been a major step forward after the country attained political independence. But the bourgeois-capitalist elite opposed this, and although Gandhi had often opposed this elite with all the power of his will and outstanding intellect he did not raise, and hardly could have raised, a mass movement against it.

Gandhi was the leader of a wide-scale anti-imperialist movement, in which different classes and social strata took part, some representing the working people and others exploiter elements. His ideological and political stand was one of bourgeois nationalism, strongly coloured by petty-- bourgeois, Utopian peasant ideas, while his political activity naturally reflected the leading role played by the national bourgeoisie in the anti-imperialist movement in India. In practical terms, i.e., independently of Gandhi's own subjective aspirations, his political activity helped further the accession to power of the bourgeoisie after the country had gained its political independence.

Yet precisely because of this eclectic character of Gandhi's social ideas, to some degree these echoed the democratic aspirations of the people, above all those of the peasant masses, aspirations born in the midst of the struggle against British imperialism and which therefore to a certain extent are today still important in the context of the struggle of India's progressive social forces for their country's rebirth and social progress.

The religious, philosophical and ethical principles of Gandhism revealed profound contradictions and ambivalence: some of their implications were of a democratic, humanistic nature but at the same time they reflected the weaknesses of the liberation movement and the way in which it was subject to the ideological and political influence of the Indian bourgeoisie. The class purpose of these principles was to provide ideological substantiation for Gandhi's specific tactics in

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the anti-imperialist struggle under the leadership of the Indian bourgeoisie, thus making it easier to implement those tactics.

There can be no doubt as to the major historical role Gandhi played in the Indian national liberation movement. In so far as attention is confined to the strictly anti-- imperialist aims of that particular movement, this role was a positive one, albeit ambivalent. Gandhi raised and organised the broad popular masses in the struggle for India's independence, and this was an important positive phenomenon, from whichever angle it was approached. No other political or ideological creed in India and no other party enjoyed such mass influence and such an effectively organised following as Gandhism and the National Congress, which were inseparably linked together for the whole of thirty years.

Yet there is another side to this question as well. Gandhism was not only the ideology of the national liberation movement; it also introduced into the latter its own specific strategy and tactics for the anti-imperialist struggle. Responsible for this among other factors was Gandhi's categoric stipulation that mass action should be of a non-violent character. It was precisely the strategy and tactics of struggle, to which Gandhi's methods of mass action were subordinate, that reflected the other aspect of Gandhism---its historical limitations---which meant that nation-wide pressure brought to bear on the imperialists usually ended in compromises on the part of the national bourgeoisie. In this sense we may safely say that Gandhism, while promoting like no other movement the upsurge of the anti-imperialist struggle, at the same time laid severe limitations on the supreme manifestations of that struggle.

A thorough analysis of the course and character of the national liberation movement of the Indian people in the period between 1918 and 1948 when Gandhism enjoyed almost unchallenged political and organisational influence brings to light a highly important and most interesting feature of the development of the revolutionary process in India. For the whole of that thirty-year period the Indian bourgeoisie succeeded in keeping separate and isolated from each other the movement for independence and the peasants' struggle to gain more land, to achieve a satisfactory solution of the

agrarian question. It would seem at first glance that such separation were impossible, quite unnatural in fact, for the colonial-feudal system, colonial-feudal exploitation were based on the long-standing political alliance of the alien rulers and powerful foreign capitalists, on the one hand, and powerful feudal and semi-feudal Indian landowners, on the other, for precisely these groups together made up the dominant forces in India---a combination of foreign rulers plus their bulwark of local reactionaries---which had to be swept away by a national liberation, agrarian-peasant, bourgeois-democratic revolution.

Yet this did not take place. Agrarian revolution did not become the backbone of the anti-imperialist revolution. The two revolutionary currents did not merge, did not complement each other; they did not achieve that degree of unity and interpenetration providing the necessary prerequisite for the national liberation revolution to be at one and the same time a peasant revolution. Why did the Indian bourgeoisie go out of its way to ensure that the revolutionary process did not develop in that direction?

A considerable section of the Indian bourgeoisie was `` territorialised'' and this applied not only to the big bourgeoisie but also to the middle and small urban bourgeoisie. As a result of the fact that British capitalists had constantly gone out of their way to hold in check India's independent industrial development, the country's emergent bourgeoisie had to varying extents turned their sights to landownership and bought up estates. This investment in land is a factor of prime importance: what is more they invested not so much in modern large-scale' agriculture as in landownership as such, which often proved more advantageous and reliable during the era of British rule.

This of course does not mean that the heterogeneous Indian bourgeoisie confined itself purely to this particular type of investment. As Indian capital developed, more and more was invested in industry, trade, banks, the infrastructure and large plantations. Yet there was hardly any doubt as to the fact that all types of Indian national capital---from retail and usury capital, that in many respects constituted medieval embryonic forms of capital, to industrial, banking and even monopoly capital---were, and indeed have remained so

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up to the present day, bound up with landownership, with the exploitation of the enslaved small peasants, which was consolidated and guaranteed by the state power of the colonialists, their powerful coercive apparatus and virtually military occupation of the country.

This feature of the Indian bourgeoisie gave rise to the specific tactics adopted in a situation where feudal traditions and practices still predominated in rural areas. The nature of the oppressed people's political development and above all the role of bourgeois nationalism serving to blur the contradictions between the classes, and also those within the propertied classes themselves, helped to shape the correlation of political forces in the struggle against the imperialists, giving the bourgeoisie considerable scope for manoeuvring in their dealings with the peasantry. The bourgeoisie made use of the peasantry in the national liberation anti-imperialist struggle while having no truck with any simultaneous promotion of the anti-feudal peasant movement.

All this enabled the bourgeoisie to renounce any active struggle against feudal rulers and landowners, who oppressed the Indian peasants, and led it to compromise with that stratum of society and opt for a reformist course of gradual elimination of feudal practices in rural life after it had assumed power, a course that would be long and excruciating for the peasantry. Indeed, could the Indian bourgeoisie have committed itself to an uprising against the feudal-- landowner system, seeing that even before the First World War and particularly so afterwards it was confronted by the emergence of an Indian proletariat and subsequently of a politically aware working class, which led by a politically astute and organised vanguard began to challenge the bourgeoisie's leading role in the liberation movement, albeit at a distance?

Where was the political leader who enjoyed sufficient political influence and had at his disposal a sufficiently strong mass political organisation to lead the peasantry drawing it into the anti-imperialist struggle without fanning the flame of its anti-feudal aspirations?

Gandhi provided just such a leader. There was no other political figure so close to the peasantry, who had a better knowledge of India's five hundred thousand villages than he. The peasants saw in Gandhi a spiritual leader, they virtual-

ly worshipped him. Yet, although his ideas in their own way gave expression to the mounting tide of the peasants' social protest and their social aspirations, and what Lenin referred to as the spinelessness of the patriarchal countryside, when it came to his basic ideological and political stand Gandhi remained undoubtedly a national-bourgeois leader. This explains the situation in which Gandhi and the National Congress were able to channel the social awakening of the peasantry so as to make use of its revolutionary potential in the movement for independence without letting the anti-- imperialist struggle grow over into an agrarian social revolution.

Meanwhile it should be remembered that India is a country where the rural population accounts for almost 80 per cent of the total. The transformation of the semi-medieval social structure the bourgeoisie decided to procrastinate until after it had assumed power and to implement these changes in ^:its own way, not so much in the interests of the peasants as in its own interests. The bourgeoisie calculated that precisely at that juncture it would be able to embark on a gradual restructuring of rural life in keeping with its own interests through the bourgeoisification of the landowners and the accelerated cultivation of an entrepreneur stratum of more prosperous peasants at the expense of the masses of poor toilers. The extent to which the bourgeoisie succeeded in accomplishing this and by what methods is another issue all of its own on which a number of articles and books have already been written. Suffice it to point out here that although capitalism in rural India has made conspicuous advances, the bourgeois reform has by no means solved all aspects of the agrarian question. The poor peasants deprived of virtually any rights---those who own or rent tiny plots---still predominate in rural areas; at the same time the numbers of the rural proletariat have grown considerably, a factor which introduces essentially new features to life in these areas.

Developments in India have provided confirmation for the Marxist-Leninist tenet to the effect that there exist within the national liberation movement two trends---on the one hand, the revolutionary-democratic trend, and on the other, the bourgeois-nationalist, reformist trend---and that the national bourgeoisie plays an ambivalent political role. Both trends work towards the elimination of foreign domination

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(and in this sense they have common objectives) and this explains the natural alliance that takes shape between the two. A united anti-imperialist front of all forces involved in the national liberation struggle was and remains a vital prerequisite for the attainment and consolidation of national independence. Yet in cases where the revolutionary democrats set themselves the task of accomplishing an agrarian revolution in the course of the national liberation struggle and later also attempt to introduce other social changes in the interests of the people, the representatives of the bourgeois-- nationalist, reformist trend adopt, as a rule, a negative attitude towards these and go out of their way to draw a sharp dividing line between the question of power and agrarian and social issues.

national unity to resist this pressure not only plays a historically positive role but also temporarily galvanises, as it were, the emerging interest of all the anti-imperialist, national-revolutionary, national-reformist and proletarian forces in resisting this imperialist pressure. Today the initiative in resisting imperialist pressure is more and more often taken by Left democratic and progressive sections of India. Although the latter are still scattered they are growing stronger and present a serious obstacle to big monopoly capital and feudal Hindu reaction in their drive for power. The parties of Right-wing reaction, whose extremism Gandhi attacked on several occasions, represent a most dangerous alternative to the more influential Centrist current in the Congress, which is still the country's strongest party.

The above-mentioned qualitative changes in the alignment of class forces in India have not, of course, led to the disappearance of Gandhism from the political scene. Gandhi's prestige was too great, and his influence too strong, particularly among the peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie, for the concepts of Gandhism no longer to be used in the political struggle, the more so in India's political vocabulary. Gandhian concepts are widely used in the propaganda of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties of different shades. To a certain extent, Gandhism shares the same fate as the former national anti-imperialist unity that developed during the fight for independence. Just like this unity produced cracks and revealed more and more class contradictions, there took place an ideological weakening of Gandhism. Parties to both the Right and the Left of the National Congress have contributed to this ideological weakening. Today bourgeois and petty-bourgeois trends, many of which are rivals, are making use only of isolated Gandhian concepts and ideas in their own interests, usually interpreting them in a tendentious, dogmatic light. But even in the National Congress itself the moral and political values of Gandhism and its economic and social doctrine are now viewed differently.

Gandhism, with its eternal, abstract, Utopian categories that lack dialectical logic, was always inclined to proclaim religious and moral postulates as universal truths in the political struggle. It has become something of a Holy Writ. It has not escaped the sad fate of all such doctrines: groups and

Political independence in India led to significant changes in the alignment of class forces in the country, to qualitative changes in the framework of national unity. Gandhism gradually cease J to be the only ideological and political means of uniting different classes. It lost this function because of objective conditions (the country's transition to independent bourgeois development with all the ensuing consequences) and because this turning-point in India's contemporary history almost coincided"' with the assassination of the man whose personal qualities, perhaps as much as his philosophical and political doctrine and activity, did so much towards consolidating India's national forces. In the quarter of a century since India's independence was proclaimed, the trend towards the emergence, ideological separation and independent political organisation of opposing class forces has become more marked and developed considerably. This trend has progressed so far that there is no longer the former foundation, or the former constancy and stability of a united nation-wide front, although the historical inertia of its influence still affects many classes and social strata of contemporary Indian society.

Since India is still often subjected to imperialist pressure,

* India's independence was proclaimed on August 15, 1947, and Gandhi was killed on January 30, 1948.

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parties with widely differing, mutually exclusive interests, which sometimes have nothing in common with the spirit of the original and the historical activities of its creator, resort to them for corroboration.

Indian reactionaries are trying to take maximum advantage of Gandhi's prestige and the popularity of Gandhism. Both the Right-wing forces within the National Congress and the reactionary Jan Sangh and Swatantra parties seek in Gandhi's social and economic concepts support for their criticism of the sometimes inconsistent, but historically progressive socio-economic changes carried out by the Congress and for attacks on state planning, the state sector, the industrialisation policy, partial restriction of the monopolies and even the essentially half-hearted bourgeois agrarian reform. Reaction is using the name of Gandhi to further evil objectives---to undermine confidence between the peoples of India, even to justify the essentially harmful centrifugal aspirations that are cultivated in certain Indian states by irresponsible elements more interested in weakening and undermining a united multi-national India than in consolidating its unity and might. The forces of reaction are trying to disrupt India's friendly relations with the socialist countries and are kindling enmity towards Indian democrats, progressive forces, the working class and the Communist Party.

Centrist groups in the Indian National Congress refer to Gandhi's idea of non-violence to justify the inconsistency and delays in elaborating and carrying through democratic reforms, as a result of which the very idea of Gandhian nonviolence, which was energetic and mobile, and was an appeal to the masses in the period of struggle against imperialism, is being distorted as an unwarrantedly persistent acceptance of chronic and blatant social evils.

It is natural that bourgeois politicians of all shades should find Gandhi's ideas of tutelage, fully understandable in an underdeveloped class society waging a nation-wide struggle against alien rule, an active means for blunting the class consciousness of the working people in a new historical context, when the working class and the toiling peasantry must contend first with big monopoly capital and then with the national bourgeoisie and capitalist landowners who have grown rich and powerful.

Sincere, honest men, of whom there are many, who have remained true to Gandhi's anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, democratic ideals, are subjecting to thorough criticism hypocritical attempts by the bourgeoisie to use Gandhi's prestige to conceal their pursuit of narrowly selfish class interests. Even Gandhi's most faithful pupils and followers, however, men such as Vinoba Bhave, have made a far-reaching reappraisal of values in the framework of Gandhian concepts. On the one hand, they are inclined to narrow the social aspects of Gandhism. On the other, they are afraid to use the proven method of mass non-violent resistance against today's propertied exploiter classes and are gradually replacing the principle of non-violent resistance to social evils with appeals for non-resistance in general. The active social character of Gandhi's ideas and his intervention in social and political life on the side of the masses, even in those specific forms which he employed, are being buried in oblivion by Indian bourgeois politicians and ideologists. Imitators of Gandhism tend to present it exclusively as a path of individual moral perfection and as a categorical demand for reconciliation among all classes.

It should be borne in mind that not everything labelled Gandhism really comes under that heading. There are now fairly widespread attempts in India to use Gandhi's name to further interests which run contrary to the essence of his doctrine. That is why a one-sided notion of Gandhism as the ideology of the Indian bourgeoisie exclusively does not provide a reliable foundation for opposing these attempts and bringing out their truly speculative significance---that of assimilating a popular ideology and placing it completely at the service of capitalism and reaction.

The period that separates us from the Indian people's struggle for independence enables us to appraise Gandhism more objectively today. It is now clear that Gandhism, the ideological and political doctrine which Gandhi created and put into practice, was still, despite its tendency towards frequent compromise with the all-powerful colonial rulers, implacably hostile to colonialism and unswervingly bent on achieving its ultimate goal, national independence. Gandhi's compromises led to a temporary curtailment of the mass movement, but each time, under Gandhi's leadership, the

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liberation movement took a new lease of life at a higher level, putting forward more clear-cut demands. Gandhi's life and work show irrefutably that he always remained true to the anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-racialist fight, true to the humanistic, although not in every way realistic ideal of social justice comprehensible to the peasant masses and the people as a whole.

There is still clearly much truth in the description of the social importance of Gandhi's work provided by his outstanding associate Jawaharlal Nehru. "It should be remembered," wrote Nehru, "that the nationalist movement in India, like all nationalist movements, was essentially a bourgeois movement. It represented the natural historical stage of development, and to consider it or to criticise it as a working-class movement is wrong. Gandhi represented that movement and the Indian masses in relation to that movement to a supreme degree, and he became the voice of the Indian people to that extent. He functioned inevitably within the orbit of nationalist ideology, but the dominating passion that consumed him was a desire to raise the masses. In this respect he was always ahead of the nationalist movement, and he gradually made it, within the limits of his own ideology, turn in this direction....

``It is perfectly true that Gandhi, functioning in the nationalist plane, does not think in terms of the conflict of classes, and tries to compose their differences. But the action he has indulged in and taught the people has inevitably raised mass consciousness tremendously and made social issues vital. And his insistence on the raising of the masses at the cost, wherever necessary, of vested interests has given a strong orientation to the national movement in favour of the masses."*

Progressive circles in India are anxious to prevent the democratic content of Gandhi's doctrine from being emasculated. Gandhi's name and ideas must not be appropriated by the reactionary bourgeoisie and landowners, who are acting against the interests of the people and ignoring Gandhi's anti-imperialist democratic humanism.

There have always been fundamental ideological and tactical differences between Gandhi's followers and India's

consistent progressives, revolutionaries and champions of scientific socialism. But these are the people with the most sincere and deepest respect for Gandhi's activity and noble objectives. It is they who take up Gandhi's democratic and social ideal, lending it meaningful, scientific content, in their fight for a better future for the Indian people. It is they who are using his methods to inspire the masses and rally together a mass movement, appreciating that Gandhi's tactics is one of the universal forms of mass-scale national liberation and class struggle evolved by the world revolutionary movement.

Unity of all the democratic Left forces of India is an urgent priority at the present time. Those who have remained true to the memory of the great champion of India's independence and the best that he introduced into the national liberation movement have a vital part to play in that united stand.

When speaking of trends in ideological and political development, if Gandhism is approached as a political philosophy which the Indian bourgeoisie has adapted to its class needs, then it emerges that two socio-political trends---Gandhism and scientific socialism---are the most widespread in India in a specific social environment, sometimes embracing divergent groups---the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia ---and sometimes those of similar social environment---the working class, peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie. Although the influence of the ideas of Gandhism, on the one hand, and that of scientific socialism, on the other, were on very different scales in view of the enormous prevalence of Gandhism, taken all in all, the main struggle for influence on the masses has been and still is being waged between these two ideological trends. The Indian bourgeoisie is well aware of this. It welcomed Gandhism back in the years of struggle for independence precisely because it was an ideology that could be used against scientific socialism, which was spreading rapidly in India, especially in educated urban revolutionary circles and among Left-wing democratic youth. The national bourgeoisie, as represented by the Indian National Congress, sought in Gandhism a guarantee against the spread of the ideas of scientific socialism among the working people

J. Nehru, India and the World, London, 1936, pp. 172, 175.

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while using it at the same time to express nation-wide antiimperialist interests.

Today too, Gandhism and scientific socialism are the two main trends in the ideological life of Indian society.

What actually is the attitude to Gandhism and scientific socialism in India? Gandhism in modern India is understood in two ways. There is the orthodox understanding of it as a system of Gandhi's anti-imperialist and peasant-socialist views, and there is Gandhism as interpreted by a large number of bourgeois schools which contradict one another (even when it comes to the basic concepts of Gandhism), and which adopt only a few of Gandhi's ideas and refashion them in accordance with their own specific class interests. Gandhism in the first sense---a product of the national liberation struggle of the Indian people---possesses important elements of a democratic nature. This makes it possible to speak of its affinity, in a certain respect, with any genuinely democratic, progressive movement. It could well serve to pave the way for an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-racialist, anti-war, anti-feudal and anti-monopoly struggle by all the democratic and progressive forces in India that uphold the interests of the broad popular masses. Supporters of scientific socialism and supporters of Gandhism in a single nationaldemocratic front could constitute a powerful force in the fight for peace, consolidation of national independence, democracy and social progress. All democratic and progressive social movements today, including those in India, have certain goals in common. One of these goals, which Indian Marxists have put forward in recent years, is the restriction and eventual elimination of foreign and local monopoly capitalism and the preparation of conditions for India's gradual abandonment of the path of capitalist development. This grandiose prospect calls for joint efforts; it will give rise to further differentiation among followers of Gandhism but rally together all the more closely all dedicated supporters of social progress.

When it comes to an interpretation of Gandhism that places it at the service of the narrow class interests of India's big bourgeoisie and reactionary forces trying to set Gandhi's social ideals off against the democratic movement, in order to emasculate their anti-capitalist content, any attempt to

find common goals with scientific socialism is utterly pointless. There is no point of contact between them, only a conflict of opposites.

There are features, however, in the genuine, politically untainted understanding of Gandhism which made it easy in the past, and still make it easy, for representatives of the Indian bourgeoisie and Indian reaction to use Gandhism in their own interests. If it had not been for this, the Indian bourgeoisie would never have been able to utilise Gandhism.

An analysis of Gandhism from the standpoint of scientific socialism reveals not only a definite organic link between Gandhism and bourgeois interests and ideas, which is perfectly natural and inevitable in any type of nationalistic reformism and Utopian socialism, but also the fact that Gandhism is acceptable to a certain degree from the viewpoint of bourgeois class interests. The combination in Gandhism of a trenchant exposure of capitalist society from moral, religious and ethical positions with the advancement of methods for changing capitalist society that guarantee the stability of its foundations and preserve it, in so far as that is possible, from being brought down by revolution, left no room for doubt that the Indian bourgeoisie would view it with sympathy despite Gandhi's critical attitude to bourgeois morality and the bourgeois way of life.

There are certain affinities in spheres other than the fight for national independence between Gandhism and scientific socialism. Sincere concern for the welfare of the masses and a desire to improve the position of the working people and establish a society of social justice are reflected in Gandhism in its proclamation of the Utopian and archaic ideal of Sarvodaya. Gandhism, like any other version of Utopian socialism or national socialism, reflects a number of principles which scientific socialism advanced more than a hundred years ago: the obligation for all to work, an end to the exploitation of man by man and the division of society into classes, public ownership of the chief means of production, the distribution of material wealth according to work, and a number of other principles. These appear to be the only points of contact between Gandhism and scientific socialism in their approach to the major problems facing Indian society. In all else differences predominate; in criticism of capitalist society,

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in the socialist ideal, in methods of fighting to achieve socialism, concepts of classes and the class struggle, the state of the future, and the social and party-political forces destined by history to bring about social justice on earth and which are really in a position to do so. On all these basic questions of the theory and practice of transforming contemporary society scientific socialism stands in opposition to Gandhism, as science does to Utopia, materialism to idealism and dialectics to metaphysics.

At times Gandhi came forward with brilliant exposure of capitalist and feudal oppression:

``How exactly do you think the Indian princes, landlords, millowners and moneylenders and other profiteers are enriched?''

``At the present moment, by exploiting the masses," was Gandhi's reply.

``Have these classes any social justification to live more comfortably than the ordinary worker and peasant who does the work which provides the wealth?''

``No justification," replied Gandhi categorically.* But these were not the all-important motifs in Gandhi's criticism of modern exploiter society. Gandhi's condemnation of `` European'' civilisation lacks clear-cut social orientation and a knowledge of the real ways and methods of overcoming the social evils he correctly noted. The fact that Gandhi made ``European'' civilisation the object of his criticism highlighted his censure of European (machine) civilisation, not bourgeois civilisation. Hence, Gandhi's criticism centres around not the capitalist mode of production but machine production in general, whose development the ancestors of the modern Indians categorically opposed. It was in machines that Gandhi saw the source of social evils: unemployment, exploitation, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, and so on. Gandhi does not say that all these consequences of largescale industry have a historically transitory, class character. The enemy is not the exploiter classes but the machine.

As to the relations between classes in the process of the "cursed machine production", Gandhi did not

see them as the material, objective foundation of the evils of the exploiter society he castigated. Gandhi saw that class contradictions existed, but he did not attach decisive importance to them, considering them a superstructure on naturally healthy human relations. Conflicts arise and are aggravated by man's greed, self-love, moral degradation and delusions. The normal state of relations between the landowners and the peasants, between the capitalists and the workers should be harmonious co-operation. Gandhi ignored the class-based economic laws of social development. His philosophy of history is idealistic and ignores the political and economic laws governing the historical process. Consequently, Gandhi's ideas about the best and most equitable social changes have a subjective and voluntaristic ring about them. According to Gandhi, people must be filled with a sense of noble morality and then, in time, social justice is certain to prevail. Class peace and the paternalism of the propertied classes in relation to the poor are inherent in Gandhism. If a class struggle does arise it is only because the capitalists and the landowners have ceased to feel responsible, to realise they are the fathers of a big family, that they themselves are part of this family. Of the workers' struggle against the Indian capitalists Gandhi had the following to say: "In the West an eternal conflict has set up between capital and labour. Each party considers the other as his natural enemy. That spirit seems to have entered India also, and if it finds a permanent lodgement it would be the end of our industry and of our peace. If both the parties were to realise that each is dependent on the other, there will be little cause for quarrel."*

Gandhi did not reckon with the fact that the social and economic conditions of man's public and private life and his bourgeois or feudal mode of producing material wealth and cultural values represent an insurmountable barrier to the universal adherence to lofty moral principles in a class society. Gandhi's non-violent method of changing the world is an old, honest and sincere method, but many years of history, including Indian history, have shown that to appeal to the exploited not to use violence against their exploiters and to the exploiters to be kind to the people they exploit is

* M. K. Gandhi, Towards Non-Violent Socialism, Ahmadabad, 1951,

p. 155,

* Ibid., p. 42.

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fruitless. Jawaharlal Nehru, one of Gandhi's closest associates, presented and solved such problems in a much more realistic way. In An Autobiography he wrote: "If there is one thing that history shows it is this: that economic interests shape the political views of groups and classes.. .. Non-violence . . . can, I think, carry us a long way, but I doubt if it can take us to the final goal.... The present conflicts in society, national as well as class conflicts, can never be resolved except by coercion."*

Such, in the most general of outlines, is Gandhi's criticism of ``European'' civilisation. Such are the concepts which Gandhi advanced almost one hundred years after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto and Marx's Capital. After the emergence of the world's first socialist country, and in the midst of an incipient revolutionary overthrow of Gandhi's hated "machine civilisation", that is, capitalism, such doctrines sounded Utopian, while Gandhi's criticism of capitalism in opposition to the scientific theory of Marxism was simply inept.

Marx, too, passionately exposed the evils of ``European'' civilisation, not only passionately but also profoundly. However, to Marx the point at issue was not European civilisation but capitalist civilisation. With scientific irrefutability he demonstrated to the world the calamities which machine production had brought the toiling masses. But, said Marx, the fault lies not in machines but in capitalist methods of industrialisation. In exposing these methods he also singled out the historical laws underlying capitalism's colonial seizures, including the British conquest of India with all the horrors committed by "European civilisers" in that country. Marx exposed the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, and the class nature of the introduction of machinery.

Precisely the scientific nature of Marx's criticism of capitalist society led him on to the equally well-grounded and convincing definition of socialism as a society which resolves all the contradictions of the capitalist system. But a socialist society comes into being on the foundations of the material culture of capitalism and uses all the values of technological

progress, first and foremost, large-scale industry, machine production of producer and consumer goods, that capitalism brings in its wake. Gandhi's emotional and romantic approach to his criticism of bourgeois civilisation naturally leads him to an illusory, Utopian conception of socialism.

Gandhi was continuing the tradition of the early Utopians, who viewed the triumph of abstract ideals of justice as a return to the "golden age". As Gandhi painted it, Sarvodaya, a society of the welfare of all, is an idealised picture of the Indian peasant commune with its closed, self-contained economy, a combination of handicrafts and agriculture, with extremely primitive implements. This commune, which never saved its members from oppression by Asiatic despot, conqueror or feudalistic clan-cum-tribal clique, was always based on the cruel laws of the caste system, and for centuries had isolated the country and its people from the outside world. This idyllic commune has long since vanished from the face of India; it disintegrated, its ancient communal principles inexorably undermined by the spread of a commodity economy and then capitalism, first headed by the British colonialists, and then by India's own bourgeoisie, capitalist landowners and increasing numbers of rich peasants.

Gandhi's Sarvodaya is not so much a reflection of Indian reality in which, it goes without saying, there are no elements of Sarvodaya, as a yearning for the past. Only Gandhi's insufficiently clear idea of the march of history and the inevitable evolution of human society from a lower to a higher stage could present an archaic picture of Sarvodaya as an ideal for the future. Since, according to Gandhi, all movement forward and modern machine civilisation give rise to social calamities and moral torment and suffering for the people, the only way out is a return, by an effort of its power, to the simple morals and manners of the patriarchal past. Gandhi bids men look not to the future but to the past. Support for a new society, he proposes, should be sought not in the increasingly stronger elements of social progress that capitalism unwittingly produces, but in preserving the survivals of doomed forms of production and social practices.

Even if we assume something that is quite impossible--- that a society of the Sarvodaya type could be artificially created, this would by no means lead to the establishment of

* Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, London, 1940, pp. 544, 551,

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the principles of socialism. The extreme technical backwardness of such a society would be a great hindrance to economic, cultural and moral progress. Slogans about universal plenty, a rise in cultural standards and other appeals would cease to have any bearing on reality. What is more, in this artificial social unit, re-created and isolated from its natural environment, the implacable internal laws of social development would begin to operate and produce the same elements of decay and disintegration that once before in the course of a long period of historical change caused the Indian commune to degenerate into an archaic institution sanctifying, through ancient customs (now of a pseudo-democratic nature), feudal and capitalist exploitation, and more often than not a mixture

of both.

Any analysis of Gandhism from the standpoint of scientific socialism usually devotes particular attention, and quite correctly so, to the problem of ways and methods of achieving social change. Gandhism made non-violent resistance to evil its rallying standard. The discovery and implementation of this method are ascribed to Gandhi. Marxism is described by some of its critics, including a number of Gandhi's followers who obtained their information about Marxism second-hand, often from unreliable sources, as a resolute denial of the very principle of non-violence, as a synonym for exclusively sanguinary armed struggle and an intrinsically violent armed movement. Such notions and such an Interpretation of the difference between the Gandhian and scientific socialist stand on the question of force and non-violence naturally suit the ideological opponents of scientific socialism. However they have no factual basis and nothing to do with the real attitude of scientific socialism to the forms, methods, means and paths of struggle for national and social liberation.

Few people today believe that supporters of scientific socialism, true revolutionaries, as opposed to dogmatists and adventurists, always support violent struggle everywhere. Such views are completely at variance with the historical truth; they contradict both the theory and revolutionary practice of Marxism.

Marxists-Leninists have always been ready to take advantage of any opportunity, no matter how small, to advance the

national liberation movement and social revolution by peaceful means, and have always believed that the basic interests of the working class and all working people make peaceful methods preferable to armed struggle. Gandhi's non-violence methods, stripped of their metaphysical and religious basis, are in fact nothing other than peaceful, unarmed methods of struggle. Gandhi did not discover them, although it is obvious that he played an outstanding role in developing them and applying them against the rule of the British colonialists and South African racialists and in lending them a genuinely mass character, which made them infinitely more effective. Long before Gandhi appeared on the Indian political scene all, or almost all the methods from the arsenal of Satyagraha, from hunger-strikes, demonstrations, local and general strikes, and non-payment of taxes to the boycott of colonialist and racialist authorities, had been widely used by all manner of peoples, the international working-class and the national liberation movement. Moreover, the peasant movement in Western Europe, Russia, Latin America and many Asian countries in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and the working-class movement from the 18th century onwards were all familiar with the above-mentioned forms and methods of struggle. Gandhi was not the first to invent and use these means and methods of mass struggle, but he was the first to use them widely in the struggle against the British colonialists and, at the same time, to present them as the only moral means and methods conforming with religious tradition.

The history of the national liberation struggle in India includes powerful anti-colonialist revolts, general strikes by the proletariat, mass peasant movements and a widespread student and youth movement. It includes armed uprisings by workers, peasants, sailors of the Indian fleet and soldiers of the Anglo-Indian army. In the history of the Indian liberation movement we find great examples of courage and selfsacrifice. Specifically proletarian, revolutionary methods of struggle played an enormous part in the movement, sometimes shaping its overall nature (as in 1947). But the backbone of the most mass forms of the movement was, of course, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie who followed Gandhi,

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Gandhism made non-violence the only and the universal method of struggle, one that would supposedly solve with the least pain all the national and social contradictions in a class society or an oppressed country. Experience showed, however, that this is not so. Scientific socialism correctly refuses, in full accordance with mankind's practical experience gleaned over the centuries, and primarily the experience of the struggle waged by the working class and the peasantry of all countries, to make any particular methods of struggle absolute, turn them into dogma, or impose them on the masses uncritically, ignoring the specific demands of given periods, political situations and historical and national conditions.

When the fierce resistance of foreign colonialists or a country's own bourgeoisie and landowners renders peaceful methods ineffective and when an armed struggle is unleashed, that is, a war against the people, Marxists propose, with due regard for the concrete situation, a transition to more decisive methods of struggle, right up to the highest form of the class struggle, armed uprising and civil war. When the followers of Gandhi are forced to recognise that they cannot achieve their demands and ideals through non-violent methods because of the violence of the colonialists, they put forward the argument that the popular masses are not ready for victory because they have not adhered to the religiousethical principles of non-violent resistance and because they have rather often justly used force in reply to the force used by the colonialists. Gandhi's followers then urge the masses not to take an interest in the final results of the movement, to abandon it, and demand that the masses reconcile themselves to the impossibility of attaining the goals of the struggle and seek consolation in the knowledge that they have performed their moral and religious duty. This is the real difference between Gandhism and scientific socialism on the question of methods of mass struggle.

Nehru's attitude to the problem of methods of struggle is of interest. Paying a deeply respectful tribute to Gandhi, he declared: "... for us and for the National Congress as a whole the non-violent method was not, and could not be a religion or an unchallengeable creed or dogma. It could only be a policy and a method promising certain results, and by those

results it would have to be finally judged. Individuals might make of it a religion or incontrovertible creed. But no political organisation, so long as it remained political, could do so."* Nehru's words require no explanation. Methods of mass struggle can never be universally applicable once and for all. They evolve from a particular situation, the objectives and results of the struggle and, in addition, the conduct of the enemy. If he does not surrender but uses violence against the people, he must be made to surrender by arms being taken up against him, when the situation calls for it, in the name of humanism.

Political organisation is of tremendous importance for the forces of democracy and peace. Therefore, the question of a vanguard political party and a socialist state, and the attitude adopted towards them by fighters for national freedom and social justice is of paramount importance. In this matter Gandhism cannot provide a reliable guide for the working people, although Gandhi had much just, trenchant criticism to make of the bourgeois state, bourgeois democracy and, in particular, colonialism and racialism.

Scientific socialism regards the socialist state as the main instrument for rebuilding society, and the party as the most reliable and only possible political organisation of likeminded people that can prepare for and carry out revolutionary changes. Scientific socialism confronts the working people with the complex, galvanising task of organising themselves politically, relying on the party, and under its leadership settling in their own favour the question of state power, the basic question in any revolution, and thus gaining possession of a powerful instrument with which to shape the life and structure of society for the benefit of the exploited working people.

Gandhism proceeds from the anarchistic concept of the state as an absolute evil, and even when Gandhi was forced to admit that the independent national state can and should be used to further progress, he still chose to have no truck with power since, in his opinion, all power corrupts. This is the position from which some modern followers of Gandhi appeal to the working people, proposing that the latter should

* Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Bombay, 1966, pp. 49-50.

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reconcile themselves to seeing representatives of the privileged classes stand at the helm of power. Gandhism does not suggest that the working people should create their own political parties, but it is not against men of labour having comparatively low forms of organisation. The political arena is thus left to experienced members of the educated class, the bourgeois intelligentsia, and the bourgeoisie itself. This leaves the working people disarmed in the face of their class enemy, who is fully armed with state power and a party organisation.

Gandhi was always in favour of the masses being involved in social movements. This is one of his greatest merits. It can be said without exaggeration that Gandhi's name, his antiimperialist policy and tactics and his bold appeal to the people are connected with the transition of the Indian liberation movement from bourgeois loyalty to the colonialists, deference to British civilisation (such a marked feature of the National Congress before Gandhi) and petty-bourgeois terrorism of the extremists, to a genuinely popular movement for independence. Nevertheless, Gandhism and scientific socialism differ in their understanding of the role of the masses. Supporters of scientific socialism try to awaken and develop the revolutionary potential of the working people and make full use of it. They try to stimulate the initiative of the masses and give their revolutionary energy an outlet in diverse and purposeful forms of struggle. They have faith in the masses and their revolutionary creativity, their ability not only to destroy what has outlived itself and is hindering progress, but to build a new and better society. Gandhism always keeps the masses within the bounds of non-violent resistance. It needs the masses to carry out the leaders' will, but they can be allowed to act only within the strictly defined limits of peaceful resistance. Gandhism has always contained an element of deep distrust of the independent revolutionary creativity of the masses in the liberation movement. From this it is clear why the attitude of Gandhism to the masses is based on the tutelage formula.

Better than anyone else Gandhi knew how to stir up the masses of the Indian people against the colonialists, but at the same time he knew better than anyone else how to hold the masses back from open revolution, from revolutionary

action, thereby leaving himself the possibility of conducting negotiations with the colonial authorities. It is obvious that these tactics made Gandhi the most outstanding leader of a liberation movement led by the bourgeoisie.

Here we have the starting-point of two different approaches to the working class. For Marxists-Leninists the working class is the advanced class, destined by history to play the leading role in the struggle for a just society. To Gandhi it was a product of "satanic, European civilisation", a class which was still too immature for political life and did not yet understand either its place in political life or the needs of the nation. Scientific socialism stakes its all on the industrial proletariat. Gandhism views the industrial proletariat as a potential opponent of the implementation of the principles of non-- violence, fears its political activity, and seeks to limit its efforts to a reformist fight for higher living standards. "I don't deny that such strikes can serve political ends. But they do not fall within the plan of non-violent non-co-operation. It does not require much effort to perceive that it is a most dangerous thing to make political use of labour until labourers understand the political conditions of the country and are prepared to work for the common good. This is hardly to be expected of them all of a sudden and until they have bettered their own condition so as to enable them to keep body and soul together in a decent manner. The greatest political contribution, therefore, that labourers can make is to improve their own condition.""" From this follows Gandhi's negative attitude to the idea of setting up an advanced political party of the proletariat.

All the above-mentioned features, fundamental to Gandhism, also come to the fore in the attitude to the social system that exists in India today and to the classes which dominate it. The attitude of these classes to scientific socialism is irreconcilable, for they see it as uncompromisingly hostile to the very foundations of capitalist life. The ruling classes have always regarded Gandhism with definite sympathy. In popularising Gandhism many ideologists of the Indian bourgeoisie endeavour to establish it as the world outlook of the Indian people. This despite the fact that Gandhi and his faithful

* Mahatma Gandhi, Young India 1919-1922, Madras, 1922, p. 736.

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followers were subjectively sincerely opposed to capitalism. Why is this happening? The fact of the matter is that although Gandhism is anti-capitalistic, the fundamental characteristics of Gandhism already discussed do not threaten India's capitalist development in any way. Gandhism has become, as it were, an organic part of the bourgeois order in contemporary India, which in a number of economic spheres has reached the stage of monopoly capitalism. Bourgeois ideologists are trying to find a new way of using Gandhism to protect the present social system from encroachment on the part of the exploited classes.

Gandhi's non-violence methods proved to be sufficiently effective in the struggle against the colonialists for national independence. Combined with non-Gandhian methods, at times with extreme, violent methods of struggle to which the masses resorted despite Gandhi, Gandhi's non-violent resistance led to the establishment of an independent Indian state. But ever since the establishment of independence Gandhi's doctrine has proved powerless to change in any substantial way the position of hundreds of millions of working people.

The objective task of the ruling classes in India today is to splinter the working-class movement and weaken the influence of Left circles and the ideology of scientific socialism. Hence their flexible combination of diverse means of class struggle, ranging from political manoeuvring to brutal repression, from popularisation of the Utopian ideas of Gandhism, "Indian socialism", to the terror of the Shiv Sena, the latter-day fascist organisation set up by Bombay monopolists to frighten the working people. The only really significant application of Gandhian methods in India today is when they are used to further the interests of the working people, against the interests of the bourgeoisie, when Left circles use them in mass Satyagraha campaigns conducted to back up the socioeconomic and socio-political demands of the working people.

Modern Gandhism has preserved its general-democratic features. These have not lost their importance, especially in view of the intensive penetration of American capital and its ideology into India and the offensive of the Indian monopolies. On this foundation---an anti-imperialist, anti-mo-

nopoly movement---broad co-operation among democratic, progressive forces is still possible.

In the post-war period and especially in the past few years a number of non-Marxist ideological trends in the national liberation movement have been developing in the direction of a rapprochement with scientific socialism (national democracy). Gandhism has not developed along this path. While stressing the democratic content of Gandhism, we cannot ignore the fact that Gandhism as represented by the majority of its contemporary followers is tending to veer further and further away from scientific socialism.

Gandhism has long been a subject of investigation by Soviet scholars. In the past, mistakes have been made in Soviet literature on this subject, stemming from a somewhat one-sided approach, which has been justly and tellingly criticised. The mistakes were due to many factors, among them the long period during which India was isolated from the Soviet Union and the international working-class movement, an inadequate knowledge of India and of the specific conditions obtaining there and profoundly unique national traditions so vividly reflected in Gandhism. A sectarian approach to a number of major questions of the general-democratic stage in the Indian national liberation revolution, including an underestimation of the anti-imperialist role of the Indian national bourgeoisie, also considerably influenced Soviet research into Indian affairs in the thirties and forties. Appraisals of Gandhism in Soviet Marxist literature were also shaped by the lack of unity in the tactics advocated within the national liberation movement in India, which sometimes resulted in political forces, objectively destined to fight together against imperialism, fighting imperialism separately at various periods, and sometimes even fighting amongst themselves. Finally, the objective difficulty of studying a phenomenon as complex and contradictory as Gandhism should also be taken into account. In the ardour of antiimperialist struggle and ideological polemics between Marxists and national-reformists not everyone succeeded in fully comprehending the phenomenon and its many facets.

During the last twenty years friendly ties with India have grown much closer and now extend to a wide range of fields.

17---919

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This means that Soviet specialists have much better opportunities for profound and creative study of India's recent history.

Latter works of historical research have introduced us to political and ideological developments in India at the turn of the century when Gandhi first came into his own as a thinker and public figure while leading the Indian movement in South Africa against racial oppression. During that period Gandhi kept in close contact with his native country where despite the seemingly indestructible rule of the British colonialists a national liberation movement was taking shape. Two main trends had already emerged in that movement--- the liberal trend associated mainly with the upper echelons of the propertied classes that were embarking on bourgeois development, and the democratic radical-nationalist trend that gave voice to the tide of protest against India's enslavement that was mounting among the people including wide circles of the emergent Indian bourgeoisie.

Progressive figures in the movement for national liberation appealed to the people to embark on a decisive struggle against colonial rule and voiced the mounting indignation of the popular masses against the medieval social oppression, against the yoke of landowners and moneylenders, against ruthless exploitation in the capitalist industry that was appearing on the Indian horizon. However, as a rule, their democratism was actually confined to the bourgeois nationalism of an oppressed nation which inevitably blurred and concealed class contradictions and at best gave rise to a striving for social compromise.

Nevertheless dreams of a society free of exploitation and oppression, although of a profoundly Utopian character, were taking shape as a result of social processes such as the awakening of national consciousness and deepening of social contradictions as bourgeois relations started to develop, as patriarchal patterns of life were disrupted and the peasant masses impoverished in the light of the merciless advance of foreign capital, as ``Indian'' capitalism started to spread rapidly throughout the country, as the people's indignation against national and medieval social oppression approached breaking-point, and, last but not least, as certain sections of the Indian intelligentsia started to acquaint themselves not

only with enlightened liberal-bourgeois social thought but also with criticism of bourgeois society; all this determined the trends of thought to be found among progressive leaders lending their ideological searchings a democratic slant. Their social views had certain elements in common with Russian Narodism and the ideas of Lev Tolstoi. However a sociohistorical comparison of the ideas that linked Gandhi and Tolstoi starting out from Lenin's analysis of the great Russian writer's world outlook reveals major differences between the essentially bourgeois-nationalist political stand adopted by Gandhi and Tolstoi's position.

Gandhi's national liberation and democratic aspirations explain the important fact that as leader of the anti-- imperialist movement in India he was greatly influenced by the first Russian revolution, which stimulated the awakening of the peoples of Asia, including the Indian people. Among other aspects of the momentum this revolution lent the Indian struggle was Gandhi's embracing of Tolstoi's critical approach, and of the experience (naturally within the limits of his own overall attitudes) of organised mass liberation struggle; Gandhi regarded the all-Russia political strike in October 1905 as a "great lesson" for Indian patriots and appealed to them to manifest "the same strength" as the Russians on that occasion.

Gandhi did not have an adequate grasp of scientific socialism and could not embrace its principles. Yet not only his destiny as leader of the Indian national liberation movement but also the subsequent evolution of his social ideas showed undeniable traces of the influence of the victorious Great October Socialist Revolution which, over several decades, was to leave its mark on the development of the Indian people's anti-imperialist struggle and create important preconditions for its upsurge. Without abandoning his nationalist outlook and while criticising Bolshevism on account of its atheistic character and its adherence to class struggle, Gandhi nevertheless acknowledged the greatness of the "Bolshevik ideal" and looked upon Lenin as a great spirit and was full of admiration for the selflessness of the Russian Communists. At the time when the liberation struggle in India was particularly intense and its fighters were being subjected to cruel repression by the British, Gandhi often

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referred to the experience of the Soviet people and their moral integrity; he saw the Soviet Union as the defender of the working people and the exploited masses throughout the whole world. Another significant point is that as the national liberation movement developed a good number of its foremost participants adopted a scientific socialist stand and many Indian patriots, regardless of their political views, gleaned inspiration from the achievements of socialism in the USSR. Gandhi's views on a number of important aspects of the democratic transformation of Indian society gradually evolved in a progressive direction.

At the present time any ideological or political trend of significance that has won recognition and can claim to be acknowledged as democratic or progressive is inevitably held up against the greatest social movement of the modern age, against the most advanced world outlook---Marxism-- Leninism. This reflects the profound respect in which scientific socialism is held: it has become an irresistible material force which through the experience and action of hundreds of millions of people has demonstrated the possibility of an effectual and just transformation of society by means of class struggle and social revolution.

Many Indians who honestly and sincerely share Gandhi's outlook attempt to compare Gandhism with Marxism in order to promote their influence among the masses. Usually they point out that Gandhism took up the finest principles of scientific socialism, but outstripped the latter from a humanist point of view and went on to adapt these principles to India's needs. In adopting this approach Gandhi's followers acknowledge the power of the impact produced on the popular masses by socialist ideas, an impact all the greater in view of the fact that these ideas are backed up by the obvious and incontestable successes scored by the socialist countries in comparison with the record of the developing countries who are still following the capitalist path. There are of course other supporters of Gandhism who are less objective and who oppose communism. For them any comparison between Gandhism and Marxism is merely used to brand the ideas of Marx and Lenin and scientific socialism as obsolete and declare that these ideas have been overtaken by this or that new doctrine including up-dated bourgeois Gandhism. For

Marxists-Leninists a scientific comparison of these two ideologies provides a criterion for an assessment of the theory and practice of Gandhism.

When considering Gandhism in comparison with scientific socialism fundamental differences come to light, including diametrically opposed solutions for central philosophical and sociological problems. Yet these differences between the two systems and the two methods of social transformation should not conceal the fact that the two ideologies have objectively been, remain and can still be allies in the struggle against colonialism, imperialism, war and reaction.

Lenin was well aware that the world revolutionary process could gain powerful irresistible momentum from the objective and irreconcilable clash of interests between a wide range of social forces, on the one hand, and the forces of imperialism and bourgeois reaction, on the other. Hence his appeal for a close alliance and interaction of the proletarian vanguard in the West with the peasant masses, the oppressed peoples of the East. Precisely this tenet of Lenin's concerning the unity of all anti-imperialist forces underlies the strategy adopted today by the international working-class and communist movement in the struggle against imperialism as mankind's principal enemy and against the imperialists' allies in the newly liberated countries. Lenin was convinced that the proletariat standing at the head of the world revolutionary struggle would not form or make arbitrary random choice of its allies. These allies would emerge in the course of the development of society and of the struggles within that society, and any genuinely popular movement aspiring after ideals of national freedom and social justice, regardless of the stand it adopted to scientific socialism, in view of its democratic or anti-imperialist implications would provide an ally in the international proletarian class struggle.

Lenin's attitude to Gandhism exemplifies this approach in the context of the movement against the rule of the British imperialists in India. Since the very beginning of the twentieth century India had attracted his attention and in the years when socialist rule was asserting itself in Russia, Lenin paid particularly close attention to that great country seeing the liberation struggle of the Indian people as a force capable of inflicting defeat on the British imperialists who at that time

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SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM AND IDEOLOGICAL ISSUES

appeared unassailable. Lenin revealed profound insight into all the internal contradictions of Gandhism, the illusory nature of the ideas put forward by this ``Tolstoian-Indian'' concerning progress and of his well-intentioned dreams of setting up the Kingdom of God on earth by appealing to the colonialists' and exploiters' sense of moral duty. It was none other than Lenin in his debate with M. N. Roy, trying at the beginning of the twenties to foist upon the Comintern his concept of the national bourgeoisie as a counter-revolutionary force, who upheld his interpretation of Gandhi's ideas and methods as a revolutionising factor in the Indian national liberation movement and who came out in favour of supporting Gandhi's anti-imperialist objectives and co-operating with him.

Lenin, while remaining an irreconcilable opponent of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist ideology and campaigning for the organisational and political independence of the proletarian vanguard, succeeded in encouraging, supporting and making maximum use of all anti-imperialist, democratic, humanist, subjective-socialist elements inherent in such ideology in the interests of the world revolutionary movement. When evaluating Gandhism Lenin ascribed decisive importance to its democratic and anti-imperialist character. Marxists-Leninists did not push into the background their fundamental differences with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, differences that were quite apparent to the Marxists-Leninists. Yet Lenin meanwhile did not make of these differences an insuperable barrier to the cohesion of all antiimperialist forces. Leaving all dogmatic prejudice to one side, basing his attitudes on the concrete historical situation and acknowledging the actual conditions and scope of the movement, Lenin called upon those forces in the plebeian, peasant, petty-bourgeois masses in the colonial and semi-- colonial countries of the East, whose counterparts had played a revolutionary role in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, to become actively involved in the national liberation movement. Most revealing in this connection is Lenin's attitude to the "subjective socialism" of Sun Yat-sen. Methodologically Lenin's assessment of Sun Yatsen's work has a direct bearing on Gandhi's ideas for these also embody the spontaneous aspirations of the peasant and

petty-bourgeois masses who have not yet abandoned the illusion that it is possible to attain social justice without class struggle without working-class leadership.

The world communist movement and national liberation struggle of the Indian people developed at one and the same time, profoundly interacting and influencing one another. The main stages of the struggle for national liberation in India inevitably reflected the course of the struggle of the Indian working class to assert its class and national interests.

The wide-scale non-co-operation campaign against the British (1919-1922) in India, which made Gandhi a national leader, provided, as it were, an echo of the October Revolution in Russia, and bore the imprint of the mass action of the, as yet young, Indian working class that took the form of general strikes and hartals among the urban poor and the peasants. This campaign was in keeping with the spirit of Russia's October Revolution since it was of a genuinely popular character and furthered the political awakening of tens of millions of Indians. It was precisely in this connection that Gandhi's role was such a great one. Post-war successes scored in the Indian people's national liberation struggle also drew strength from the heightened activity of the democratic movement throughout the world that followed on the rout of the most aggressive detachment of the world imperialist camp and to which the world's first socialist country had made the all-important contribution. In their turn the victories scored by the national liberation forces in India that were undermining the imperialist system provided support and inspiration for the most consistent and uncompromising champions of the fight against imperialism, namely, the Communists. For years the international working-class and communist movement had been marching alongside the fighters for national liberation and this made possible the collapse of the imperialist colonial system. The cherished dream of the colonialists has always been to disrupt that alliance.

In the past and to this day the imperialists have been going out of their way to prevent the international workingclass, communist and national liberation movements from setting up a united front, making wide use of subtle methods of anti-communist propaganda. Imperialist and reactionary ideologists present as "communist infiltration and subversion"

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all instances of boldness and consistency in the struggle for anti-imperialist unity, national interests, and social progress. Gandhi has also come in for attack from these quarters: he has been accused of entertaining communist sympathies even by some public figures who supported Indian nationalist aspirations. The first nation-wide non-co-operation campaign in India (1919-1922) led even some of the Congress moderates to fear that it might promote the spread of Bolshevism in India.

However, consistent and far-sighted representatives of the national movement in no way shared these fears. While adhering to their original ideological stand they nevertheless saw in the October Revolution and the successful socialist transformations implemented in the USSR a source of inspiration, an example for development and powerful support for the struggle against imperialism. "I had no doubt," wrote Jawaharlal Nehru, "that the Soviet revolution had advanced human society by a great leap and had laid the foundations for the 'new civilisation' toward which the world would advance."* Nehru also noted that Rabindranath Tagore " became an admirer of the great achievements of the Russian revolution, especially in the spread of education, culture, health, and the spirit of equality".*""

Gandhi's attitude to socialist transformations in the USSR was more complex and contradictory. This can be explained by his unusual conceptions of progress and absolutising of the principle of non-violence. There can be no denying that Gandhi numbered among those representatives of the Indian national movement who adopted a positive attitude to the achievements of the world's first socialist revolution and appreciated how fruitful had been its influence for the anti-imperialist struggle.

Gandhi's scope for theory and action being limited by his refusal to recognise any doctrine other than non-violence, which he set up as the universal and eternal principle for relations between men, regardless of the social or class structure of the society in which they lived, this led him to underline first and foremost his negative attitude to violence

when assessing the fundamental differences between himself and the Bolsheviks. Yet despite this Gandhi paid due tribute to the communist ideal maintaining that communism meant a model society, an ideal worth fighting for. Gandhi did not deny the merits and achievements of the Soviet Union, in particular the elimination of private ownership of land; he deeply admired the heroism and diligence of Soviet men and women and the sacrifices which they had made in the name of the revolution and the victory over nazism, and he entertained profound respect for Lenin. On a number of occasions Gandhi acknowledged the positive impact which Indian revolutionaries, opponents of his non-violent tactics, had produced on the course of the national liberation movement, rallying its members to take bold steps against the imperialists. While failing to agree in principle with the methods of antiimperialist struggle extending beyond the limits of non-- violent resistance, Gandhi was to declare in 1944 that in the historical perspective all forms of struggle advanced the country's independence.

The fundamental ideological differences between scientific socialism and Gandhism remain valid to this day. However the objective interests of the international working class and the national liberation movement make it imperative that all anti-imperialist forces should unite. The finest representatives of the Indian working-class and national liberation movement have always been convinced that this unity was necessary. This appeal for unity of the anti-- imperialist forces acquires particular significance at the present time when the imperialists, relying on the support of their old and new allies in the recently liberated countries, India among them, are going out of their way to retain their economic and political influence and to this end are working hand in hand with the local bourgeois-landowner and communalist reactionaries against those honest followers of Gandhi in the Indian National Congress who are anxious to help the country out of the cul-de-sac, into which it has been led by the adherents of neo-colonialist capitalism, and on to the path of social progress. Precisely these followers of Gandhi's, in accordance with their leader's teaching, are opposing the domination of big capital, Indian and foreign monopolies and their enslavement of the Indian people.

* Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, New York, 1946, p. ** Ibid., p. 342,

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The voice of the selfless champion of India's independence and convinced campaigner for equality and social justice echoes through the masses of the Indian people deeply anxious to achieve a brighter future and progress in their interests, not the selfish interests of the big bourgeoisie and landowners.

Soviet men and women hold in deep respect the outstanding son of the Indian people, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in view of the enormous contribution he made to the antiimperialist struggle against colonialism in general, and to the cause of his own country's liberation from the domination of alien rulers. Soviet people are fully aware of the fact that Gandhi was always in the very midst of the people of India, led the life of the people and voiced their hopes and aspirations. He always drew inspiration from the bitter struggle that he waged against the British rulers, from the dedication and courage of the common people. He tried honestly and sincerely to lighten their lot, protect them from disaster, and inspire them to seek a new and more perfect society.

Decades of stubborn struggle against British imperialism ended in victory for the Indian people. In the memory of the Indian people Gandhi's name will always enjoy the deepest respect. The Soviet people, who have always felt the greatest sympathy for the revolutionary and creative efforts of the masses, sincerely join them in this.

better life to tens and hundreds of millions of working people, or the nation's interests and the interests of the broad popular masses will be sacrificed to the selfish designs of Indian big monopoly capital, that collaborates with American and British capital, and the old feudal and new semi-feudal elements in the countryside.

Undeniable success has been scored by independent India in setting up a new economy of its own. The state sector is gradually becoming more powerful and is coming to dominate in a number of branches. It has played an important part in undermining the power of the monopolies, the influence of foreign capital and closing the gap between levels of economic development in different parts of the country. Cultural facilities and the health and education services are being expanded effectively. Tangible improvements have also been made in the training of personnel for industry, science and technology, in the building up of national statehood and in the implementation, albeit at a very slow pace, of partial bourgeois agrarian reform. During the last ten years industrial production has increased by almost 200 per cent and agricultural production by 50 per cent.

The agrarian reforms that have already been introduced in India, despite their inconsistency (they have not fully solved the land problem in the interests of the peasant and neither have they eliminated outdated production relations in the Indian village), have dealt an appreciable blow at the feudal landowners, the princes and zamindars. With government support large agrotechnical schemes have been set under way that are generally referred to as the "green revolution". Although it is mainly the rural entrepreneur, the landowner-cum-capitalist and the more prosperous peasant who have gained the maximum benefit from these reforms, they have nevertheless made possible a certain rise in grain production (110 million tons were available for 550 million inhabitants in 1971). This enabled India to curtail its grain imports from the United States that were such a burden on the country's economy.

In point of fact Indian agriculture is going through a period of accelerated capitalist development. Goaded on by high prices for agricultural produce against the background of a constant shortage of grain, rural entrepreneurs make th,e;

Never before since Indian independence have political developments been so intense as in the recent period. Since July-August 1969 a fierce political struggle has been going on between the patriotic, progressive forces and the reactionaries who closely collaborate with the Indian monopolies and imperialist circles. This struggle which assumes a variety of forms, some of them most unexpected, is spreading to more and more parts of the country and involving wide sections of the Indian population. The basic question at issue is the path of development which India should follow.

Political leaders of various shades agree as a rule on one point: in many respects the outcome of the present struggle will determine whether the country shall take the path of national rebirth and genuine social progress bringing a new,

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SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM AND IDEOLOGICAL ISSUES

most of agrarian reforms, which are by no means really satisfactory from the point of view of the toiling peasantry, buying tractors, fertilisers and using improved seed and implements. As a result they are able, on the one hand, to achieve considerably increased yields and commodity output, and, on the other, to drive off the land poor tenant-farmers, turning some of the latter into hired labourers.

Thus it can be seen how India's economic development is being subjected to far-reaching changes. In recent years the transition from an economy on colonial patterns to the implementation of bourgeois reforms has been proceeding particularly rapidly. Major strides towards economic progress have been accompanied by rapid growth and concentration of wealth and control exerted over the economy by a small exploiting minority, while the position of the masses of the Indian working people has remained virtually the same. Only a small stratum of highly qualified blue- and whitecollar workers and the more prosperous peasants have attained improved material standards; the living standards of the bulk of the working people in town and country, who number hundreds of millions, have if anything deteriorated. The polarisation of social classes, the rich and the poor, has continued apace.

By the mid-sixties in the context of India's so-called mixed economy (that embraces a state sector, monopolies, large-, medium- and small-scale private enterprise) the economic power of a small group of Indian monopolies had consolidated considerably. Seventy-five enormous monopolistic trading-cum-industrial and banking concerns and firms were controlling almost 55 per cent of the total holding of the 25,000 non-government joint-stock companies and banks. India presented a classical example of concentration of industry and centralisation of capital: a handful of large monopolies on the strength of their economic power was virtually controlling the whole private sector and endeavouring to set it up in opposition to the state sector, slow down the pace of the latter's development and assert its domination over it.

To avert the concentration of economic power in private hands and the emergence of new monopolies was one of the main reasons for the state regulation of the economy that was introduced by the country's ruling party, the Indian Na-

tional Congress. The credit for the elaboration and initial implementation of the anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist policy both at home and abroad goes to Nehru. Even before him Gandhi had drawn attention to the need to carry on the struggle against foreign imperialism and big Indian capital.

In their turn the Indian monopolies, hand in glove with foreign capitalists, openly opposed official state policy in their economic programme. Their programme was based on the demand for all-round unrestricted co-operation with foreign capital, for confining public ownership to the narrow limits of the infrastructure, i.e., to the task of setting up auxiliary branches of the economy (power, transport, etc.), so that large-scale capital need not invest in these capitalintensive branches where no large profits were to be had, and for a minimum of planned state regulation and control of the economy. In the socio-political sphere the Indian monopolies demanded restrictions on democratic freedoms, the trade union rights of the working people, a halting of agrarian reforms and the banning of the Communist Party, etc.

In the second half of the sixties by virtue of the laws inherent in capitalist development, Indian monopoly capital succeeded in substantially consolidating its economic strength. After the death of Nehru the influence it exerted on the Indian National Congress leadership grew considerably stronger: this influence was used against the working people in both town and country. During the economic crisis of 1965-1968 Indian monopoly capital succeeded in pushing through a number of concessions vital to its own interests. These dealt a tangible blow at the interests of wide strata of the population, including the petty and middle bourgeoisie on whose shoulders the monopolies went out of their way to shift the whole burden of the difficulties then facing the Indian economy.

Meanwhile opposition to the monopolies among the working class, peasantry, petty and middle bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia grew apace. Even the big bourgeoisie outside the monopolies expressed their concern at the situation which had taken shape. The struggle between the supporters of monopoly capital and those social groups which were opposing it from a general-democratic, anti-imperialist and anti-monop-

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271

democratic, socio-economic measures (nationalisation of private commercial banks, etc.). The fierce political struggle in the ruling party which resulted led to a split into two new parties---the Indian National Congress uniting Indira Gandhi's supporters, and the Congress Organisation or the `` Syndicate'' consisting of the Right-wing Congress members opposed to the National Congress.

In its struggle against Right-wing elements the Indian National Congress was naturally assured of mass support from the people. The Congress programme directed against the monopolies was also approved of by Left and democratic parties, including the Communist Party of India. The Communist Party's National Council announced that favourable conditions now existed in India for campaigning against monopoly capital, imperialist and feudal reaction on a broader front. It also stressed that the new situation demanded closer co-operation between Left and democratic forces and their joint action. The party of the working class appealed for unity and cohesion of all anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-monopoly forces so as actively to withstand the policies of the monopolies and the reactionaries.

Observers of the Indian scene have drawn attention to a new phenomenon in that country's political life, namely, the involvement of broad strata of the people on an unprecedented scale in the struggle against the forces of the Right, in active politics. Moreover, as a rule, it is the democratic forces that the working masses support.

The struggle being waged by the working people in the towns and villages is gaining ground. This can be seen from the mass campaign of agricultural labourers and landless peasants anxious to take over abandoned state land and surplus acreage belonging to the landowners in excess of the legal maximum laid down for their estates. Demands for rapid nation-wide completion of the agrarian reforms, for lowering the ``ceiling'' for the extent of landownership and abolition of the land tax for small peasant holdings have been put forward and have the support of the masses, who are exerting pressure for them to be met. These recent mass movements have served to strengthen the position of the democratic forces, whose authority and influence are increasing accordingly.

olist stand began to dominate political life in India. This struggle was rife even within the actual ruling party. The monopolies had already long since found their obedient henchmen within that party in the Right-wing group known as the ``Syndicate''.

After the general elections of 1967 and the by-elections in a number of states in 1969 the struggle between antimonopolist, Left-Centrist forces in the Congress and the Rightwing reactionary elements which were aligning themselves more and more openly with the chauvinist parties Jan Sangh and Swatantra became particularly fierce. These elections served to bring to the public attention the crisis that had been mounting within the National Congress for a long time, they pointed to the Congress's declining influence in democratic strata. A real danger that the veteran antiimperialist party might be ousted from power was in the air.

In this situation the National Congress leadership was well aware that new steps were vital in order to consolidate the party's position that had been shaken. Yet there was no agreement among the party leaders as to how this should best be done. Discussion of this question served to exacerbate the struggle between the Right elements, on the one hand, and the Left and the Centre, on the other.

The Left-Centrist forces in the National Congress led by Indira Gandhi were in favour of introducing progressive anti-monopoly measures, such as nationalisation of the banks, insurance companies and certain vital branches of industry and accelerating agrarian reform, etc. They also promised to ensure wider scope for the activities of the petty and middle bourgeoisie and introduce certain measures designed to improve the lot of the working people, including the most unfortunate sector of Indian society---the agricultural labourers and the poor.

Supporters of monopoly business in the ruling party, in collaboration with the reactionary parties Jan Sangh and Swatantra, launched a political offensive aimed at seizing leading positions in government and party. Left and Centrist forces in the Indian National Congress party and the government led by Indira Gandhi foiled these attempts and responded to them by announcing a number of anti-monopoly,

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^73

and are unwilling to accept the fact that their natural allies are the non-monopolistic middle and petty bourgeoisie, who today oppose the monopolies, feudal landowners and foreign capitalists. Politicians of this stamp oversimplify complex social processes now at work in India and reduce everything to a "power struggle between two groups of the Indian big bourgeoisie", an explanation as unconvincing as it is brief. In this connection the most far-sighted political observers in India point out that given the constant efforts of the Right to consolidate their forces, to create a bloc of the Right-wing parties so as actively to oppose the forces of progress, any fragmentation of democratic and Left-wing parties, reckless action by any such groups, struggle between them and disregard of the Communist Party's appeal for unification and cohesion of all progressive forces of the working class and the whole of the working people have suicidal implications. Such action is fraught with serious consequences not only for the future of the particular parties, which put their sectarian interests before those of the people, but also endanger prospects for the country's national renascence.

Right-wing forces in India backed up by big business, that is hand in glove with foreign capitalists, big landowners and feudal lords, show no readiness to abandon the struggle. In the light of their recent failures and setbacks a tendency has come into the open for them to surmount internal inter-party differences in the camp of the Right and join forces in the struggle against the Left and the democratic forces. At the end of June 1970 the All-India Committee of the ``Syndicate'' held a meeting in Delhi: the main resolution to attract public attention was the appeal for the setting up of a united front or "great alliance" of the Right-wing parties---the `` Syndicate'', the Jan Sangh and Swatantra parties.

In itself this appeal for a united stand of the parties of the Right is nothing new in Indian politics. After the general elections of 1967 it was to be heard particularly frequently and insistently in one form or another from the leaders of all three of the above-mentioned parties as S. K. Patil, and also by representatives of Indian monopoly capital such as J. R. D. Tata. Slogans such as the need to "defend democracy", "save the country from chaos and disaster", or alternatively "communist subversion", are being used to rally

18---919

The most important aspect of the activity of all India's progressive forces is that they have come to appreciate the need for unity of Left and democratic forces, not only in the individual states, but on a nation-wide scale in the course of this struggle to avert the threat from the Right. India has been waiting for these forces to unite for so long: her progressives have long been appealing for cohesion of the forces of independence, democracy and social progress.

The Communist Party is actively working to bring about a united front of all Left, democratic and national-patriotic forces. As the Communists see it, the present mass struggle of the working people to defend their rights and interests and to implement progressive socio-economic programmes, including that put forward by the ruling National Congress at its Bombay conference, provides opportunity for setting up such a front. Democratic circles in India approved the statements made at the meeting of the National Congress's All-India Committee in June 1970 in Delhi to the effect that it was essential for the Congress party to embark on joint action with other democratic and Left parties in the country to implement socio-economic reforms in the interests of the people, and to hold the monopolies in check.

The need for united action on the part of Left and democratic, national-patriotic forces in India is dictated by the very course of the country's development. The fruitful results of this unity have been demonstrated by actual developments on more than one occasion. New objective opportunities for achieving this unity have emerged that did not exist in the past.

The Indian public shows concern at the stand adopted by certain democratic parties who, in order to promote their narrow party interests, sometimes indulge in unprincipled collaboration with conservative and Right-wing forces in their struggle against the Indian National Congress and the government. Disregarding the changes that are now taking place the leaders of these parties attempt in various ways to justify their actions. Some use as an argument the notorious policy of blind ``anti-congressism'' although major changes have taken place within the ruling party. Others refuse to see as the underlying factor in the present political struggle the deep division within the ranks of the Indian bourgeoisie itself

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Ill

THE AGRARIAN QUESTION AND THE PEASANTRY IN THE NEWLY LIBERATED COUNTRIES

together the parties of the Right now, just as in the past. The day-to-day struggle in modern Indian politics shows that the parties of the Right have by no means lost hope of uniting to oppose the National Congress party and all India's democratic forces.

The possibility of depriving Right-wing reaction of the chance of success depends upon whether or not the democratic forces unite. The community of interests of the forces of progress and democracy, finding themselves face to face with the menace of reaction, is being appreciated by ever wider circles of popular, democratic India. These circles also see such unity as a guarantee of success in their country's advance along the path to national renascence and social progress. The impressive victory scored by the National Congress party in the election campaign of 1971 demonstrated the degree to which all sound, democratic forces in the country have thrown in their lot with each other in the struggle against the monopolies and the landowners.

A time of change has dawned in India which is destined to determine the course of the country's subsequent development. It is now recognised by the whole people that the foreign imperialists (although stripped of political power), in alliance with leading local monopolists and the reactionary bourgeois and landowning elite, are responsible for all the people's suffering and deprivation and no amount of effort will be able to conceal this fact.

Warm sincere friendship has always united the Soviet and Indian peoples. Soviet men and women are anxious that India find a solution to the complex economic and sociopolitical problems now facing the subcontinent.

REFORM IN INDIAN AGRICULTURE PRIOR TO THE EARLY SIXTIES

Rural India Prior to the Reform: Objective Need for Agrarian Reform

Between 1946 and 1948 work began on the preparation of agrarian reforms for territory covering approximately half India's surface. The task ahead was to transform the obsolete, semi-feudal patterns of agriculture which had evolved under British colonial rule. Rural India before independence was dominated by the class of big, middle and petty landowners who as a rule were not themselves engaged in agriculture but leased their land often going in for sharecropping.

According to 1951 figures, 5,300,000 landowners hiring out land, together with the members of their families, constituted two per cent of the rural population while owning 70 per cent of the land under cultivation. This enormously high concentration of land in the hands of the landowning oligarchy did not in any way go hand in hand with any significant concentration of agricultural production. The predominance of semi-feudal patterns of agriculture on the eve of the agrarian reforms found expression in three main factors that are historically and economically interconnected: the predominance of landed estates; the prevalence of small and tiny peasant land-tenure agricultural production and the allimportant role of trade and usury capital in commodity and money circulation in the countryside.

The enormous concentration of land in the hands of the landowning class is reflected in the material collected by the national sample survey specially carried out in rural India in 1953-1954. Table 1 gives figures illustrating land distribution.

18*

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Table 1

CONCENTRATION OF LANDOWNERSHIP IN RURAL INDIA

1953-1954*

(65,600,000 rural holdings and 310 million acres of land fit for cultivation are taken as 100 per cent)

trast in size of holdings, we turn to the medium-sized units in relation to which extremes are usually less in evidence, even then 50 per cent of the holdings making up the lowest group accounted for only 10.5 per cent while the other 50 per cent (the highest group) took up 89.5 per cent of the land fit for cultivation, or almost nine times as much.

In India land provides the main means of livelihood for the majority of the people. It is on the land that the bulk of the population is employed. Yet the above-mentioned survey shows that 14,500,000 peasant holdings, or 22 per cent of the total, actually owned no land at all; moreover while holdings of this type constituted 8 per cent of the total in North India, the figures for the South and West were 28.1 per cent and 31.2 per cent respectively.

In practical terms peasant holdings with plots of land of less than one acre should also be listed among the landless peasants and there were 16,300,000 such peasant holdings (or in other words, they accounted for 24.9 per cent of the total). Thus 30,800,000 peasant holdings (47 per cent) owned no or virtually no land.

Table 2

Proportion of Landless Holdings and Holdings of Less Than One Acre and the Share of Land They Account For*

(65,600,000 holdings = 100 per cent)

Group of holdings (per cent of

total):

a---in each case equals group of holdings with smallest plots; b---in each case stands for group

Percentage of land cultivated by each group of holdings

Times size of group b plots exceeds size of group a plots

of holdings with largest plots

a---5 (0-5)

0.2

b---5 (95-100)

34.2

a---10 (0-10)

0.4

b---10 (90-100)

48.8

a---15 (0-15)

0.9

b---15 (85-100)

58.6

a-20 (0-20)

1.5

b-20 (80-100)

66.5

a---25 (0-25)

2.3

b---25 (75-100)

72.5

a---30 (0-30)

3.1

b---30 (70-100)

77.5

a-35 (0-35)

4.6

b---35 (65-100)

81.0

17.6

a_ 40 (0-40)

6.2

b---40 (60-100)

84.6

13.7

a---45 (0-45)

8.1

b---45 (55-100)

87.5

10.8

a-50 (0-50)

10.5

b---50 (50-100)

89.5

8.5

Per cent of holdings

Per cent of land

India as a whole

46.89

1.38

North India

41.46

2.41

East India

49.54

2.92

South India

55.56

2.17

West India

43.59

0.48

Central India

40.38

0.28

Northwest India

44.08

0.55

* See Sankhya. The Indian Journal of Statistics, Calcutta, February 1958i pp. 56-58.

Table 1 shows that 5 per cent of the holdings belonging to the lowest group (i.e., the smallest holdings) accounted for an acreage 170 times smaller than 5 per cent of the holdings of the highest group. The concentration of land in the hands of the landowners was so great that even if, leaving to one side these two groups which present the greatest con-

~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 59.

The social character of the concentration of landownership is determined by the social character of the mode of

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Being a product of the systematic campaign to obstruct capitalist development in Indian agriculture, this system ot parasitic rent-collection had a highly negative effect on the whole economic evolution of India's agrarian structure and on the productivity and technical equipping of Indian agriculture. These factors constituted a major obstacle to largescale farming based on the capitalist mode of production, and held back and distorted the class differentiation of the peasantry, condemning the bulk of the rural population to poverty, turning millions of bankrupt peasants into coolies and beggars/'^^1^^'

A distinctive feature of agriculture in colonial India was the chronic disparity between its results and the country's needs and the degree to which agriculture lagged behind India's industry. This situation led to an almost uninterrupted crisis of productive forces in the countryside. One of the particularly backward branches of agriculture which was at the same time one of decisive importance for the masses was rice-growing. The farming methods and implements used for growing rice and the yields had remained virtually unchanged since the time of Buddha according to Indian economists.

At the same time India's semi-feudal agriculture was to a considerable extent subordinated to demand on the domestic and world capitalist market.

The most constant and serious aspect of the crisis in India's agriculture was the relative over-population of rural areas which was on an unprecedented scale. It was a result of long years of foreign colonial rule, oppression resulting from methods and customs left over from the feudal past and the

^v In 1928 the Royal Commission on Agriculture summed up the situation, in which the vast majority of the Indian peasants were exposed to barbarous exploitation and virtually tied to their holdings, in the following terms: "The crowding of the people on the land, the lack of alternative means of securing a living, the difficulty of finding any avenue of escape ... combine to force the cultivator to grow food wherever he can and on whatever terms he can." In 1931 the Banking Enquiry Committee acknowledged the correctness of this assessment formulating it in these words: ".. .in India agriculture is ... more a mode of living than a business" (The Indian Central Banking Enquiry Committee, Majority Report, Calcutta, 1931).

' '

production predominant in agriculture. Whereas the allimportant feature of advanced capitalist relations in agriculture is the monopoly of large-scale capitalist production which is in keeping with a definite degree of concentration of bourgeois landownership, in pre-reform India the high concentration of landownership was by no means determined by developed large-scale agricultural production. The central factor in Indian agriculture was not the contradiction between the social, large-scale capitalist character of agricultural production and private forms of the appropriation typical of developed capitalism, but the contradiction between a private, small-scale semi-commodity peasant economy aspiring to free development of agricultural productive forces and the semi-feudal landowners' monopoly of landownership.

A variety of forms of peasant lease-holding, some with, some without legal protection and some with partial protection, was typical for pre-reform rural India. Payments for the land used to devour from one-half to two-thirds and sometimes even as much as three-quarters of the gross harvest. Rent in kind was as a rule more crippling than rent to be paid in money terms.

A specific feature of the system of landownership in India was the growth of an enormous stratum of parasitic landowners who did no more than hire out their estates. All over the country semi-feudal, private estates were breaking up and being purchased by representatives of the propertied classes in order that the latter might secure for themselves a constant source of unearned income at a time when colonial monopolies still dominated the economy and an anti-- industrialisation policy was being systematically pursued.

Market sale of private-ownership rights to semi-feudal rent-collection was widely practised throughout almost the whole country for about a hundred and fifty years. This led to the gradual emergence of a whole pyramid of intermediate rent-collectors, each one step lower down than the one before and entitled to a correspondingly smaller share of rent from the peasants. Despite sometimes considerable differences in the rights and social conditions of these landowners at the various levels of intermediate rent-receiving, they were all representatives of one and the same class.

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crippling conditions stemming from the nature of trading and moneylending practices. Long periods of stagnation and decline in major branches of arable farming and stock-- breeding, financial ruin that struck at rural artisans, natural calamities of overwhelming proportions, a chain of bad harvests throughout areas inhabited by tens of millions, famine, the underdeveloped industry and transport system all helped to make the relative rural over-population India's most burning social problem.

In 1952-1953, i.e., five years after independence, a special national sample survey was conducted in order to assess levels of employment in rural areas.* The survey revealed that there were close on 140 million people of an employable age in the country's villages. Of these, 12 million were virtually unemployed, 30 million had work for less than five days a month, 39 million for less than ten and 53 million for less than fifteen days a month. Leaving aside the 12 million not employed in agriculture, with reference to the normal number of working days per year 20 million of the rural population worked less than an hour a day, 27 million between one and two hours and 45 million between two and four hours. This meant that some 100 million able-bodied members of the rural population were unable to find a suitable outlet for their capacities.

This striking reflection of rural over-population in the chronic unemployment affecting tens of millions had become an acute social problem: the lack of a solution for it meant that the ruling classes in India were constantly exposed to the danger of social unrest.

Concentration of land in the hands of the landowners which had deprived tens of millions of peasants of the right to work on the land was exacerbated by the concentration of trade capital and money in the hands of a smallish group of usurers and traders who exploited the peasants in the sphere of commodity and money circulation.

According to figures of the special sample survey conducted in 1951-1952 by the Reserve Bank of India, 69.2 per cent of peasant holdings were in debt to usurers. The total

extent of these debts was estimated at between 12,000 and 15,000 million rupees. The burden of these debts was enormous for all, even the prosperous peasants. The above-- mentioned survey records that, in 40 of the 75 districts of the country investigated, the debts incurred by the prosperous peasants amounted to 10 per cent of the market price of the land they owned, in 27 districts the corresponding figure was 30 per cent and in a further eight it was in excess of 30 per cent. In Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh state) this figure rocketed as high as 500 per cent and in Sirohi (Rajasthan state) it amounted to 378 per cent of the market price. The position of the less prosperous peasant strata was as follows: in 28 districts the peasants' debts amounted to approximately 10 per cent of their land's market price, in 16 districts it was between 10 and 30 per cent and in 31 other districts it exceeded 30 per cent. In the state of Uttar Pradesh the following figures were recorded: Ballia district---248 per cent, Sultanpur---1,414 per cent, Shahjahanpur---410 per cent, Agra---100 per cent, Naini Tal---82 per cent; and in the state of Rajasthan: Gurha district---105 per cent, Sirohi---2,886 per cent, etc. So it was by no means rare to find poor peasants whose debts to usurers exceeded the market value of their land 20 to 30 times over.

The largest debts to moneylenders (in proportion to income) were those of landless tenant-farmers and peasant farmers or protected tenants with plots of up to five acres, and agricultural labourers. Precisely these sections of the rural population which constituted the majority had to surrender between 40 to 90 per cent of their annual gross income to moneylenders. Moneylenders (of the professional, village trader or commissioner variety) enjoyed a monopoly status in commodity and money circulation and credit facilities In the Indian countryside. The state, co-operatives and commercial banks provided 3.3, 3.1 and 2.4 per cent respectively of agricultural credit or a total of 8.8 per cent, while moneylenders and traders provided 69.7 and 5.5 per cent respectively, thus accounting for a total of 75.2 per cent.

The Indian moneylender not only exploited the peasant holdings needing credit through the crippling terms provided, but, being at the same time engaged in trade and very often acting as intermediary for foreign or local purchasing and

* Science and Culture, Vol. 23, No. 8, Calcutta, February 1958, p. 403.

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consolidation of peasant landownership. National Congress leaders were well aware of this: in the report of the committee set up by the Congress party to implement agrarian reforms, it was pointed out that if the peasants owned no land they lacked the necessary stimulus to raise their productivity. Since they had no confidence that they would receive the full benefits from possible improvements, they therefore had no desire to improve the plots they cultivated. They knew that any such improvements would only result in increases in the rent they had to pay even if their lease-hold rights were protected. This meant that the crux of the problem was the inadequacy of tenants' rights and the need to replace leased holdings by peasant ownership.

Meanwhile the lack of any restrictions on the purchase and sale of land and its alienation meant that more and more peasants were joining the ranks of the landless and losing protected rights of permanent or hereditary lease-hold, as land was being concentrated in the hands of big and mediumscale semi-feudal landowners, who as a rule were not engaged in agriculture themselves.

The regular intervention in the affairs of the peasants practised by the colonial state introducing essentially predatory but highly flexible lease policies was aimed at adapting the peasant economy to suit the needs of the colonialists and the world market.

At the same time the introduction of disorder among the discontented peasantry, the disruption of its anti-feudal and anti-imperialist unity through the barriers of formally differentiated lease terms served in some measure as self-sufficient political grounds for the colonialists' land policy and leasehold legislation.

The inadequacy of the so-called lease laws when weighed up against the actual economic relations in rural India was often brought out by the fact that one and the same individual would come forward in the capacity of intermediate rentcollector or hereditary lease-holder with one set of rights in one holding, and in another with different ones; sometimes at one and the same time a man would figure in the capacity of a peasant entitled to a permanent lease and that of a subtenant, even sub-sub-tenant receiving an appropriate share of the produce grown.

marketing firms, was able with impunity to dictate terms to the Indian peasants in the market sphere as well, in their capacity as sellers of agricultural produce and purchasers of manufactured goods. The moneylender was therefore in a position to deprive the mass of the peasants of free access to district and town markets. Hand in hand with the purchasing monopoly firms the moneylenders would make the most of the enormous differences between prices in village and town markets, appropriating an average of between 20 and 50 per cent profits on agricultural produce and sometimes even more. The moneylenders would also conclude crippling credit contracts for the peasants' standing crop harvests, buying up the crop at low monopoly prices. According to the survey carried out by the Central Banking Enquiry Committee, in the 1930s the customary rate of interest on these loans ranged between 12 and 37.5 per cent and in some areas was as high as 75-360 per cent.

In the early fifties (i.e., already after independence) twothirds of the transactions involving peasants were concluded in the villages themselves on the spot by village traders, moneylenders and commissioners of purchasing firms, who had control over money, transport and warehouses.*

Colonial rule in India together with the predomination of feudal practices in rural areas made it more or less impossible for a small-commodity peasant economy to develop and ruled out any large-scale transition to genuine capitalist development. Over a long period of a century or more agricultural development proceeded against a background of shameless and most successful profiteering on the part of small-scale predatory primitive capital.

A central factor in class relations in rural India has always been the question of landownership, and in particular the attitude of the state and various classes to the establishment and

* See All-India Rural Credit Survey, Vol. II, p. 22: in this context it is relevant to cite Marx's statement relating to the 1860s, when he pointed out that the products of the labour of the Indian peasant in the light of the taxes he had to pay "were sold without regard to price of production, they were sold at the price which the dealer offered, because the peasant perforce needed money without fail when taxes became due" (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1971, p. 726).

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private enterprise. These prosperous peasants at one and the same time combined ruthless exploitation and crippling leaseholding with capitalist exploitation and capitalist leaseholding.

The extent and application of hired labour in agriculture presents a particularly interesting question for study. Figures on this subject are far from complete but according to data provided by the government commission investigating the status of agricultural labourers (1952) there were 17,659 thousand agricultural labourers' families in pre-reform India, which made up 30.4 per cent of the rural population."" In South India agricultural labourers' families accounted for 50.1 per cent of the rural population, in East India for 32.7 per cent and in Central India for 36.7 per cent. The largest numbers of hired agricultural labourers were to be found in these three areas---a total of 14,482,000 families or 82 per cent of the total number of such families.**

The vast majority of the hired labourers were day labourers. Agricultural labourers were usually ``locals'', peasants owning no or very little land and whose very existence required that they sell their labour power, not merely sporadically but on a regular basis. According to the data provided in the above-mentioned survey the peasants owning no or very little land were unable to feed their families and thus had to sell their labour power in order to buy food for themselves and their dependents. Although approximately 50 per cent of these agricultural labourers owned or leased tiny plots, they depended almost entirely on opportunities to hire themselves out for their living. The hardship of their position was made still worse by the fact that 85 per cent of these agricultural labourers were only able to find casual employment and a mere 15 per cent had regular employment. The majority of the agricultural labourers were obliged to go out and look for work every day in order to feed themselves and their families, to find work wherever they could, and hire themselves out for any kind oT work on any terms. The average

* Agricultural Labour. How They Work and Live, Delhi, 1954, pp. 7, 8. ** Ibid.

Throughout India there was a large number of peasants, who while formerly entitled to rights of ownership, i.e., to hold permanent leases, economically speaking were virtually reduced to the status of sub-tenants, lease-holders with no rights or share-croppers. Although there existed throughout India a formal distinction between tenant-farmers with and without rights of ownership, in practice this difference often did not exist. In fact in actual economic life they were regarded as tenant-farmers "at the landowner's will", although the vast majority of them had been working their plots of land for many years.

This meant that the actual socio-economic status of certain strata of the peasantry did not coincide with their legal rights as laid down by the law. As a rule the actual status of the bulk of the peasants was considerably lower than the norms stipulating their lease-hold rights.

The economic purpose behind this expropriation of the peasants' rights of ownership and lease-hold was gradually to reduce them to the status of tenant-farmers and sharecroppers bereft of any rights whatever. The majority of the share-croppers (approximately 25 per cent of the peasants) possessed livestock, implements and labour power but had no land. The remainder possessed nothing or practically nothing other than their labour power. In the first place we are dealing with share-croppers of a pre-capitalist type and in the second with a direct transition to capitalism. The slow but increasingly obvious ousting of the first type by the second constituted the trend of the economic evolution of agriculture based on share-cropping. This trend went hand in hand with a still greater pauperisation of the share-croppers than their proletarianisation, but nevertheless this economic tendency was essentially capitalistic.

The bulk of the peasants rented land not in order to earn money or engage in capitalist enterprise, but were obliged to do so by hardship and hunger and this renting of land did not develop into capitalist farming practices on a mass scale. The latter tendency was only to be found among the prosperous upper echelons of the peasantry. These peasants not only engaged in moneylending before the agrarian reform was introduced and hired out part of their land at crippling rents but sometimes themselves rented land for purposes of

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number of days per year that these agricultural labourers were employed was 218 and the equivalent number for women workers---120; moreover, 92 per cent of this work was paid for on a time basis and only 56 per cent, in money. Of the total number of agricultural labourers' families 44.5 per cent were living in debt, a position to which they had been reduced by the urgent need to feed their families, and the average size of these debts was equal to 25 per cent of the whole family's annual income."'

There is no doubt as to the crippling character of these agricultural labourers' working conditions. The material position of the agricultural proletariat presents an equally grim picture. While the average annual per capita income in India in 1950-1951 was 264 rupees, the equivalent figure for the agricultural labourer's family taken as a whole was 104 rupees, and in South, West and Central India only 91 rupees."""" Wages for the agricultural labourer amounted to 59 per cent of those earned by an industrial worker in West Bengal, 36 per cent in Bihar, 33 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, 54 per cent in Orissa, 56 per cent in Punjab and 24 per cent in Bombay/^^1^^""""" The agricultural labourers and their families, who in 1954 constituted 22.7 per cent of India's total population, accounted for only 8.3 per cent of the national income.

An analysis of the structure of the average income for the agricultural labourer shows that at the beginning of the fifties 64.2 per cent of his wages were gleaned by means of hiring himself out in agriculture and 11.9 per cent outside, meaning that a total of 76.1 per cent of his income was obtained by hiring himself out. Income from working the land in his own holding accounted for only 13.4 per cent and work of a non-agricultural character for 11.9 per cent; thus income from self-employment accounted for only a quarter of the annual total.****

This meant that not only the peasants' produce but also the labour power of millions of impoverished peasants was

becoming a commodity in India. By making the villages subject to the conditions obtaining on the world capitalist market the colonialists, with the help of the landowners, managed to turn what had once been a natural peasant economy into one which could only survive if the peasants sold the product of their labour. In the course of time a large section of the peasantry, now impoverished, found itself unable to live without selling its very capacity for work---its labour power. The decline and disappearance of village industries connected with agriculture, and the ubiquitous spread of a commoditymoney economy in the countryside, the emergence of private, semi-feudal, semi-bourgeois patterns of landownership, the involvement of land in commodity circulation, the organisation of capitalist plantations, attempts at capitalist enterprise in agriculture on the part of the landowners, class stratification of the peasantry and the formation of a class of agricultural labourers were all factors pointing to the fact that capitalist relations were taking shape in India side by side and interwoven with practices left «ver from pre-capitalist patterns of the countryside.

Class contradictions in rural India were being reproduced on an extended basis over the decades. After the colonialists, whose bayonets upheld the reactionary agrarian system, had been driven out these contradictions came out in condensed form. It was no longer possible to merely suppress these contradictions or evade this or that solution for them. More and more often they provided the starting-point for the new stage of the peasantry's class struggle, that began with the advent of independence. On the eve of the reforms the Indian countryside was on the verge of agrarian revolution, that in places actually broke out. The class which had led the mass anti-- imperialist, national liberation movement for independence and which had now come to power was not able to bring forth a programme for radical, anti-feudal agrarian change and take on itself the leadership of a mass peasant movement. It adopted all possible measures to paralyse and in places suppress an over-revolutionary peasant movement and then it embarked on a course of bourgeois agrarian reform.

* Agricultural Labour..., pp. 15, 72, 73. ** Ibid., p. 30.

*** Ibid., p. 30; Report of the National Income Committee for 1954, p. 45. **** Agricultural Labour..., pp. 27-28.

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28!)

General Terms of Agrarian Legislation

Before the agrarian reform was introduced 43 per cent of India's territory was in the hands of the zamindar landowners. These zamindars together with the feudal princes had provided the main social support for the colonial regime in India. For close on a hundred and fifty years they had provided a direct instrument of the colonial state when it came to the exorbitant taxation of the peasantry. Among the zamindars there were considerable numbers of small and mediumscale landowners, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, who owned comparatively small plots of land of several hundred or even dozens of acres.*

The Indian peasantry had long held the landowning class in hatred. For centuries the peasantry had been waging a struggle against the numerous representatives of the class of parasitic rent-collectors---the zamindars, jagirdars, inamdars, malguzars, mirasdars, etc.---a struggle that had by no means always been a passive one, as certain Indian historians would have us believe, but on the contrary most active and one that on frequent occasions did not shrink from the use of force. The ruling circles who came to power in 1947 had to take this phenomenon into consideration.

In 1950-1951 when the big landowners were being abolished, the incomes of the landowning class as a whole ( including the rayat landowners, which constituted 3 per cent of the rural population, and in particular the incomes of the zamindars) amounted to 7,700 million rupees, or exceeded 2.5 times over the gross profits in the country's mining and manufacturing industries (3,100 million rupees).** The income

* Moreover it should be noted that 84.8 per cent of the zamindars in the state of Uttar Pradesh were very small landowners, and sometimes they were little more than privileged peasants, in so far as in 1945 they paid land taxes not exceeding 25 rupees each. In the Agra districts the zamindars were often no more than small peasants. This group of zamindars cannot be listed among the rent-collectors. At the same time 1.54 per cent of the zamindars who paid state land taxes of 250 rupees and upwards owned 83 per cent of all the state's land fit for cultivation. Their number included close on 800 big landowners who constituted less than 0.05 per cent of the total and yet owned 25 per cent of the state's land, i.e., almost ten million acres. ** The Indian Economic Review, No. 1, New Delhi, 1956, pp. 9-12.

amassed by this handful of parasitic landowners in 1950-1951 was equal to the total income of all agricultural labourers together with their families (7,600 million rupees for 17,600,000 families or close on 75 million people).*

Reactionary patterns of landownership, manifested in appropriation by the big landowners, traders and moneylenders of about one-third of the country's annual agricultural produce, assumed a still more acute form in independent India giving rise to growing difficulties for the country's overall economic development which urgently required a solution.

After the British had been driven from India there was no single force capable of preserving intact the old patterns in the countryside without risking the outbreak of agrarian revolution, a foretaste of which had been clearly provided by the agrarian unrest and large-scale peasant uprisings that had already broken out in many places. The semi-feudal parasitic rent-collectors, who had compromised themselves by collaborating with the imperialist rulers, were unable to go on being the socio-political mainstay of rural India. The new ruling class needed a new or restructured and broader source of support. On assuming power in a country where the poor peasants vastly outnumbered any other section of the population, and in the light of their active participation in the national liberation struggle, the Indian bourgeoisie would not have been in a position either to strengthen the state, or secure its own class domination within it, or embark on tackling the urgent problems in India's economic development without preserving and consolidating its leading influence in the countryside, particularly among the peasants, in the fundamentally new situation that obtained after independence. The bourgeoisie as a whole, despite the fact that certain of its more conservative and influential strata may not have wanted this, was unable to hold up agrarian reform any longer: this was not only because the bourgeoisie had promised the peasants reform even before it came to power, but also because the interests of extended capitalist reproduction, the extraction of profits and the expansion of the domestic market demanded that the long since rotten social order obtaining in the countryside be changed without delay.

Agricultural Labour..., pp. 1, 53, 73.

19-919

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In the situation that had taken shape it was clear that the question as to future forms of landownership and cultivation would for a long time be central in India's development and that the character and pace of the country's economic evolution would depend first and foremost on the type of solution found for the land problem. It also became increasingly clear that the land policy of the ruling class would not be aimed at any sweeping elimination of medieval practices in rural India in all aspects of the country's agrarian structure, but a gradual reformist implementation of such changes in the structure of the rural economy, which while being a compromise solution in relation to the interests of the landowners would at the same time lead to a certain degree of modernisation of the social structure of rural India and more rapid agricultural development; these changes would be introduced from above without the involvement of the broad masses of the peasantry.

In many documents published by the National Congress party it was pointed out on various occasions that most important was the carrying out of social reforms in the countryside and that these reforms would precede a transformation of agriculture.

The All-India Committee of the National Congress set up a special committee in 1947 headed by the prominent party functionary, Joseph Kumarappa. The committee insisted that all mediation between the peasants and the government in connection with land relations be ruled out. Further the committee suggested that a maximum size for landed estates be laid down and surpluses be taken away from landowners and handed over to rural co-operatives.

The main conclusions drawn up by the National Congress committee as a preliminary to the elaboration of the agrarian reforms can be summed up as follows:

1. No lasting improvements in agriculture are possible without all-embracing reforms of the country's system of landownership;

2. There is no place for intermediate landowners, and the land must belong to those who till it;

3. Given the diversity of conditions in the different parts of India and the complex nature of the agrarian question no single solution for the whole country can be adopted but the

main principles for land reform should be the following: The rural economy must provide favourable opportunities for the development of the producer's personality;

There must be no exploitation of one class by another; All steps must be taken to promote maximum efficiency of production;

Drafts for reforms must be realistic.

4. The need to stipulate three types of holdings was recognised: economic, basic and optimal.

Economic holdings: their size was to be assessed by agronomists for the various districts and they would base their calculations on the need to secure for the peasant a " reasonable standard of living" and full employment for the average peasant family possessing draught animals---a pair of bullocks. The basic holding was that of a smaller size than the economic unit as a result of the lack of necessary land resources in certain regions. The optimal holding could be larger than the economic one but not more than three times over. For all peasant holdings of the basic type, i.e., those of the bulk of the peasantry, plans were to be drawn up for their reorganisation on a basis of "co-operative joint farming", so as to create units of land for cultivation on a par with the size of the optimal holding which, in the committee's opinion, would make it possible to get rid of small uneconomic holdings by means of voluntary co-operation in larger units.

Apart from these types of holdings the committee also recommended that reform projects should take into account the need to set up "family holdings", which in size could be bigger than basic holdings but smaller than economic ones and that this type of holding, since it would not really pay its way, should also be drawn into a system of co-operative agricultural production.

5. The committee was of the opinion that for the majority of the rural population the burden of debts to moneylenders had not decreased despite the relatively high prices for agricultural produce that had obtained during the war and after it; it therefore suggested compulsory measures to be enforced by specially organised tribunals to reduce the burden of debt "in the light of the peasant's solvency" and that the debts of agricultural labourers should be written off completely.

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6. The committee urgently recommended that collective farming units should be organised on land newly made fit for cultivation "where agricultural labourers could be settled", i.e., the most wretched section of the rural population. In this connection it was pointed out that the committee believed that the settling of individuals on these lands being brought under cultivation should not be permitted under any circumstances. It was also stipulated that the existing system of land taxation, the extent of which was determined by the area of cultivated land, should be replaced by a progressive income tax, that would depend on the size of the income from agricultural production. Such were the formal recommendations put forward by the committee.

Even before investigating the report of Joseph Kumarappa's committee for agrarian reform, in December 1948 the Jaipur meeting of the National Congress adopted the proposals put forward by a special committee for the economic programme which had been formed in April 1948 under Nehru, to do away with the zamindar system. However, this committee's proposals evoked unexpected protests on the part of the provincial committee for abolition of the zamindar system in the United Provinces (now the state of Uttar Pradesh) which were the very hotbed of intermediate landowning practices in the country. As a result a new commission for agrarian reform was set up by the National Congress to study the material sent in from Uttar Pradesh and to define land reform policy in more precise terms. In June 1949 the commission's report was submitted to the National Congress but no decisions were taken. Right up until 1953 the numerous official statements and resolutions published provided no more than a general outline of the necessary land policy, but no concrete steps were taken by central state organs to implement any such policy on a nation-wide scale. Local legislation formally abolishing titles for semi-feudal landownership was meanwhile introduced in such states as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Rajasthan. In some of these states resolutions were also issued stipulating the maximum size of land-holdings. However up until 1953 no definite decision to confiscate land surpluses and make them over to the peasantry had been taken in any state, although this question was central to the whole issue of agrarian re-

form: would the peasants with no or little land and the agricultural labourers receive any land or not?

The National Congress election manifesto of 1951 virtually avoided the question and again put forward a programme for co-operative rural development. It was pointed out that rural development should take the form of co-operation of agriculture so as to turn whole villages or parts of them into units administered by co-operatives. It was not until almost two years after the elections, in 1953, that the National Congress All-India Committee adopted a special resolution calling upon the state governments to conduct a census of all land-holdings and also to lay down the maximum size for these, in order as far as possible to redistribute land surpluses among the peasants and agricultural labourers.

The question of land and the peasants' right to it was becoming a more and more urgent problem. It could not be ignored _any more, however long and evasive was discussion of it in all manner of legislative and administrative organs.

The need to limit the monopoly of landownership enjoyed by the established landowning class and surmount the latter's resistance to reforms obliged the People's Chamber in parliament in 1955 to adopt a special amendment to the constitution to the effect that the scale of compensation to be paid by the state for property confiscated from the landowners should be assessed not in the courts but administratively. This step officially put an end to the persistent sabotage of the landowners who had been submitting complaints to all legal bodies concerning the abolition of their titles, thus putting off for years on end the implementation of the resolution on the elimination of landownership by the big landlords in the states where this was the dominant practice (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, etc.).

Implementation of the Agrarian Legislation in the States of the Indian Union

The agrarian legislation enforced in the various states of the Indian Union has a very long history. Although it varied considerably from one state to the next its essence can be summarised as follows:

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a) the abolition of leasing out of land by intermediaries as practised by the absentee landlords (such as the zamindars) through the buying out of the latter's rights;

b) the regulation of relations between landowner and tenant by establishing a normal and fixed rent and providing the tenant with a guaranteed long lease with simultaneous retention by the landowner of the right not to lease out holdings of limited size for so-called personal cultivation; the establishment of direct tax and other relations between tenant and the local state apparatus with regard to the use of that land to which intermediary landowners lose their rights;

c) gradual transformation of tenants into owners of holdings;

d) redistribution of land through stipulation of a maximum size for existing holdings and those subsequently acquired, the buying up of land surpluses, resettlement of landless peasants and agricultural labourers on these lands; increases in the size of peasant holdings that were ineffective, i.e., that did not bring in an income;

e) the consolidation of small scattered and parcelled out peasant plots in compact holdings and the adoption of measures to avert any further spread of strip-farming and the parcelling out of land to such an extent as to render them unprofitable;

f) the organisation of peasant holdings on a co-operative basis to promote joint land cultivation and increase the size of farming units.

In August 1946 a zamindar abolition committee was set up in the state of Uttar Pradesh which two years later submitted to the government a special report on the question. After a further year (in June 1949) the Uttar Pradesh government put before the local legislative assembly a draft bill for the elimination of intermediate landowners. It was ratified in 1951, i.e., eighteen months after first being submitted to the assembly.

In the state of Bihar in which landownership was completely in the hands of absentee landlords, a law to abolish this type of landownership was also ratified in 1950. The landowners appealed to the state's High Court. The central government put before the Central Legislative

Assembly a draft for a constitutional amendment making the Bihar law constitutionally valid. Yet the Bihar landowners responded to this decision of the country's highest legislative body by lodging an appeal with the High Court of India. When, two years after the ratification of the original law, the Bihar government attempted to apply the law in practice, the Bihar landowners categorically refused to hand over their land-surveys to the authorities by way of "passive resistance" and then started individually to submit appeals to the High Courts of the state and the republic.

A law on alienation of estates was passed in West Bengal in 1953. It provided for the abolition of zamindars' rights of landownership with compensation. From April 1955 landowners would only be able to keep 25 acres of agricultural land and 15 acres of other land. For smallscale landowners (whose net revenues did not exceed 2,000 rupees a year) compensation was fixed at between 12 and 20 times the total of the annual rent they collected, for medium-scale landowners (whose net income was in the area of 15,000 rupees) at between six and ten times the total of the annual rent collected and for the large-scale landowners (with net income of 80 thousand rupees and upwards) between two and three times the total of the annual rent collected. In the state of Uttar Pradesh compensation to be paid to the landowners was fixed at a rate of between three and twenty times the total of the annual rent collected. The laws providing for the abolition of the landlords' rights and trie compensation to be paid to them formally proclaimed the principle of immunity for the tenant-farmer and the landowners' disability to drive out the tenant, with the exception of those cases when it was legally established that the tenant was making improper use of the land, not using it or making it unfit for use in violation of the law and the lease contract and when the landowner was intending himself to farm the land that he had formerly hired out.

The laws pertaining to land reform passed in the various states were excessively complex, detailed and sometimes confused. This applied in particular to the laws concerning rights of tenure. These were a result of the variety

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of forms of taxation that had existed in the country and also the blatantly casuistic legislation in this field under the colonial regime; other factors complicating rights of tenure were caste and religious barriers within the peasantry and the peasants' rights and traditions of inheritance. The most significant legislative changes in connection with the agrarian question that were introduced after 1947 were numerous amendments to earlier laws making the latter open to a variety of legal interpretations, frequently of a contradictory nature. No opportunities were provided for organised control by the peasants over the implementation of the agrarian laws passed in the various states. The practical implementation of the laws was the responsibility of the state apparatus in the individual states, which in many respects was merely that inherited from the colonial past and often of a corrupt nature concerned above all with the protection of the interests of the privileged classes.

The fact that the agrarian reforms were implemented in such a way meant that the landowners in all the states made the most of the authorities' tardiness and their not being subject to any central control, and succeeded in dividing up their estates and formally selling up their large estates to relatives and friends. The class struggle between the landowners and the peasants after the land reforms had been announced took a variety of forms: bribery of rural officials, falsification of census data and land-survey registers, intimidation of tenants to make them ``voluntarily'' renounce their rights of tenure and leave their rented holdings, efforts on the part of the landowners to register tenants with permanent or protected rights of tenure as domestic servants or hired labourers so as to be able to evict them in the future, and finally the actual eviction of millions of tenant-farmers.

In Rajasthan according to the law passed in 1952 jagirdar landowners had left at their disposal a stipulated minimum of land for their "own cultivation" (30 acres of irrigated land and 90 acres of non-irrigated land). Under the guise of a transfer by the landowners themselves to their own cultivation, tens of thousands of tenant-farmers were driven from the land regardless of their rights. The

jagirdars terrorised the peasants, set up bands of mercenaries to murder peasants and the leaders of the peasant movement.

Bogged resistance on the part of the landowners, organised terrorism against the peasants and their organisations were common features for between five and seven years in the states of Madhya Bharat, Uttar Pradesh and Mysore. In some parts of Tamilnad mirasdar landowners waged a desperate campaign against the agrarian legislation for several years. In the Tanjore district special armed police had to be brought in to keep ``order'' between landowners and prosperous peasants or mirasdars, on the one hand, and pannayals---domestic servants and sharecroppers, on the other.*

Big landowners throughout the country and those with medium-sized estates in most cases had no permanent production link with the agricultural process. They paid land tax to the state and either themselves or through intermediaries collected rent from the lease-holding peasants on the next step down the ladder from themselves, rent which exceeded the land tax they paid the state many times over.** This was the fundamental pattern of their parasitic existence, their class privilege. The landowners openly opposed the peasants and used all possible means to keep as much land and as many privileges in their grasp as possible. At first they tried to block the adoption of agrarian legislation, disadvantageous to their interests, in the individual states and, when this did not succeed, they then tried to obstruct its implementation using procrastination and sabotage tactics. The landowners started redistributing their forces, disguising the concentration of their landownership, fictitiously dividing their estates and evicting intractable peasants.

B. K. Madan, chief advisor to the Reserve Bank of India, stated at the nineteenth annual conference of the Indian rural economics society that the "Land to the tiller" goal

* Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India, Delhi, 1956, p. 37.

** The zamindars of Bengal were paying the state 10 million rupees a year in taxes, while annually obtaining from the peasants 125 million rupees.

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had been "substantially compromised by the large-scale evictions of tenants for resumption of land for `personal' cultivation"."'' He went on to point out that the members of the rural population, enjoying full political and economic rights and privileges, had obstructed every practical possibility for implementing the reforms, so that no improvements of any significance had been made in the position of the weakest sections of the rural population. When summing up the failures of the agrarian reform, B. K. Madan drew attention to the fact that the "farmer's passion for his own bit of earth in our country"""* had not been satisfied.

Local authorities in the various states of the Indian Union, while observing the law on the surface, in practice left the landowners ample scope for concentrating landownership in their own hands as before. What appeared as a radical slogan, "Land to the tiller", the harbinger of a new era in agrarian relations, was exploited to the full in those states where large estates dominated patterns of landownership.

A major problem facing the reformers was how to define in legal terms a "tiller of the soil". After endless debate spread over several years the following formula was drawn up, to the satisfaction of the landowners, providing for the abolition of the zamindars in the state of Uttar Pradesh: a person who permanently or occasionally hires agricultural labourers for manual work should also be regarded as a tiller of the soil, providing finance for agriculture, supervising it and taking risks. This abstruse definition of a "tiller of the soil" made it possible for all landowners to disguise the parasitic character of their landowning rights and, when their land surpluses subject to confiscation were revealed, to put themselves over in the fictitious role of "rural master". In order to qualify as "tiller of the soil", all the zamindar had to do was to evict tenants without rights or formally turn them into agricultural labourers allegedly working on their employer's own estate. By adopting similar tactics in relation to many

tenants on land outside their own individual estate, landowners were able to declare other lands from which tenants had been evicted as their own individual estates in their efforts to reduce to a minimum the land actually leased and owned by the peasants, an extension of which had been declared the goal of the reform.

The semi-feudal land monopoly of the zamindar landowners was legally abolished. The term ``zamindar'', which for centuries had been anathema to the peasant, disappeared from the language of agrarian relations. There were no longer any ``intermediaries'' between the state and the peasant and the peasant no longer paid any rent to the zamindar. Instead he paid a land tax to the state. However, although the hiring out of land for rent was no longer permitted by law, the former zamindars having obtained the status of "rural master" and now officially termed ``bhumidars'' started renting out the land they still owned on a share-cropping basis and obtaining compensation payments for the relinquishment of the parasitic landowning rights they had enjoyed as zamindars. At the same time they also started to engage in private enterprise.

The main condition stipulated for the abolition of semifeudal landownership was compensation in the form of cash or state bonds. After laws providing for the abolition of the zamindars had been passed in the legislative organs of the Indian states, one of the main problems still outstanding was the extent of the compensation to be paid to the former landowners, the procedure and terms of payment, all of which had to be fixed, and then the intermediary landowners still had to be replaced by a new state taxation body.

The compensation payments for landowners were estimated at approximately 6,250 million rupees (of which 3,890 million rupees were compensation as such, 860 million were taken up by subsidies for the reorganisation of former small landed estates and 1,500 million was paid out in the form of interest). Of the total sum allocated for compensation payments, landowners from the state of Bihar received 2,400 million rupees, those from Uttar Pradesh 1,780 million, those from West Bengal 590 million and those from Rajasthan

* Reserve Bank of India Bulletin, Bombay, December 1957, p. 1184, ** Ibid., p. 1186.

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300 million rupees. This meant that 5,130 million rupees or 83 per cent of the total went to four states where the old patterns of landownership had been most firmly entrenched. Approximately 60 per cent of that compensation money was paid out to the big landowners.

The source of money for the landowners' compensation was the land tax levied on the peasants, the total of which was equivalent to that of the rents formerly collected by the landowners. This meant that the abolition of the zamindar system did not result in any reduction of the payments the peasants had to make. They were paying out the same amount of money and sometimes even more than before, but as land tax instead of rent. This land tax, since it provided the source of compensation money for the landowners, in practice provided the basis for the continued parasitic existence of the landowning class. Despite the reform this class had not been done away with. The landowners, although deprived of their right to collect rent, nevertheless continued to suck thousands of millions of rupees from the impoverished peasantry in the form of compensation money and would be able to do so for years if not tens of years to come in keeping with the existing laws, provided the latter were not changed. Daniel Thorner pointed out that "all through the years the burden of maintaining these landlords had fallen upon the peasants", and they were now being asked to bear the expense of eliminating this burden. "If, indeed, the zamindars were parasitic, the question can be asked as to whether they were entitled to any compensation at all."*

The inconsistent and in some respects anti-peasant character of the new agrarian laws came to the fore as methods and ways for abolishing the intermediary land-

owners were selected: not only did the laws passed by the various states make it possible for the landowners to evict millions of peasants,"' retain and even expand their former estates rather than oblige them to hand any land over to the peasants, but in addition these laws provided for the placing of enormous financial burdens on the peasantry to provide compensation money for the parasitic landowning class. This meant that the agrarian laws possessed antidemocratic features although, as pointed out by one of the prominent Indian agrarian specialists, Bhovani Sen, the abolition of the zamindars was undoubtedly an important step forward on the road to progress. A reform that was essentially progressive when viewed in a historical perspective was implemented at the expense of the popular masses while the privileges of the outlived semi-feudal parasitic classes were retained.

In some states, such as West Bengal for instance, the bonds received by the landowners were recognised as inalienable which meant that their holders had no legal right to sell them and thus bonds could not become the object of any commercial dealings. In other states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, where large-scale landownership had been particularly widespread and the landowners' influence had been most powerful within the legislative organs, the latter granted the landowners the right to alienate their bonds and to re-sell them to other parties. This created a situation in which landowners could legally capitalise their essentially semi-feudal revenue in the form of compensation payments, obtained by the landowners from the peasants via the state. This not only meant that over a period of 40 years in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, 20 years in West Bengal and 15 years in Rajasthan the former owners of land, worked by over 150 million

* ". . .Even the Prime Minister of India was at long last constrained to declare that 'it is a crime to evict peasants'; nevertheless, the majority of the states have not even passed legislation banning evictions. Even where anti-eviction laws have been passed as a result of peasants' struggles, peasants who have already been evicted have not been restored to the land, neither are the laws properly enforced." (Communist Party and Problems of National Reconstruction, New Delhi, 1955, p. 7.)

•* Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India, p. 24. In connection with landowners' compensation the well-known Indian economists P. A. Wadia and K. T. Merchant write: "If Gandhi could without compunction contemplate, as late as 1942, the possibility of confiscation of Zamindari property, it is difficult to understand why the followers of Gandhi who are now in power ... should be so scrupulous in this matter of giving adequate compensation to those who may well be regarded as social parasites." (P. A. Wadia and K. T. Merchant, Our Economic Problem, Bombay, 1954, p. 339.)

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peasants, had secured for themselves a steady source of parasitic revenue, but also that they had obtained the right to glean further profits from these fixed payments by selling their government bonds on the open market whenever they saw fit. Obviously when this aspect of the compensation legislation is submitted to scrutiny it becomes quite obvious that India's ruling circles were anxious either to encourage the landowners to use their compensation revenue to engage in large-scale agricultural investment, or when they were clearly incapable of such undertakings to sell their right to receipt of compensation from the peasants to representatives of the new bourgeois strata who were playing a growing role in the countryside. Before the reform the Indian statutory landowners had made a practice of selling their rights to collect rent from the peasants to anyone who had the money---as a share in the semi-feudal exploitation of the peasantry. After the reform, when the old patterns of landownership had been abolished in the above-mentioned districts, landowners were able to sell their right to compensation payments from the peasants to any ready buyer. Yet, whereas in the past the landowners had not aspired to setting up an entrepreneur economy but merely bled the tenant peasants dry, demanding as large semi-feudal land rents as possible, and strove to strengthen their proprietary and legal rights and class position in the system of landowner exploitation of the peasantry, now all agrarian legislation and the rural conditions resulting from it were designed to encourage those entitled to compensation payments either to capitalise these in agricultural production or to sell their right to this compensation money to those capable of becoming a capitalist landowner or simply a farmer-entrepreneur of the rich farmer-capitalist type.

Although the abolition of the zamindar system of landownership had not led to the abolition of the landowning class in the north of the country where it was prevalent, and still less in India as a whole, it served significantly to accelerate the emergence of capitalist elements in all socioeconomic strata of rural India.

In a resolution summing up the prospects and results of the agrarian policy in October 1958, a plenary meeting of

the Communist Party of India's National Council called attention to the fact that the general aim and direction of this policy "is to promote capitalist relations in agriculture and to generate, foster and develop a class of substantial land-holders---capitalist landlords and rich peasants---who, with state aid and support, can develop agriculture on modern capitalist lines.. .".*

Assertions were to be encountered alleging that as a result of the agrarian reform that was being introduced the situation in rural India did not change at all and everything was as before. This interpretation is incorrect and clearly fails to take into account the changes at work in the Indian countryside. Those who failed to take into account the bourgeois character of the reform insisted that the agrarian legislation passed since the war has been aimed exclusively at defending, consolidating and preserving intact the landowners' feudal and semi-feudal interests. The agrarian reform in effect did not accomplish the pivotal objective of the bourgeois-democratic revolution--- it did not transfer land to the peasants and thus, since no redistribution of land took place, did not abolish once and for all either every form of semi-feudal exploitation of the peasantry, or, consequently, the landowning class as a whole. The economic power of the most hated figure in rural India---the moneylender---also remained unchallenged.

Nevertheless landowners all over India were compelled to relinquish part of their former holdings to the state in return for compensation (with the exception of Jammu and Kashmir where no compensation was provided). This meant that the sway of the privileged landowner had been made a thing of the past. Capitalist farms run by the landowners were not confiscated and landowners not engaging in agriculture were allowed to retain the estates immediately adjacent to their homes but they no longer had the right to rent out such land. These measures served to do away with the old system of landownership in Central and

* Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question, Resolution adopted by the National Council, Communist Party of India, October 8-13, 1958, New Delhi, 1958, p. 9.

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North India, led to a reduction in the number of landowners, served to check semi-feudal exploitation and introduced land taxes to be paid directly to the state by the peasants thereby severely curtailing the sphere of semifeudal conditions of land-tenure imposed on the peasant by the landowner.

The introduction of the direct land taxes payable by the peasants served to disrupt the pyramid stratum of intermediate rent-collectors who had formerly come between state and producer. Relying on their compensation payments and state loans, some of the former rent-collectors were able to start organising large-scale capitalist farms.

The abolition of the semi-feudal zamiradar class and the intermediate stratum of rent-collectors, which however did not strip the landowners of the land adjacent to their homes and guaranteed them substantial compensation payments, on the one hand, made possible streamlining and expansion of private bourgeois landownership, and on the other, served to promote capitalist agriculture and accelerate the stratification of the peasantry.

The agrarian reform dealt serious blows at the feudal practices still to be encountered in India and as a result these practices were ``up-dated'', i.e., brought in line with the increasingly capitalistic socio-economic relations that to a growing extent were being shaped by commoditymoney, bourgeois relations. "All this has had repercussions ... unleashing certain new social forces and creating new problems which have to be properly assessed and understood."*

It is quite clear that the overall evolution of the Indian economy since the last war, particularly as regards industrial development, the enormous growth of capital investment, the expansion of the transport services, commodity turnover, the enlarged budget allocations for construction in the state sector of industry, the programme for communal development and other schemes in rural areas, largescale irrigation and hydrotechnical projects for agriculture, inflationary finance policy and the large increase in money

circulation, banking and usury capital, is constantly encouraging and accelerating the development of capitalist relations in rural India.

The agrarian reform introduced in areas where largescale landed estates dominated the rural scene, should be analysed not as an isolated phenomenon but in the light of the whole course of the Indian economy's independent development. Only then is it possible to arrive at a correct assessment of the series of legislative measures serving to intensify capitalist exploitation in agriculture. However, as pointed out in the resolution published by the National Council of the Communist Party of India, in that part of the country where the system of landownership was reformed, semi-feudal patterns of rural life remained very strong, which meant that ".. .the substantial land-holders who dominate village economy indulge both in capitalist and semi-feudal forms of exploitation".* Some capitalist landowners started farming on capitalist lines, and although the total extent of land taken up by these farms was far from great, nevertheless ". . .there has appeared on the scene in these areas a class of big land-holders who own a considerable portion of the total lands which are cultivated through wage-labour.. .".**

Thus the most significant objective result of the reform in the system of landownership was that feudal practices had ceased to dominate rural India as a whole and also those areas where large-scale landownership had been particularly prevalent.

India's First Five-Year Plan made provision for a restriction in land rents throughout the country. Such rents were not to exceed between a quarter and a fifth of the harvest. However this recommendation that was incorporated into the plan was not introduced in practice. Rent restrictions were by no means uniform in the various states and regions of India and in some no restrictions at all were even announced.

* Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question..., p. 2.

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 5.

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In the state of Assam and in several districts of Mysore, Orissa, Rajasthan, Hyderabad, Himachal Pradesh and in Delhi province the maximum rent was fixed at a quarter of the harvest; in the state of Bombay and most districts of Rajasthan at one-sixth, in Kerala at a rate of between a quarter and a sixth of the rice harvest and a rate of between a third and a twentieth of the harvest of other crops. In the remaining states maximum rents were fixed at a third of the harvest or over. In Andhra, Jammu and Kashmir, for example, rents of up to fifty per cent of the harvest were legal; one-third was the legal maximum in Punjab and certain districts of Mysore, in Bihar it was seven-twentieths, in Tanjore sixty per cent, along the Malabar coast fifty per cent and in West Bengal between forty and fifty per cent of the harvest.

However the size of rents was not the central issue when it came to legislation covering land-tenure. It is clear from many sources, including the official ones, that the laws concerning rent stipulations were as a rule not enforced. Naturally (this Indian economists themselves admit) laws stipulating rent levels can only be effective if there are real guarantees for tenants' right to the land they are renting. The following examples suffice to show the extent to which the by far from satisfactory laws to protect the peasants' rights to the land they leased were enforced.

The territory of the former state of Hyderabad* In 1950 the Hyderabad Tenants and Agricultural Lands Act was introduced which officially secured tenant-farmers' rights for a period of five years, allowing for an extension of existing leases after that for a further period of five years. Provided the land was worked satisfactorily and rent payments were in order, landowners were not allowed to evict their tenants. The law defined the category of "protected tenant" possessing permanent and hereditary rights. However, if landowners decided to start engaging in farming themselves, whatever conditions obtained they were in a position to deprive tenants of their land. Although the tenant possessed the

formal right to buy the land he was renting from the landlord, the latter used to refuse him that right if he himself wished to increase the size of his own holding.

The introduction of such a land Act did not serve to regulate relations between tenant-farmers and landowners. The Hyderabad state government declared the eviction of tenant-farmers illegal after March 21, 1952. Several hundred eviction orders were declared null and void. Plots they had formerly leased were restored to more than 5,000 tenantfarmers. However this did not result in substantial changes in the position of the peasants. The state government set up a special land commission to investigate the main problems in agriculture.

Landowners refused to recognise and observe ``protected'' tenants' rights. They used to auction their property to pay their debts. In the commission's report it was confirmed that ``protected'' tenants in practice accounted for only an insignificant proportion of the state's tenant-farmers. In practice their position was determined not so much by laws passed by the state government, as by the market situation, the increased demand for land as a result of rural over-population, the "balance of power" in the villages between landowners and peasants, and the arbitrariness of the local administration.

In Hyderabad the eviction of ``protected'' tenants assumed catastrophic proportions; according to figures drawn up by the Kisan Sabha, by 1955 approximately 57 per cent of the ``protected'' tenants had been evicted, which meant that 59 per cent of the total area held by such tenants had been ``released'' on the grounds that the landowners themselves were intending to work their own farms.^^51^^' Another detail of interest in this connection is that according to official figures 77 per cent of the evicted tenants allegedly relinquished their rights to their holdings voluntarily. In the Kisan Sabha report it is stated that the Hyderabad government itself assumed that this ``voluntary'' relinquishment of rights of landtenure might well not be voluntary after all.

Madras. After the general elections of 1952 and serious

* This section is dealing with agrarian reforms introduced in Hyderabad prior to the reorganisation of India's administrative divisions in 1956.

* Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question..., p. 7; Fourteenth Annual Session of the All-India Kisan Sabha Report, New Delhi, 1956, p. 4.

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disturbances in the Tanjore district, which provided over a third of the state's whole rice harvest, the Tanjore Tenants and Pannayals Protection Act was drawn up to enforce rights of tenure. The Act provided for distribution of the harvest between tenant and landowner on the basis of a 5:2 ratio and prohibited eviction of tenants except in those cases when decisions concerning eviction were adopted by a special land court. This Act obliged the landowner to pay labourers---or pannayals---according to the number of days worked. The Madras legislative assembly incorporated this Act into the state's code of laws.

The basic principles underlying this Act also provided the basis for the act introducing fixed rents. However eviction of tenants still continued. The mirasdar landowners indulged in intimidation tactics and organised a campaign against the new land legislation which continued for a number of years. New laws protecting tenants' rights were introduced in 1955 and 1956. Officially these prohibited eviction of tenants and fixed tenants' and landowners' shares of the harvest at a 6:4 ratio. The new laws also stipulated that landowners should restore within the year holdings to tenants evicted throughout the state after 1953, with the exception of the Tanjore and Malabar districts that were particularly critical in this respect. It is revealing to note that tenants evicted from plots of less than 6.6 acres of irrigated land and 20 acres of non-irrigated land did not have to have their holdings restored to them according to the new laws. Despite all these new state laws the landowners first of all cleared their land of small-scale tenant-farmers and then obtained legal ratification for their thereby enlarged estates.

Bombay. The Bombay Tenancy Act of 1948 was regarded in India as a model for all other states. It stipulated three types of tenancy.

Permanent tenancy for tenant-farmers with immutable rights and privileges which could only be revoked by a court of law in cases of non-payment of rent. There was a total of approximately 350,000 holdings of this type.

Protected tenancy for tenant-farmers who over a period of six years or more had been working their particular holdings. They were entitled to acquire the land they rented as their own property and also to transfer their rights of

tenancy to their heirs on similar conditions. However this type of tenant could still be evicted as soon as the landowner might decide to start farming himself (if he possessed less than 50 acres of land under cultivation) and start laying claim to the tenant's holding, even if the purposes for which he planned to use it were not connected with agriculture. Approximately one and a half million holdings came under this heading.

Ordinary tenancy for tenant-farmers with rights to permanent tenure over a period of ten years, which could then be extended for a further ten years. The insufficient protection provided for this type of tenure too was reflected in the fact that the landowner could confiscate land for his own private development at any moment in the course of the above period. The total number of holdings worked by tenant-farmers of this kind was approximately 700,000.

In addition there were still lower down the scale large numbers of share-croppers, tenants bereft of any rights and landless agricultural labourers.

A special survey conducted by the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in 1953 (the findings of which were published in 1957) defined the true results of the agrarian legislation introduced in the state of Bombay in the following words: "For all practical purposes the Act did not exist."*

In 1949-1953 50 per cent of the tenant-farmers in an area selected for a special survey (covering 105 villages) in the state of Bombay retained their former rights of tenure, 20 per cent leased their holdings on a new basis, 27 per cent were deprived of their holdings by their landlords who confiscated them after the tenants' alleged "voluntary relinquishment" of their rights, and 3 per cent bought up the land they had been renting which became their own property.

By 1957 in the state of Bombay the total area held by ``protected'' tenants had been reduced by 50 per cent, a state of affairs which the legislation had in fact promoted, although officially it had been introduced to protect tenants.

* Working of Bombay Tenancy Act 1948, Report of Investigation, Poona, 1957, p. 187.

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According to the Bombay Tenancy Act, "it is further provided that if a tenant fails to exercise his right of purchase by April 1957, he shall become liable to ejectment"."" This meant that in that particular state even small-scale peasant holdings could be taken over by the landowners as the latter endeavoured to put an end to the peasants' parcelling of land and use it instead for their own capitalistic enterprises.

To sum up:

In those states where legislation was adopted which guaranteed tenant-farmers' rights to their holdings, relations between tenant and landowner assumed one of three forms.

1. Tenants were assured a guarantee for their rights of tenure, while landowners were forbidden to take over the land they had leased out for their own personal use;

2. Landowners retained the right to take over tenants' holdings so as to cultivate the land themselves, on condition that they left the tenant part of his former holding, so that he might continue to make a living;

3. Tenants were deprived of the right to retain even a minimal holding and landowners could take over all or part of their land as they wished.

In the state of Uttar Pradesh and in Delhi province relations of the first type established themselves.

In the states of Assam, Bombay, Punjab, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh relations of the second type became the accepted pattern.

In Assam a landowner was able to take over a tenant's holding on the pretext that he was going to develop it himself; the maximum size of such holdings could be as much as 33 acres, on condition that the tenant-farmer or sharecropper retained a holding of not less than 3.3 acres.

In the state of Bombay landowners had the right to take over from tenants between 12 and 48 acres provided the tenants were left with holdings not less than half the size of their original ones.

In Punjab landowners were legally entitled to take over 30 standard acres from any tenant provided the tenant was left with a holding of at least five standard acres.

In the state of Rajasthan landowners were entitled to take over all land from any tenant over and above that part of his holding which brought in 1,200 rupees a year. The tenant had no rights to any land over and above that which brought in such a revenue.

In Himachal Pradesh a landowner was not entitled to take from a tenant-farmer more than five acres and the tenants had the right to retain as their leased holding three-quarters of the land they worked.

In the states of Jamniu and Kashmir, West Bengal and also in the territory of the former state of Hyderabad, relations of the third type grew up.

In Hyderabad territory a landowner had the right to take over land with an acreage three times that of his family estate (i.e., from 12 to 180 acres). Meanwhile the tenantfarmer had the right to retain a holding equal to a third of his family estate (i.e., from one to 20 acres), or half his original plot if it came to less.

In West Bengal any landowner possessing less than 7.5 acres could take over from a tenant-farmer all the land leased out to him; landowners with estates of more than 7.5 acres were entitled to take over two-thirds of the land they leased out. The maximum number of acres a landowner could take over from a tenant-farmer was fixed at 25. In West Bengal a substantial number of tenant-farmers and share-croppers, so-called bargadars, were evicted on the grounds that the land they had been renting was taken over by the landowners concerned in order that the latter might develop it themselves. These tactics brought countless disasters and untold privation to the bargadars and their families, who in the majority of cases were reduced as a result of this treatment to the status of landless agricultural labourers deprived of any protected rights or regular sources of income.

Kerala was the only state where the share-cropper was legally placed on the same footing as the tenant-farmer if he had been working his current holding for over five years, even if the landowner's plot was under the set limit. Legislation adopted in Kerala in 1957 stipulated the landowner's right to take over 15 acres of a tenant's rice fields that could be harvested twice annually or an equivalent acre-

* Review of the First Five Year Plan, Delhi, May 1957, p. 322.

R. ULYANOVSK?

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

age whenever he chose. Landowners with large estates were not entitled to demand any land back from their tenants.

In Andhra Pradesh, Bombay, Madhya Pradesh, Mysore and Manipur temporary, and even more unsatisfactory legislation, providing for the protection of tenancy rights, was introduced. The same applied to the states of Orissa and Madras where landowners' rights to take over their tenants' land were subject to certain restrictions.

These laws relating to the peasants' rights of tenure, however many amendments were introduced into them allegedly so as to improve conditions for the tenant, were basically designed to preserve and consolidate the landowners' rights to a) take over land subject to any kind of peasant tenure in order to engage in their own development projects and b) to realise land on an unlimited scale for their own private gain. Herein lay the core of the ruling classes' policy when it came to peasants' rights of tenure.

The Punjab Kisan Sabha report stated in a memorandum on land reforms that it was very difficult for tenants to rent land for cultivation, since the powerful landowners were resorting more and more frequently to private enterprise and in such conditions petty landowners were reluctant to lease out their property, and moreover although land rents in Punjab and Pepsu were lowered and could not exceed a third of the harvest, rights of tenure were not protected and tenants as a rule were not able to benefit from the law providing for lower rates of rent.

In 1954 findings extremely important from an economic point of view were published by the All-India Rural Credit Survey after a sample investigation of 127,343 peasant holdings in 600 villages in 75 different areas of the country. According to Professor M. L. Dantwalla, a leading expert in the Indian rural economy and member of the committee for land reform, the survey made it quite clear that the legislation introduced to secure firm rights of tenure for the peasants and to stipulate moderate levels of rent had not achieved anything: "It was estimated that there had been more evictions during the last ten years than in the previous 100 years."*

Although the legislation providing for protection of tenants' rights was undeniably in the interests of the bourgeoisie and landowning class and its actual implementation was officially acknowledged as unsatisfactory from the point of view of the tenant peasants, this does not by any means imply that it did not produce fairly substantial changes in the tenants' formal and legal status. The conditions of tenancy in the various states were unified to a considerable extent and levels of rent came down. The majority were granted rights of tenure for fixed periods, except in those cases when landowners were entitled to take over land for their own personal cultivation.

The ruling class, in collaboration with the landowners, succeeded in reforming the old system of landownership (viz. the revocation of the zamindars' rights in return for compensation) and making over to the state 87 per cent of the land formerly owned by the zamindars in the state of Uttar Pradesh and 84 per cent of the land formerly owned by them in the state of Bihar. Despite alienation of land even on this enormous scale, the landowners succeeded in retaining almost all their estate lands which after the agrarian reforms accounted for 7,000,000 acres in the state of Uttar Pradesh, 3,900,000 acres in Madhya Pradesh and 3,500,000 acres in the state of Bihar. Only 14.55 per cent of Indian landowners owning a total of 30.77 per cent of the land fit for cultivation leased out land to the peasants.

The political significance of the reform lay in the fact that after the transfer to the state of a considerable part of the land in those districts, where formerly traditional patterns of large-scale landownership had dominated, such land was not redistributed among the landless peasants; instead legislation was designed in such a way as to facilitate the expansion of only those holdings leased by the prosperous and partly middle, i.e., most influential, sections of the peasantry, while reducing direct relations of tenure between landowners and the backward mass of the peasantry to the minimum possible. The ruling classes thus aimed at rendering harmless the anti-feudal unity of the peasantry and keeping down the class struggle in rural areas. i The agrarian reform did nothing to ease the burning issue of the landless peasants or those with insufficient

See: The Hindustan limes, New Delhi, August 21, 1956.

R. ULYANOVSKY

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

holdings while the goal set by the ruling circles was by no means fully attained.

The class struggle in rural India, which had been less intense due to the implementation of the reform from which the peasants had hoped for more land, continues to have an objective foundation, in view of the fact that the peasants' hopes have not been fulfilled.

The following table illustrates which sections of the rural population continue to lease out land after the reform and on what scale.

and political power over the rest of the peasantry which this wealth gave them, although it redistributed this wealth m the interests of the prosperous peasants and the flourishing capitalist landlord. It is worth noting that between 50 and 70 per cent of the land owned by the entrepreneur peasant elements and landowner upper strata in the countryside by this period was not being leased out but developed by its owners.

• ^T_T^hUi^S- ^W,^hile P^reviouslY students of the agrarian question in India had justly maintained that semi-feudal patterns of tenure had dominated in the production relations existing between landowners and the peasants, now such an interpretation of the situation was plainly inadequate It did not take into consideration all the complexities of the Indian situation as a whole and in particular that of the south of the country where capitalist development of rural areas was far advanced.

``In regions like Andhra, Punjab, Berar, Kavery belt and Loimbatore district of Tamilnad, some districts of Gujarat Maharashtra and Mysore, the capitalist landlord is a much more powerful element in rural life. He possesses big farms consisting of the best lands, he is the employer of a large number of agricultural labourers and uses more modern methods of production; he is also a moneylender, supplying a good part of the credit needs of cultivators and resorts to hoarding and black-marketing in food grains. He is often closely connected with agro-industries such as rice and oil mills, sugar mills, etc. He is also closely connected with the ruling classes and the administrative machinery."*

Yet this assessment of the situation obtaining in the villages of southern India does not mean that feudal practices had disappeared entirely in the area: "The fact of the matter is that even in these regions, share-cropping, subletting on excessive rents and various other types of semifeudal exactions are still quite prevalent, although the dominant tendency among the bigger landowners is to resort more and more to cultivation through wage-labour."**

So while old forms of semi-feudal exploitation had not

__* Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question..., p. 6. ** Ibid., p. 7.

Table 3

Leasing Out Land According to Group of Holdings*

Area of holding (acres)

Total number of holdings COOC)

Total area owned (acres)

Percentage of holdings

Leasing out land

Not leasing out land

14,444

_-

0.01-0.99

16,346

4,275

9.42

90.58

1.00-2.49

9,108

15,277

18.27

81.73

2.50-4.99

8,975

32,404

21.89

78.11

5.00-7.49

5,361

• 32,807

22.01

77.99

7.50-9.99

3,092

26,743

23.74

76.26

10.00-14.99

3,359

40,816

28.58

71.42

15.00-19.99

1,744

30,290

25.46

74.54

20.00-24.99

21,026

28.34

71.66

25.00-29.99

19,279

25.32

74.68

30.00-49.99

1,032

38,602

36.63

63.37

50.00 and above

48,331

43.94

56.06

65,659

309,850

14.55

85.45

* National Sample Survey, pp. 55-58.

The bulk of the land, as the figures in Table 3 show, was leased out by prosperous peasants and the more powerful landowners. These sectors concentrated in their own hands the country's land resources, as before. The reform did not deprive them of their wealth and their economic

R. ULYANOVSKY

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

disappeared in India, after the reform they had become more subject to the influence of commodity, money and capitalist relations, and were being made use of for accumulation by the rural capitalist elements whose position had been strengthened. Capitalist enterprise in rural India, the development of which had intensified in the course of the reform period, was to be found side by side with obsolescent, semi-feudal forms of exploitation of the peasantry and this situation is to continue for a good time to come as well.

In 1955 in accordance with a directive from the central government a survey of land-holdings was carried out so as to establish the area under personal cultivation or leased out by its owners. Answers to the survey questionnaires were to be sent in by the ``patwars'' or village elders who were advised to base their answers on findings gleaned from surveys made on the spot or at least on those of the village land-surveys. Instructions for the conduct of the land census were drawn up in most vague terms which made it possible for the rural upper crust and administrators to list privately owned land worked by share-croppers or tenants devoid of any rights as landowners' personal property. Attitudes to the idea of this land census varied considerably from state to state. The ruling circles in all states were well aware that it was aimed at singling out land surpluses which were not being used by landowners themselves and which could if the worst came to the worst be distributed among the peasants. All this left an imprint on the results of this most significant and only state survey, that was conducted in the spring of 1955 before work began on stipulation of norms for the maximum size of land-holdings. Table 4 is a summary table for several Indian states with regard to the two most prosperous categories of landowners, owning between 45 and 60 acres and upwards, who came closest of all to the landowners of a semi-feudal type. These figures show that the share of land developed by landowners themselves, even if allowances are made for the deliberate and ill-intentioned exaggerations designed to conceal the actual state of affairs regarding the leasing out of land, had become most substantial and this testifies to the far-reaching process of capitalisa-

tion of landed estates which a mere twenty to thirty years ago had hardly started to make itself felt at all in connection with large-scale agriculture.

Table 4

Distribution and Size of Holdings Leased Out

by Big Landowners and Used by Them

for Their Personal Cultivation*

('000)

Grades of holdings (in acres)

45-60 acres

Above 60 acres

State

•a S n

SSf-

It

Per cent of holding

SP, a 3

T3

Per cent of holding

°s,s

ad &

•pa

a

+»

OMOJ •a g

S3^_,

•o§S

s$3

n3 OT C3 "" t-i o

§1

a •S3

S?5

og.2

ro to-^

«'•§

;>

o

« fccra •g .J"

a P.*? •g t, S

£**

m

n^g

``^

s5

<& w

£5-0

££i

sy

Hi

0 >.»_ E-IJ3 o

Sfig

S-g

f^ u

CJ J

Andhra Bombay Mysore Madras Madhya

1,005 3,327 412 1,399

868 2,875 362 1,159

86 87 88 83

14 13 12 17

3,074 7,710 1,805 6,194

2,199 5,889 864 4,284

72 77 80 69

28 23 20 31

Pradesh Punjab

2,159 757

1,907 485

88 64

12 36

7,617 2,301

5,705 990

75 43

25 57

The Second

Five Year Plan, New Delhi, 1956, pp. 213-16, 218.

The land census showed that on an average between 75 and 80 per cent of the land belonging to big landowners was used for purposes of their so-called personal cultivation while between 20 and 25 per cent was leased out. In the thirties---to judge by the findings of the survey conducted by the British Royal Commission on Agriculture (1928) and by the Central Banking Enquiry Committee (1932)--- large-scale capitalist enterprise in estates owned by landowners, traders, moneylenders or prosperous peasants was extremely rare, whereas now the situation was quite different. The slow process by which the rural economy was being transformed along bourgeois lines, a process that brought so much hardship to the peasants, found expression

R. ULYANOVSKY

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

in the crystallisation of the stratum of capitalist landlords, capitalist landowners from among traders and moneylenders and the emergence of an influential prosperous top stratum of the peasantry; this process meant that in the long run as a result of the reform it was precisely these capitalist strata who in some places had already come to hold sway in the villages and elsewhere would do so eventually.

It is a common occurrence for agrarian researchers when basing their research on the conditions obtaining in modern India to be unable to ignore the issue of central importance as regards both the production and social aspects of this question---namely, the correlation between the number and size of the large landed estates and the number and size of the large farms. Certain bourgeois researchers deliberately go out of their way to avoid this correlation substituting one issue for the other. They maintain that the establishment of the maximum size of holdings inevitably leads to the establishment of the maximum size of farms, as a result of which limits for maximum holdings will hinder the development of large-scale farming, although it is common knowledge that it is possible to go in for largescale capitalist farming on comparatively small land-- holdings, just as it is possible to own large landed estates without going in for large-scale capitalist farming, as indeed was the practice in India. An essential difference regarding opportunities for engaging in large-scale farming in the period of imperialist rule in India and at present consists in the following: the British imperialists, when making timid attempts to bourgeoisify the Indian semifeudal landowners, did not score any real success since the colonial monopoly of the imperialists ruled out any chance of success in this undertaking; while now, with the Indian bourgeoisie in power, prospects for progress in this direction, stimulated by the war-time and post-war economic conditions and the agrarian reforms, were quite different.

The declared goal of the agrarian reform was to confer property rights on tenant-farmers and thus turn them into owners of the holdings they had been renting.

Purchases by tenants of land they rented could only take place when the land concerned was of a kind that land-

owners could not take back from their tenants on the basis of the right granted landowners everywhere to claim back land they sought to use for purposes of personal cultivation. This restriction itself was a major one which hardly facilitated implementation of the goal of the agrarian reform. However there also existed additional restrictions. In Hyderabad, for example, only protected tenants had the right to buy any land and in Madhya Pradesh only permanent tenants. In Punjab only such persons who had been renting their holdings for an uninterrupted period of at least six years (the landowners could not claim them back) were entitled to buy land. In some states tenantfarmers were entitled to buy their rented holdings as they thought fit and at any time. However the laws concerning land purchases, passed in the state of Bombay and the former state of Madhya Bharat, contained a reservation to the effect that this right could only be made use of in the course of a fixed period laid down by law. Otherwise tenants could be evicted. This measure was aimed at tenants with small holdings.

In Kerala tenant-farmers were advised to purchase their holdings by a fixed date, otherwise they would remain tenant-farmers.

In Punjab, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and the former states of Hyderabad, Madhya Bharat and Vindhya Pradesh tenants were formally granted the preferential right to purchase land. However, numerous reservations written into the laws passed in tHese states narrowed the opportunities for ordinary tenants to become owners of land.

For quite obvious reasons tenants renting small holdings were not in a position to make use of their right to purchase land. The purchase prices were multiples of the rents or land taxes previously fixed for the holdings in question. Just rents, to which much space was devoted in legislative documents and which it was planned to introduce in the Second Five-Year Plan, did not as yet exist. The land prices stipulated in the laws passed by a number of states were exorbitant.

Land-purchasing prices were set up according to the following rates: in Madhya Pradesh at 7-10 times the land rent; in Uttar Pradesh at 10 times the land rent and in

R. ULYANOVSKY

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

Hyderabad at between 6 and 15 times the land rent; in Rajasthan the rate was 10 times the land rent (for nonirrigated land); in Ajmer at 12 times the tenant's net income. In four states rights of ownership over formerly rented holdings were priced according to multiples of the land tax for the holdings concerned: in the state of Bombay at 20-200 times the annual tax, in Delhi province at 4-40 times and in Himachal Pradesh at 48 times. In all these states (with the exception of Madhya Pradesh) land could be paid for on a long-term basis over a period of between five and fifteen years.

The richer peasants---those owning trade or usury capital or possessing permanent and hereditary rights of tenure ---often purchased their land with the help of state subsidies. In West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh---areas where traditional patterns of large-scale landownership predominated---a mere 15-20 per cent of the peasants purchased land. Nevertheless, the practice for peasants to become owners of land was definitely on the increase and serving to accelerate class stratification in rural India.

After the abolition of feudal and semi-feudal rights of landownership, particularly those enjoyed by big absentee landlords, not only did the formation of a class of big and medium landowners of a bourgeois type from among the traditional landowners accelerate, but also that of a new rural bourgeoisie consisting of prosperous peasants anxious to make the most of the new legislation concerning tenants' rights to purchase their holdings. This process of accelerated capitalist development is most complex and contradictory in the sense that, while in the process of bourgeoisification landowners made every effort to profit from the vestiges of their former rights through share-cropping and lending out money or grain, etc., so as to increase their income, the new rural bourgeoisie taking shape within the peasantry was also endeavouring to indulge in both types of exploitation of the toiling peasants, the capitalist and the semifeudal type. Between these two social strata---the former semi-feudal landowners becoming capitalist landowners, and the prosperous peasants becoming capitalist entrepreneurs---there now existed, despite deep-rooted contradictions, certain shared class interests on a number of impor-

tant issues pointing to a new alignment of class forces in rural India (the fixing of a ``ceiling'' for landed estates, the gratuitous distribution of non-cultivated land, the granting to tenants of rights of ownership, the use of funds allocated for communal development, the utilisation of food stocks, etc.).

Demands that the maximum size of land-holdings be stipulated by law were first put forward in 1945 by the all-India peasants' union. The pressure for this demand to be met grew stronger with each passing year. After independence peasants throughout the country joined in the campaign.

The principle for establishing the maximum size of landholdings had been put forward in the First Five-Year Plan. A land census was conducted in the majority of states in order to collect the data essential for drawing up these norms, but the land census was unsuccessful, to say the least.

In the Second Five-Year Plan proposals were put forward for practical measures to cut down all large landholdings. The state governments were called upon to establish norms for maximum holdings. The Second FiveYear Plan also defined those groups of holdings that were not subject to such restrictions. These included tea, coffee and rubber plantations; orchards; cattle, sheep and dairy farms, etc.; sugar-cane farms supplying sugar factories; efficiently run compact farms, whose productivity would fall if part of their acreage were taken away; mechanised farms and those involving large-scale capital investment.

The very fact that exceptions were made for largescale capitalist enterprise when norms for maximum holdings were being drawn up encouraged landowners to start working their estates. Often this was only done to mislead the local authorities. However by organising production cooperatives for landowners and prosperous peasants (in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Bharat), factories for the initial processing of cotton, sugar-cane, seed-oil, small joint-stock companies, by purchasing tractors for setting up mechanised farms, etc., many landowners succeeded in having their

21---919

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AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

holdings exempted from the category liable for curtailment. From 1951 onwards a constant campaign was being waged by landowners and social groups with closely allied interests, and latterly by big capitalist monopolies as well, against the stipulation of a ``ceiling'' for the size of land-holdings and against the transfer of land surpluses to landless peasants and agricultural labourers.

In Punjab and Pepsu the first law restricting the size of land-holdings was passed in 1950. The limit for land used for personal cultivation was set at 200 acres but when the law was submitted to the president in 1951 the limit was reduced to 100 acres. In practice however this law did not bring the peasants any additional land.

In 1953 another law was passed stipulating new norms for maximum land-holdings/^^1^^'' The size of such holdings was fixed at 60 acres (30 standard acres). However this law also failed to produce the desired results. Tenants continued to be evicted from the plots they were working at the same rate as before and the number of landless peasants was on the increase. In the light of this situation the legislative assembly introduced in 1955 an additional law conferring on the state government the right to take over all the big landowners' and tenant-farmers' surpluses so as to transfer these to the landless or evicted peasants. All land over the sixty-acre maximum was reckoned as surplus.

While these laws and the accompanying amendments were being issued and state bodies in Punjab spent years elaborating the rules and instructions for their application in practice, big landowners took steps to evict tenants, divide up their estates and start engaging in personal cultivation.

The owners of large land-holdings officially registered the eviction of 8,388 tenants in 1950-1951, 7,083 tenants in 1951-1952, 17,503 tenants in 1952-1953 and 60,353 tenants in 1953-1954.

In Pepsu the number of landowners with estates of over 30 acres sank from 185,000 in 1948 to 39,000 in 1952 and

only came to 28,336 in 1955 according to the official land census.

Punjab and Pepsu were not only the "greatest centre of tenant eviction in India",* but districts where the organisation of farming along capitalist lines proceeded at a relatively rapid rate. By October 1956 landowners of large estates in Punjab had been granted state subsidies for the purchase of 4,000 tractors totalling 11,700,000 rupees. In Pepsu 1,300 tractors were purchased.

By the end of 1958 the laws passed in Punjab and Pepsu, stipulating the maximum size of land-holdings, had still not been enforced. Not one acre of surplus land had been handed over to landless peasants. In the press, state organisations and legislative organs of these states the big landowners were campaigning more and more persistently against the stipulation of these land norms and the transfer of land to landless peasants. Under the pretext of the need to surmount the food crisis and avert the deterioration of agricultural production, the big landowners demanded renunciation of the land reforms and of norms for maximum land-holdings, insisting on a switch to a policy promoting the formation of large-scale mechanised farms of a capitalist type, i.e., to a policy of still further concentration of land in the hands of a minute minority that would lead to still further increases in the number of landless peasants. These tactics employed by the big landowners were undoubtedly fraught with serious complications, particularly in view of the fact that the peasants' fight for land was a deep-rooted tradition in Punjab.

At the end of 1958 the maximum size of land-holdings had still not been stipulated in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Laws abolishing the zamindar system of landownership and laying down new conditions for leasing land avoided this question. Meanwhile there were close on 1,100,000 peasant families with no or virtually no land in the state, i.e., close on 5,550,000 people with virtually no land. A maximum of 30 acres was laid down for any land-- holdings acquired in the future. If that maximum were eventu-

* Instructions for applying the 1953 law fixing the maximum area for land-holdings at 30 standard acres were not ratified until April 30, 1956.

^::~ Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India, p. 49.

21*

R. ULYANOVSKY

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

ally to be extended to existing holdings, then while excluding the holdings used by landowners for "personal cultivation" and therefore exempt from restrictions (in Uttar Pradesh in addition to this land 2,088 mechanised farms had been set up in accordance with a resolution of the Planning Commission), land surpluses would be so negligible that they would make no appreciable difference to the land issue as it affects the millions of landless peasants and agricultural labourers.

In the state of Andhra Pradesh (Telengan district) a maximum was set up both for future land acquisitions (from between 12 and 180 acres) and for existing holdings (from 18 to 270 acres). However, over a period of many years the large landed estates had been intensively divided up and holdings set up for so-called personal cultivation, so that the introduction of such a high ``ceiling'' did not provide any significant land surpluses for distribution among landless peasants and those with minute holdings. In the Khamam and Varangal districts (formerly part of the state of Hyderabad) measures were introduced to reduce the size of large land-holdings. Originally it was estimated that the implementation of these measures would produce 700,000 acres of surplus land to be distributed among the peasants. However these calculations were to be considerably amended by the big landowners, who by dividing up their estates succeeded in reducing the extent of these surpluses to 100,000 acres.

Legislation stipulating the maximum size of land-- holdings was also introduced in Assam and West Bengal. In Assam the limit was fixed at 50 acres and in West Bengal at 25 acres. These norms applied not only to land-- holdings but also to acreage used for purposes of personal cultivation. The laws passed in these states did not make land supporting efficient farming exempt from the general restrictions. Only in Assam were mechanised farms not exceeding 166 acres exempt from the norms for maximum land-holdings. In neither state however was the maximum enforced in practice and land surpluses were not handed over to landless peasants.

Regarding West Bengal, M. P. Mehra had the following to say: ".. .No substantial progress has been made in the

field of redistribution of land and resettlement of real cultivators. Again, the re-survey and settlement operations are expected only to be completed by April 1958, which means that the actual operations with regard to redistribution of land, etc., will take another long period."*

In 1958 the West Bengal government adopted a resolution to set up a commission for the distribution of land among landless peasants. This step was made necessary mainly in the light of the severe food crisis in the state. According to government figures, in 1958 the state was short of 750,000 tons of rice, the biggest shortage recorded since 1947. The peasants demanding rice and land came out in mass demonstrations that were dispersed by the police.

The largest concentration of land-holdings in the whole country was that in the state of Bihar: 77 per cent of all holdings were up to 5 acres and accounted for 31.8 per cent of the state's land, while 1.6 per cent of land-holdings (25 acres and upwards) accounted for 19.1 per cent of the land. Ninety-three per cent of the state's population depended directly or indirectly for its livelihood on agriculture. Some nine million people had no land at all. At ! the beginning of the reform period the Bihar government j announced its intention to confiscate land surpluses from I the big zamindar landowners and distribute them among ~^^1^^ the peasants. The draft for a law fixing the size for the \ maximum holding at 25-75 acres and the report drawn up | by the commission of representatives from the legislative ' chambers on this question were put before the legislative ! state assembly in 1956 but the law was never applied in ! practice. It came up against stubborn resistance on the | part of the landowners. The large-scale landownership in vast areas of the state was left untouched. The zamindars, as the owners of large estates had been known before the reforms, renounced their former ``title'', divided up their holdings, concealed their true size by engaging in so-called personal cultivation, and introduced ``corrections'' into the land-survey registers. At the same time they saw to it that no norms for the maximum size of either holdings acquired

AICC Economic Review, April 1, 1958.

R. ULYANOVSKY

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY .

in the future or existing ones were introduced. The conduct of the state's landowners and civil servants is an instance of the landowners' resistance to the reforms.""

In the state of Madras the maximum size of land-- holdings had not been stipulated by 1956. A draft law for this purpose was put before the state's legislative assembly in 1956.

While the draft for this law was being drawn up and discussed the landowners and their minions went out of their way to demonstrate that the law would be a violation of the Indian constitution and for that reason could not be passed. According to the figures in the land census, 67.6 per cent of the state's holdings averaging two acres in size accounted for only 20.3 per cent of all the land. Meanwhile, 0.9 per cent of the state's land-holdings averaging 140.5 acres accounted for 19 per cent of the land. In short, holdings belonging to 44,000 landowners accounted for the same amount of land as those belonging to 3,348,000 peasant families.** In the state of Madras 53 per cent of the entire rural population consisted of landless peasants and agricultural labourers with minute plots. The land problem was a particularly critical issue.

It was only in the states of Jammu and Kashmir and Kerala that the ``ceiling'' for land-holdings was introduced in a more or less consistent fashion. In Jammu and Kashmir in 1950 a law providing for the liquidation of large landed estates and their transfer to the real cultivators was passed. This particular law said that a "tiller of the land" was he who worked the land with his own hands.

In all the other Indian states the definition of a "tiller of the land" was debated for years on end and in a number of cases all that was achieved was that the term "tiller of the land" was declared identical with the term `` landowner''.

In the state of Kerala an agrarian law was passed in December 1957, according to which the maximum holding an individual or a public organisation might possess (as owner or tenant) was not to exceed 15 acres of land bringing in two harvests a year, 22.5 acres bringing in one harvest or 30 acres of non-irrigated land. These restrictions did not apply to plantations run by state farms and co-operative societies, or land occupied by factories and workshops.

This norm was increased by one acre for every member of a family exceeding five persons, while the total family holding was not to exceed 25 acres of land in the first category. Surpluses were to be handed over to the land office.

For surpluses handed over to the land office compensation was paid to the former owners in cash or three per cent non-circulating bonds. Compensation payments were stipulated at 16 times the annual rent for the first 5 surplus acres, 14 times for the next 5 surplus acres, 12 times for the next 15 surplus acres, 8 times for the next 30 surplus acres, 6 times for the next 50 surplus acres and 5 times for 100 surplus acres and over.

Land that was handed to the peasants was freed from any debt obligations.

The maximum rent paid to a landowner could not exceed a quarter of the harvest. The draft law defined in detail the rent due according to the cultures sown and the type of land.

The draft law granted the broad peasant masses rights of protected and hereditary lease-hold; it also permitted them and made it possible for them to purchase the land they worked on preferential terms over a period of 16 years.

It was the land councils that were responsible for applying in practice the agrarian reform. They fixed the compensation sums that would be paid to landowners and

* An interesting comment on the disreputable role of certain state leaders with vested interests in landownership, who opposed the agrarian reforms, was made while the reforms were being introduced by Shriman Narayan, General Secretary of the National Congress, in an article entitled "The Need for Ideological Clarity": "One of the main reasons for this slow and halting progress has been the presence of some Congress legislators who belong to the propertied classes. They have been trying to put spokes in the wheel with the result that the Congress has been losing its hold on the tenants and landless labourers, particularly the Harijans." (AICC Economic Review, June 15, 1957.)

** Government of India. Planning Commission, The Second Five Year Plan, 1956, p. 215.

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collected money from peasants with which to pay out this compensation; they were to distribute the land surpluses in the way laid down in the new law to the landless peasants, the agricultural labourers, members of cooperative societies which did not possess any land, and to other tenant-farmers.

To sum up: in the country's major states---Bihar, Bombay, Madhya Pradesh, Madras, Mysore, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh---whose total rural population came to over 210 million (70 per cent of the whole country's rural population) the maximum size of land-holdings had not been stipulated by the end of 1958, i.e., ten years after agrarian reforms first started being introduced, and the peasants had not received the land they had been promised.

The following assessment of the legislation introduced in the various states to fix the maximum size of holdings is given in the Review of the First Five Year Plan: "In a number of states, where Bills have not been prepared or legislation enacted, the question of prescribing ceilings is engaging the attention of the state Governments. In states in which there has been legislation for ceilings, practical implementation has not proceeded beyond preliminary steps."*

This meant that the agrarian question in India had not been conclusively solved. The agricultural labourers, landless peasants and those with only minute plots had not been given the land promised them. Laws providing for land reform adopted in the various states had not put an end to the domination of powerful landowners and had not led to a transfer of land to those directly engaged in its cultivation. The monopoly of the bulk of the land by a handful of landowners had not been fully eliminated. As the reforms had been introduced the social character of this monopoly had been gradually changing. It was no longer a feudal, or semi-feudal monopoly but was becoming a bourgeois-landowner monopoly; nevertheless it was precisely this monopoly which stood in the way of genuine agrarian reform and a new lease of life for agriculture.

The reforms such as they were announced in legislative documents and in the form in which they were actually introduced were powerless to check the growing concentration of land in the hands of a minority of property-owners. Some Indian economists profess surprise at the fact that the process of the increasing concentration of land in the hands of the minority was not only not checked by the reforms, but even accelerated by their introduction, at a time characterised allegedly by nation-wide endeavour to introduce a ceiling for existing holdings and those acquired in the future.

During the First Five-Year Plan period and also the years that followed obsolete production relations still acted as a brake on productive forces in Indian agriculture and indeed still continue to do so. Indian economists admit that the agrarian reform was inadequate to ensure the necessary scope for the development of productive forces in peasant economy, although it gave rise to a number of new phenomena stemming from the increasing capitalist element in agriculture.

As a result of the social and technical backwardness of her villages, India found herself up against unprecedented food shortages immediately after embarking on the implementation of the Second Five-Year Plan. It became imperative for the state to take decisive steps to streamline agriculture, particularly peasant farms, without delay.

The partial breaking up of semi-feudal landed estates, in the past not usually linked with any large-scale farming enterprise, and accelerated by land reforms in regions where traditional forms of big landownership had held sway, was negligible in comparison with the significant and far-reaching process of concentration of landownership based on expropriation by bourgeois landowners and prosperous peasants of the peasants' rights of ownership or tenure. This served to complicate still further prospects for the solution of the whole agricultural problem.

It is by no means a coincidence that precisely when the agrarian reform was going through a profound internal crisis, having stopped short, as it were, before the solution of the basic problem of the redistribution of land, thus revealing its intrinsic inconsistency, a particularly acute

fteview of the First Five Year Plan, p. 326.

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crisis hit Indian agriculture as such and this naturally resulted in a food crisis.

Nor is it a coincidence that at this particular period representatives of the powerful monopolist stratum of the Indian bourgeoisie came forward with sweeping declarations as to the superfluity of further agrarian reforms, declarations to the effect that these reforms were merely a palliative and there was no urgent need for their implementation, which would only lead to further division of the land and hence an inevitable fall in agricultural production and a worsening of the food crisis. The monopoly bourgeoisie had always put forward these arguments. From their point of view the main task was to increase to the maximum the size of land-holdings and introduce up-- todate agricultural machinery. What was important in their eyes was not so much who owned the land but how it was cultivated. A still more open statement on this subject is to be found in the pages of the journal Commerce, mouthpiece of powerful Bombay capitalists that openly criticised the government's attempts to stipulate ceilings for land-holdings. The journal maintained that only "men with knowledge and capital" were in a position to help Indian agriculture out of its dilemma and stressed: "What India needs is legislation for prevention of excessive subdivision of land. So long as average holdings remain small and unrealistic land reform policies keep men with knowledge and capital out of rural areas, India must continue to face the problem of dismally low per-acre yields."*

So they would have us believe that the main disaster for rural India---the problem of low yields---was the result of the existence of small-scale parcelled holdings and that reform would lead to still further subdivisions and thus argued that plans for reform should be abandoned since it hindered the infiltration of capital and capitalists into rural India.

Representatives of the monopolist stratum of the bourgeoisie were anxious to check the spread of reform, disrupt the stipulation of any ``ceiling'' for land-holdings and

hence prevent the granting of land to the landless peasants.

While during the initial period of reform the landowners went out of their way to render ineffective anv legislation relating to ceilings for land-holdings and divided up their estates so as to create the illusion that they owned less than they did in effect, and thus avoid confiscation of their surpluses, later on the monopoly bourgeoisie came forward maintaining that the introduction of ceilings for land-- holdings would mean disaster for "efficiently organised farms" and a decline in the level of technology introduced into agriculture. Meanwhile it was quite clear that they were concerned not so much with improving agriculture as with thwarting any attempts to put an end to existing inequality in the distribution of land and the revenues obtained from working it.

Leading Indian industrialists with Birla at the head put forward a proposal at the end of 1958 for the agrarian reform to be wound up and replaced by a policy promoting the setting up of large capitalist farms of a privately-owned and mechanised variety.

Pressure from monopolist circles even made itself felt in such an official document as the Fifth Review of the Planning Commission's programming organisation which, much to the surprise of progressive circles, put forward the opinion that granting land to the peasants would lead to a deterioration in agricultural production and allegedly not only fail to solve the problem of securing land for the landless peasants and agricultural labourers but intensify their land hunger and lead to agrarian unrest and disturbances.

Pressure to abandon all attempts to restrict the sizes of land-holdings and limit instead revenues gleaned from agriculture---a policy which would allegedly make redistribution of land superfluous---became ever stronger. Nor was it a coincidence that the schemes undertaken by representatives of the powerful bourgeoisie and the pressure they brought to bear were quickly followed by a decision on the part of the National Congress working committee at its meeting in Hyderabad in October 1958 to set up a special subcommittee to investigate problems of land redistribution in view of the long delavs in stipulating and enforcing

* Commerce, Bombay, May 24, 1958, p. 970,

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333

In the report it was stressed that the need to pass laws stipulating the maximum size for land-holdings was urgent. It was resolved that agrarian legislation to cover the abolition of intermediate leasing out of land, the securing of tenants' rights and restrictions on the size of landholdings must be implemented in all states by the end of 1959.

ceilings for land-holdings as a step prior to the National Congress conference that was to take place at the beginning of 1959.

It was precisely at that period when particularly fierce controversy was raging round the problem of ceilings for land-holdings and the transfer of land to the landless peasants that the Indian Statistical Institute published for the attention of the Indian public figures of a land-holding survey relating to the beginning of 1955. Professor Mahalanobis in charge of that institute maintained on the strength of those figures that if the maximum size of landholdings were to be fixed at 20 acres, then land surpluses over the country as a whole would total 63 million acres which would be sufficient to supply the needs of all rural Indians who possessed either no land or less than two acres (according to Mahalanobis' estimates, 60 million acres were required for that purpose).*

The country's economy and the nature of the class struggle in India at that time made it imperative for the country's ruling circles to resolve the land question and after long bureaucratic delays over the stipulation and enforcement of a ceiling for land-holdings in the various states explain to the millions of landless peasants how and when they would be granted land.

Soon the stipulation of a ceiling for land-holdings came to be associated not with a direct transfer of land surpluses to the landless peasants and those with minute plots, but with the organisation of rural co-operatives on these land surpluses.

In January 1959 the demand put forward by a group of delegates at the Nagpur conference of the National Congress for the transfer of land surpluses to landless peasants after the introduction of a ceiling for land-- holdings was turned down. The conference approved the report submitted by the subcommittee of the all-India Congress committee for agriculture which proposed that the best method to promote agriculture was to organise the peasants in co-operatives for joint cultivation while they retained ownership of their holdings.

Many Indian economists made detailed studies of the possibility of increasing the output of agricultural produce by using more intensive methods of land cultivation.

While bourgeois theorists in agrarian questions in the developed capitalist countries usually try to avoid infringing on the foundations of the capitalist structure in agriculture, in India there is a substantial group of agricultural economists who attempt to evolve a ``theory'' for solving the agrarian question that leaves the foundations of the existing system of land cultivation as intact as possible. They maintain that the crux of the matter is not at all the question as to whether the existing system of big landownership continues: they would have us believe that if there was full employment for the peasantry, yields were improved and the so-called "green revolution" effected, then the agrarian problem would be solved. This approach is the basis for their programme of all-out intensification of land cultivation.

This involves, according to these Indian economists, utilisation of all the land lying fallow (which accounts for about 10 per cent of the total area fit for cultivation) for growing food crops; the widespread introduction of bedgrown crops and more systematic hoeing work, especially in rice-planting; ensuring two or three sowings of food and other crops per year in regions adequately irrigated; expansion and more effective utilisation of irrigation by means of constructing artesian wells; more intensive utilisation of high-grade seed; the use of manure, compost and green fertiliser; more work on soil preparation and measures to prevent loss of fertility.

In their efforts to tone down the failure of the agrarian reform, bourgeois agrarian experts lay particular emphasis

* Sankhya, February 1958.

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on the state's efforts to set up a flourishing peasant economy by employing such benefits of technical progress as chemical fertilisers, high-grade seed, etc. However, as a rule, they forget that in order to promote agriculture it is essential to spend ever more on means of production for plots freed from the fetters of semi-feudal or bourgeois landownership.

The subdivision of holdings, a reduction in the productivity and intensiveness of peasant labour, and decreased market orientation in agriculture---in short, what is commonly referred to as the fragmentation of agriculture--- resulted from the concentration of landownership that did not go hand in hand with any concentration of farming. The dependence of small peasant holdings with low productivity and small-commodity production on enormous latifundia was what gave rise to the acute crisis in Indian agriculture.

All classes of Indian society appreciate that it would be practically possible to surmount this crisis by switching ito a system of landownership involving larger units and that this switch-over was in the long run quite inevitable. The Indian bourgeoisie considers that such a transition would be possible within a framework of agriculture involving the development of farms run by bourgeois landowners and prosperous peasants and co-operatives run on capitalist lines. Ruling circles in India meanwhile plan to promote agriculture by setting up peasant co-operatives. There is no denying the progressive character of this innovation for India.

Indian economists maintain that it would be impossible in anything like the near future for Indian agriculture to switch over to mass-scale and universal introduction of agricultural machinery and artificial fertiliser.* Neither the

Second Five-Year Plan nor preliminary drafts for the Third plan envisaged such measures. Meanwhile, despite the tremendous land hunger rife throughout India, there are 98 million acres of land not being used for cultivation, including land that, although quite ht for cultivation, has been merely left to go wild, and 62 million acres of fallow land. This means a total of 160 million acres or 51 per cent of the country's sowing area.

Another idea widely propagated is the association of peasants in agricultural co-operatives in order to bring this land under cultivation. Co-operative farming is regarded as a means of making cultivation more intensive on land already cultivated by incorporating small parcel plots, if not whole villages, into co-operatives. Indian economists hold that co-operation of this type, designed to embrace the whole rural population, would make it possible to establish class peace in rural India in the context of so-called co-operative communities, which would not involve driving out of the system of agricultural production landowners, moneylenders, traders and prosperous peasants. The promotion of agricultural co-- operation of this type is regarded as a socialist measure that should take priority among the tasks to be carried out by local authorities and the organisations of the ruling party.

The first type of agricultural co-operative was " cooperative joint farming". The land is worked on a joint basis but private ownership of the land which is pooled is preserved, and the title and value of the land contributed is one of the factors which is taken into account when income is shared. Members can also withdraw from these co-operatives if they so wish.

The second type was "co-operative collective farming societies", where in addition to land, all other resources of the members are pooled together and the private ownership of the land is liquidated, while the farm income is divided among the members only according to the work done by each of them.

In India there were over 1,300 agricultural production co-operatives in 1958 accounting for a total acreage of close on 350,000 acres. These co-operatives differed fundamentally from those in the socialist countries,

* Some Indian economists maintain that it is to no one's advantage to use tractors in Indian agriculture. There is no justification whatever for this abstract approach to the question that disregards social and technological conditions. As for the financial aspect, according to figures provided by the Ministry of Agriculture, ploughing an acre of land with bullocks costs an average of 8 rupees and with tractors 8 annas, i.e., 16 times less. (Dr. P. S. Deshmukh, Circular Letter, Delhi, 1956, Part IX, p. 135.)

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although certain Indian economists identified the two on the strength of the fact that both unify villages in single units. The Republic of India's First Five-Year Plan (1951-1956) had also provided for co-operation of agricultural production in connection with the agrarian reform. At that stage it had been envisaged that co-operative societies of the "co-operative joint farming" type would be set up on a voluntary basis.

The maximum size for land-holdings was not fixed, for it was assumed that within the co-operatives the property interests of those persons owning land but not engaged in cultivation would be stipulated and preserved intact.

As early as the time when the First Five-Year Plan was being drawn up, principles of this kind for the organisation of agricultural co-operation gave rise to harsh criticism from progressive scientists and public figures. The wellknown authors of major works in the field of economic research P. A. Wadia and K. T. Merchant wrote in their analysis that the co-operation proposals should be regarded as reactionary in so far as behind a mask of democratic and peaceful transformations they were legalising the system of absentee landlords by providing for dividends to be paid to landowners. They also mentioned the fact that parasitic rights of ownership were recognised and respected.

As pointed out earlier Indian economists saw the cooperation of agricultural production as a direct means of dealing with the problem of fragmentation and strip-- farming, an urgent task in the light of the food crisis.

In view of certain progress made in the consolidation of land-holdings in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Bombay, it was recommended in the First Five-Year Plan that in all states programmes for the consolidation of holdings should be expanded and pursued with vigour. In these three states in 1947, and during the following years in other states, too, legislation was enacted, enabling the government of each state to frame schemes of consolidation of holdings in any area on its own initiative.*

The consolidation of small land-holdings, i.e., the initial

stage of rural development, was formally carried out on a voluntary basis through the setting up of co-operative societies. More and more frequent recourse to coercive measures had to be made later on. As noted in the official report on the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan, the element of coercion made it possible for the government to carry out the programme for the consolidation of holdings in those places where a certain section of the landowners in the villages expressed their readiness to comply with the introduction of such schemes. These tactics were used in Baroda, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir.

When assessing the measures introduced to regulate rural development it is important to take into consideration not only their agricultural but also their social aspect. The formation of more compact land-holdings by means of consolidation in practice meant the introduction of a compulsory minimum for peasant land-tenure. The new legislation prohibited the division of land if plots did not exceed 10 acres in Uttar Pradesh, 2.5 acres in the former state of Hyderabad, 8 acres in Delhi province and 15 in Madhya Bharat.

The division of land and the spread of strip-farming in peasant land-tenure is an objective economic process inherent in an agrarian system dominated by the owners of large estates. The main task in connection with peasants' land-tenure as laid out in the legislative documents published by a number of states was not only to get rid of strip-farming but to stipulate a minimum for holdings of land under cultivation. This meant that no new plots under the set minimum could be created. The legislation introduced in the majority of states to check the spread of strip-farming therefore prohibited hereditary transfers of land and further division if the resultant holdings were so small that their cultivation became unprofitable. In 1958 laws stipulating a minimum holding were introduced and enforced in 15 Indian states.

The following figures illustrate the consolidation of holdings thus achieved*:

* Review of the First Five Year Plan, p. 326.

Ibid., p. 327; AICC Economic Review, August 1, 1958.

22---919

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State

Area consolidated by 1958 ('000 acres)

played into the hands of these strata of the rural population: those with most land stood to gain the most from consolidation.*

In order to substantiate the need for the stipulation of a concrete minimum for land-holdings, various agricultural economists in India drew up for each state something in the way of a standard for the size of an "economically advantageous" peasant holding. For the state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, this "economic minimum" was fixed at 6.25 acres. Meanwhile in that particular state close on 65 per cent of all the peasant holdings came to less than five acres and were therefore not economic. H. D. Malaviya, criticising attempts to hold back or disrupt entirely the agrarian reforms, and in particular attempts to stop the transfer of land to the peasants on the pretext that it would lead to the creation of ``non-economic'' holdings, maintained that as against inefficient cultivation by the ex-zamindars, the tillers of the soil, who managed to acquire in the course of the agrarian reforms proprietary rights of land or permanent rights, "have proved to be enthusiastic cultivators despite the uneconomic nature of their holdings".** At the present stage of development the endeavour of the Indian peasantry to attain equal rights of land-tenure is a profoundly progressive phenomenon. Dismissal of this aspiration on the grounds that small peasant holdings are ``uneconomic'' reflects an unwillingness to redistribute land ,in the peasants' interests. Similarly, the desire to set up co-operatives on the basis of the as yet incomplete agrarian reforms is, at times, deliberately contrasted to the peasants' demand that land obtained by means of dividing up landowners' estates should be made over to them. This overemphasis of the agricultural aspect of the situation ignoring the decisive role of social changes that have taken place in rural India led such a prominent

Bombay

Madhya Pradesh

Punjab

Delhi

Uttar Pradesh

2,120

2,850 (1955) 4,810 220 4,400

In the Second Five-Year Plan the target was set at consolidating 38 million acres. Expenditure to this end was allowed for in the state budgets to the extent of 38,200,000 rupees (50 per cent to be provided by the central government). Meanwhile it leaked to the press that over 50 per cent of the peasant holdings, mainly the very small ones, which had voluntarily or under pressure been involved in the consolidation schemes, had not been enlarged in any way. The prosperous peasants, ruling the roost in the panchayats and co-operatives and at the same time anxious to add to and consolidate their own holdings, did not even stop at evicting poor peasants and tenants of small holdings so as to take over their holdings, or at driving them on to inferior land. There are concrete reasons for the profound interest in this consolidation of holdings shown by prosperous and capitalist elements in the villages, as opposed to the far smaller interest shown by the rest of the rural population. The land-tenure enjoyed by these strata in the Indian villages had taken shape in the course of a lengthy process of the impoverishment of the poor peasants whose rights of ownership to small holdings they had been buying up. When wider opportunities for accumulation, by engaging in capitalist enterprise in agriculture, opened up before these prosperous peasant farmers, the consolidation of holdings became an elementary condition for the further strengthening and expanding of their farms. This accounts for their particularly active participation in implementing the consolidation policy. The above-mentioned "element of coercion" referred to in the official report on the First Five-Year Plan, that was necessary in order to overcome the unwillingness of middle and poor peasants to co-operate in consolidation schemes, also

``" "Consolidation of holdings is another measure whereby the economic position of the richer strata of the landowning classes has been strengthened. Experience has shown that it is the big land-holder or the rich peasant who is always able to manoeuvre and secure for himself the best land and the best sites at the cost of the poor and middle peasants." (Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question. . . , p. 7.) ** AICC Economic Review, July 1, 1957.

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Indian economist as D. R. Gadgil, as far back as December 1954 (when sabotage tactics were being employed to block the fixing of a ceiling for large landed estates in all states), to propose immediate stipulation of a norm for minimum peasant holdings and compulsory combination into cooperatives of all farms below that minimum size.* Approximately half the existing peasant farms would have come into the category liable for compulsory co-operation.

Of course these proposals could not be accepted, let alone implemented, without risk of fanning class struggle in the village. Replacing the question of the abolition of large landed estates by that of the abolition of small and minute peasant holdings was only possible in speeches or on paper. Experience had shown that it was impossible in practice even by means of co-operation.**

Some Indian economists with ample grounds give voice to pessimism as regards production co-operatives in Indian agriculture. They point out that attempts at mass co-- operation on the basis of "unsuccessful agrarian reforms" testify to a failure to understand all the implications of experience in agrarian reform in other countries, especially the socialist ones.

The problem of agricultural co-operation in India extends beyond the framework of ordinary organisational measures and stems from the social conditions that shape village life, from the nature of the country's power structure, from the relations between industry and agriculture and cannot be conclusively and successfully resolved in the context of bourgeois development.

Experience of many countries has shown that bourgeois promotion of co-operation in the long run leads to "co-

operative capitalism"---a component part of the overall mechanism of capitalist production and exchange. A document issued by the Communist Party of India contains the following comment on this situation: "In the absence of real land reforms, the existing co-operative societies have become the happy hunting ground for landlords, moneylenders and traders."* Progressive forces in India, taking into account the situation in their country, the socialist states' experience in reorganising agriculture and the demands of the Indian peasants, try to channel the development of co-operatives not in the interests of largescale capitalist production in agriculture, but in such a way as to organise mutual help for the toiling peasants, the small and very small producers, agricultural labourers, promote their joint struggle in defence of their class interests looking upon co-operation as a precondition and organisational form, called forth by the very course of previous economic development, for genuinely socialist transformation of rural India in the future.**

Only the future will show whether co-operation in Indian agriculture becomes a weapon helping to organise the toiling peasants or a means of implanting "co-operative capitalism''.

In India the position in the market for agricultural produce was such that despite the rise in prices for food items the incomes of the main mass of the peasants did not increase between 1949 and 1959; instead their expenses merely went up. This was the result of, among other things, the increases in direct and particularly indirect taxation, and also the rise in prices for manufactured consumer goods.

* Communist Party and Problems of National Reconstruction New Delhi, July 1955, p. 52.

>r* Tjj_e j_ournal Commerce, summing up the prospects for co-- operation of the peasantry in capitalist conditions, notes: ". . .There is a great risk of these co-operatives ending in some form of state capitalism." Later in an obvious attempt to scare public opinion, the journal contends: "There is also the risk of collective farming, thereby paving the way for the spread of communism." (Commerce, Bombay August ' 1958, p. 174.)

* Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India, p. 71. ^::~* The first minister of Uttar Pradesh Dr. Sampurnand declared in connection with the consolidation of small holdings and^ the introduction of "co-operative farming" that these measures were " psychologically not comprehensible to the cultivators" since on having first become proprietors they are suddenly made subject to government control and supervision. (Capital, May 9, 1957.) Six months later the governor of the above state, V. V. Giri, in an extensive article demonstrating the advantages of co-operation wrote that "the main obstacle in the way of co-operative farming is the lack of enthusiasm among the people". (AICC Economic Review, October 1, 1957.)

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If the prices for 1952-1953 are taken as a 100, by 1959 the wholesale price index for food items had risen to 112.* However, this rise in wholesale prices for agricultural produce by no means implies that the peasants' incomes had risen accordingly, although they were the commodity producers. According to figures recorded in research surveys drawn up immediately before the Second World War and during the early war years, the share of these prices paid by consumers for various types of agricultural produce that went to the capitalist trader came to between 25 and 60 per cent. A similar state of affairs existed in the post-war period. In 1952-1953, for example, wholesale prices for rice were 20 per cent higher than purchasing prices in Bombay and 70 per cent higher in Madras. The difference between wholesale and purchasing prices for wheat in Bihar came to 22 per cent. It was first and foremost the incomes of large-scale producers and capitalist traders that increased as a result of the higher prices for agricultural produce. As mentioned earlier the semi-feudal exploitation of the Indian peasants went hand in hand with their exploitation by the moneylenders and traders. At the beginning of the fifties, according to a survey conducted by the Reserve Bank of India, 75.7 per cent of all agricultural credit was that provided by moneylenders. According to estimates of the National Income Committee the total interest paid to moneylenders in 1950 came to 865 million rupees (this calculation is based on an average rate of interest of 9.5 per cent a year). However, as was borne out by the figures recorded in various surveys, average rates of interest demanded by moneylenders came to anything between 12 and 24 per cent and for loans in kind to 50 or 100 per cent and higher. It is commonly held by Indian economists that peasants still turn first and foremost to these moneylenders for credit.

A new factor in the life of rural India is the increasingly important role of credit societies providing both longand short-term loans for the prosperous peasants, middle

peasants and even the capitalist landowners, all strata of which have been on the increase since the reform started being introduced. However, in 1951-1952 even the most prosperous group of farms investigated in the Reserve Bank of India survey borrowed only 4 per cent of its total credits from such societies. Between 1951 and 1956 the total number of primary agricultural co-operatives rose from 107,925 to 161,510 and the number of members from 4,800,000 to 9,100,000. The joint-stock capital of the individual co-operative rose from an average of 827 to one of 1,228 rupees; the average amount of working capital at the disposal of such co-operatives rose from an average of 4,190 to one of 6,086 rupees. This meant that by 1956 close on 17 per cent of all families working in agriculture were members of these credit societies. Later this figure was to rise to 30 per cent. Comparison of selective data in the above-mentioned surveys gives reason to presume that if not even the whole stratum of rural capitalists joined the rural credit societies in 1951-1952, by now not only landowners, entrepreneurs and prosperous peasants but evidently a large proportion of the middle peasants have joined these agricultural credit societies. This points to the spread of capitalist development in agriculture and the increasingly firm position enjoyed by entrepreneur elements.

Another factor testifying to the improved economic position of the upper echelons of the peasantry is the growth in the fixed capital functioning in the capitalist and semicapitalist sectors of Indian agriculture. Between 1945 and 1959 the number of metal ploughs increased more than twice over, that of sugar-cane crushers worked by power 2.5 times, that of internal combustion engines ten times over and that of tractors five times over/^^1^^"

However the overall level of technical equipment in agriculture still remained negligible. In 1956 there was only one tractor per every 15,000 acres of land under cultivation, or for 28 villages.

The upper stratum of prosperous peasants that now had firmly established itself in the villages was concentrating

* Indian Livestock Census, 1951, Vol. I, Delhi, 1955, XVIII, p. 46; Eighth All-India Livestock Census, 1956, Delhi, 1958, p. 3.

* Monthly Abstract of Statistics, New Delhi, 1959, Vol. XII, No. 10, pp. 92-93.

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between 30 and 40 per cent of agricultural produce in its own hands and making the most of the favourable market situation in order to expand its accumulated capital. The gulf between prices for agricultural produce and those for manufactured goods, in so far as it affected above all the toiling peasantry, tended to increase steadily. Between 1947 and April 1960 India imported 35,116,000 tons of cereals and other food items at a total cost of 15,230 million rupees, a sum which exceeded total state investments in industry. The food crisis was becoming chronic and was clearly a result of the failure to solve the land problem.

quacy of legislative measures alone in the country's agrarian structure and pointed to the need to encourage landowners voluntarily to distribute part of their land among the peasants. The leaders of this movement considered that changes in the distribution of land should be effected by convincing landowners of the need to give up part of their land rather than by means of state power. Basing his arguments on these principles Bhave made his appeal to the landowners, calling on them to give up a sixth part of their land to the landless. This campaign was designed to check the revolutionary aspirations of the peasantry, and also, to a certain extent, to add weight to the agrarian reforms introduced from above with a mass movement.

The progressive aspect of the movement led by Bhave consisted in the fact that the movement as a whole and its most consistent champions were genuinely exposing the evils of private ownership of land and the enormous inequality of land rights that obtained in India.

When launching the movement, Acharya Vinoba Bhave set the target of collecting 50 million acres of land through voluntary contributions. By the end of 1958 (i.e., almost ten years later), according to official figures, 4,200 thousand acres had been donated to the campaign's land fund and of these, 600 thousand had been distributed among 200 thousand families. A large part of the land contributed was ill-suited or indeed unfit for cultivation, which explains why seven times less land was distributed among the peasants than was originally donated.

At the same time as the Bhudan movement another movement came into being in 1957 which reflected the more radical character of the peasants' moods and the vital need to solve the land question by means of redistribution. This movement was also led by Acharya Vinoba Bhave and was given moral and material support by the National Congress. This second movement was known as the Gramdan movement. It aimed at persuading landowners and lease-holders in each concrete village to renounce their land rights, after which all the lands would become the property of a village association for the egalitarian redistribution for purposes of joint cultivation. According to official figures, by the end of 1958 the principles

In the Indian village a campaign took shape calling upon the landowners to voluntarily give up part of their land to a special land fund for the landless peasants and agricultural labourers (the Bhudan movement). It was sponsored by the National Congress in an attempt to introduce certain Gandhist principles into the official approach to the land question. The movement was headed by the prominent Congress leader Acharya Vinoba Bhave. In his eyes the land question did not have any class or social implications. The shortage of land for some and the surpluses enjoyed by others was a moral question, a matter of conscience and honesty. He held that it was amoral, dishonest to possess surpluses when those, who were sorely in need of land, did not possess any at all.

The Bhudan movement was launched after the peasant uprising in Telengan and it first caught on in that region after the uprising had been suppressed. The movement came into being as an alternative to agrarian revolution. It was linked up with Gandhi's concept of "moral improvement", re-adaptation and utilisation of religious principles, beliefs and customs observed by the peasants that had been handed down from the days of the communal system destroyed by the British colonialists.

It was in the interests of the ruling classes to see to it that this movement possessed a dual character. On the one hand, it rejected peasants' expropriation of land possessed by the landowners, and on the other, it exposed the inade-

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of the Gramdan movement had been applied in 3,500 villages, i.e., approximately 0.8 per cent of all Indian villages.

Acharya Vinoba Bhave and the other leaders of this movement proclaimed the principle of the elimination of private ownership of land. Land did not belong to anyone, as was the case with air and water, they declared. Moreover, Bhave maintained that the Gramdan movement would become the main means for nationalising the land, justly redistributing it, and would thus serve to do away with strip-farming and to ensure the consolidation of landholdings and their joint cultivation. "Government planning must be on the basis of Gramdan. I will even go to the extent of saying that if in the achievement of this a little coercion may be necessary, there is no harm."*

A special conference of the leaders of the Indian political parties, convened in 1957 in Mysore, supported the movements led by Acharya Vinoba Bhave, but decided they were inadequate to solve the agrarian problem on the whole, without any steps taken by the national government. The conference resolved that the Bhudan and Gramdan movements were not in a position to replace state legislation but that they should be used to supplement state legislation.

In the light of this prospect, the Bhudan and Gramdan movements enjoy the support of Left parties in India, including the Communist Party, which in the meantime is fully aware of their limited possibilities and the need to lend them a clearly defined class character.

sible means, above all the harvest of food crops; improving irrigation facilities; eliminating local unemployment and raising levels of employment; at improving transport facilities and communications between villages; organising primary education on a broader basis, and providing schools; improving medical services and levels of hygiene in rural areas; promoting rural industries and agricultural co-operatives; eliminating parcel-holdings and strip-- farming by consolidating land-holdings; promoting the Bhudan and Gramdan movements. This programme for the " community projects" and the "national extension service" was designed to improve and normalise living conditions in the Indian village.*

At a meeting for chairmen and secretaries of National Congress local organisations, convened to discuss the outcome of the 1957 general elections, Jawaharlal Nehru announced that "the implementation of Community Development Schemes is most important and most vital, and it is the most revolutionary thing that is happening in India.... New India is coming out from the Community Development Projects. . . ."**

Community schemes, while being habitual measures in the context of bourgeois development, also reflect the desperate plight of the rural population which for centuries on end has been exposed to ruthless exploitation on the part of the colonialists and landowners. The Communist Party of India, acknowledging the progressive character of such measures introduced by the state, co-operative and

* Details on the structure and activities of these organisations are provided in the following official documents: Road to Welfare Stale. Community Projects Administration (New Delhi, 1957); /. Nehru on Community Development (New Delhi, 1957); Evaluation Report on Working of Community Projects and National Extension Service Blocks (Vol. I, New Delhi, 1957, Publication No. 19).

** AlCC Economic Review, May 1, 1957, p. 5. At the same time as this statement of Nehru's in which he so clearly stressed the importance of the "community projects", the firmly established traditional organ of Calcutta capitalists, the journal Capital, outspokenly remarked in connection with the role and work of the rural community organisations that it would be desirable for them to be "a little more practical and a little less revolutionary. One of the objects of the community development programme was the avoidance of a revolution." (Capital, May 16, 1957, p. 694.)

An extremely important method for the state to employ in its efforts to shape the development of rural India and rally social and political support for the implementation of agrarian and other reforms is the inauguration of socalled "community projects" or the "national extension service''.

This official programme can be summed up as follows: it aims at increasing agricultural production by all pos-

AlCC Economic Review, July 1, 1957.

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community organisations to improve living conditions in the countryside, called upon the peasant masses to take an active part in their implementation, to extend and intensify their role in village organisations, trying to glean maximum advantages for the toiling peasants from the new schemes and at the same time to counteract corruption practised by local officials, their anti-democratic bureaucratic practices and oppose the appropriation by the propertied classes of state and public funds earmarked for rural redevelopment projects. At the same time the Communist Party of India held that apart from this campaigning to ensure that their everyday economic and domestic needs were met through the existing network of co-operative, community and state organisations, the rural population should make their main task the rallying together of the masses to solve the land question in the interests of the peasants.

A most interesting evaluation of the work of the community organisations is contained in their report issued in 1957. In a passage referring to the attitude adopted by the community organisations to the various social strata in the villages the following conclusions are drawn:

``There is a wide disparity in the distribution of the ... benefits of community project programmes. This disparity exists as between different blocks in the project areas.. .. Within the villages, it exists as between cultivators and noncultivators of bigger holdings and larger financial resources and those of smaller holdings and lesser financial resources. This is a matter of serious concern not only in terms of regional and social justice but also in terms of the political consequences that may ensue in the context of the increasing awakening of the people."""

In an article containing a policy statement on the draft budget for 1957/58 S. Narayan acknowledged the class character of the activity of the community organisations.

The agricultural economist M. L. Dantwalla, a member of the National Congress committee for implementing agrarian reforms, quoted earlier, wrote on the basis of material taken from numerous surveys: "Whether it is the

land reform, or the community development and national extension service programme or the organisation of the co-operative movement, we find that in spite of the best of intentions, their beneficial effects are not evenly shared by all strata of the population."*

P. Srinivasachari, a research officer at the Delhi Institute of Gandhian Studies, drew the following conclusion from his study of the work carried out by the community project organisations: "There is no doubt that they are doing very valuable work but experience has shown the benefits of these projects do not reach peasants with meagre resources; instead they are enjoyed by landlords commanding large resources. There should be complete reorientation of the policy concerning the working of the Community Projects if they are intended to prepare the ground for transforming the present society into a Sarvodaya order."**

As emerges from the above quotations, the activity of the services for ``community'' and ``national'' development grew up from the new, post-reform conditions for rural development and can be explained by the increasing orientation of that development in a bourgeois direction. These services to a certain extent supplemented the agrarian reform. Apart from the overall beneficial aspect of the activity bound up with these projects they serve to consolidate the position of the prosperous upper echelons of the village who provide the social support for the national bourgeoisie. The activity of these organisations cannot do away with the historic need for radical agrarian reform.

At present the impact of capitalist development makes itself more strongly felt in the increased scale of agricultural production than in the period prior to independence. The mechanisation of agriculture makes a stronger impact now and particularly in regions where the main

* The Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Bombay, 1956, Vol. XI, No. 1, p. 70.

** Indian Affairs Record, New Delhi, May 1956, Vol. I, No. 12, p. 4.

* The Fourth Evaluation Report on Working of Community Projects and National Extension Service Blocks, Vol. I, April 1957, p. 20.

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crops are cereals and industrial crops. Modern agrotechniques is now often to be found in large and medium-scale farms. Farms belonging to capitalist landowners, prosperous and middle peasants have started employing hired labour on a wider basis. The position of the rich peasants, entrepreneur farmers and capitalist landowners is much more stable than before: they now hold sway in the villages and channel rural development on a capitalist course. In the village it is they who provide the ruling party with its bastion of support.

The peasantry of the past, held down by the imperialists and the feudal and semi-feudal landowners, which constituted a united class in the spontaneous struggle against the common enemy, no longer exists. Economic development during the war and post-war years, the bourgeois agrarian reform and the post-war policy as a whole in the countryside have served to split the peasantry. The rich peasants and prosperous middle peasants have been able, thanks to the chance to buy their land and pay for it by instalment payments, gradually to become owners of their land. The less prosperous middle peasants have been able gradually to become protected tenants and have grounds to hope that they too would eventually own their holdings/^^1^^" The poor peasants, share-croppers and agricultural labourers who still make up the bulk of the rural population have, on the other hand, not succeeded in gaining any improvements in their living conditions. They had been exposed to mass eviction for many years and are now being opposed not only by the landlords who have managed to hold on to their estates, but also by the `` updated'' capitalist landowners, and the now stronger and rapidly growing stratum of capitalists consisting of traders, speculators and moneylenders, and also entrepreneur farmers from among the prosperous peasants and merchants. The reforms have done away with some of the obstacles

holding back capitalist development in rural India and it is now proceeding at a much quicker pace.

The general patterns of development peculiar to this process of property- and class-based stratification of the peasantry started to apply in India after an end had been put to colonial domination, in keeping with the laws of development of commodity-money capitalist economy.

In a resolution published by the National Council of the Communist Party of India it was stated: "Capital formation in the countryside is extremely low, and in the case of the great bulk of producers there is more disinvestment than investment of capital."* Indeed, while new investment in production made by the owners of more prosperous holdings amounted to between six and eleven per cent of the gross value of production by the beginning of the sixties, among the lower groups constituting the bulk of the rural population a drop in the value of basic funds equal to between 4 and 14 per cent of the gross value of their produce was recorded. The mass of the peasants sank to ever greater depths of poverty.

However this impoverishment of the small-commodity peasant farms, caught up in the sphere of increasingly capitalist relations, speeded up the crystallisation of rural capitalism. Not only local industrial capital, but now to a larger degree than before the rural entrepreneur bourgeoisie, consisting of prosperous peasants (and also landowners), whose interests were being increasingly opposed by the poor peasants, middle and lower sections of the middle peasants and agricultural hired labourers, represented the main vehicle of capitalist development.

The journal Economic Weekly wrote that the bulk of the agricultural produce coming on to the market belonged to large rich producers able and inclined to store the produce in warehouses until they could get a higher price for it. The credit policy pursued by the state and the co-operatives played into the hands of these producers. The bulk of the credit provided by the credit societies and various government departments went to the richer and better established producers of both the new and

* Ibid., p. 3.

* "It should, however, be stated that the old slogan of all-in peasant unity against feudalism can no longer be treated as the central strategic slogan of the Kisan movement on a country-wide basis, though it may yet be applicable to certain areas where semi-feudal survivals are still strong." (Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question. .., p. 13.)

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the old type. Petty producers were unable to hold back with the sale of their produce. In the vast majority of cases the burdens of rent and tax obligations made them sell their produce, at times even their standing crops, without delay, and they were in no position to make the most of price fluctuations. Large-scale producers were bound to keep the upper hand not only when it came to technology and modern farming techniques, although these factors were gradually acquiring more and more importance, but also, given the larger scale of their holdings and larger commodity output, they were able to hold back the sale of their produce till prices were at their most favourable, all the more so in view of their wide opportunities for obtaining credit.

Traders of the traditional pre-reform type, in view of the changes in the "composition of the producers", gradually started to lose their monopoly of the rural markets. This situation stemmed from the fact that they had held monopoly-type sway over trade capital for buying up the harvest. In general these traders still kept in their hands an enormous proportion of agricultural produce, while the banks (including the Reserve Bank of India) handed out to them advances at low rates of interest against the coming harvest. However, the emergence of the large-scale producer with direct control over the production process inevitably limited the former powers of the old-style traders.

The domination of the moneylender in the field of agricultural credits still held good, although the professional moneylenders in their turn were gradually losing their direct control over the producers' harvests as their place came to be taken by the farmer-cum-creditor.

The emergence of the post-reform large-scale agricultural producer was explained by Daniel Thorner in the following words: "These people . .. are not the great landlords who commonly stayed in the cities and only visited their estates once or twice in the year. But these prosperous village dwellers are not unimportant people nor are they without connections. They have relatives, friends, or caste fellows in the civil services, the army and the police and judicial hierarchy. They may not have a detailed knowledge of land law and legal procedure, but of all villagers

they can best afford to retain lawyers. They also supply the core of the Indian National Congress membership." They "stand in strength, quite capable of blocking or crippling any measure that runs counter to their interests. Now that the great absentee zamindars have been removed, the resident zamindars and big tenants have come up to take their place; today they strut around as lords of the land."*

A major economic result of the agrarian reform which benefited first and foremost the capitalist elements was the increased scope it gave the latter for appropriating considerable sums of differential rent formed in the new capitalist economy as the difference between the individual price of production and the higher price of production in the least favourable conditions. The large-scale and medium-scale capitalist producer in present-day Indian agriculture gleans considerable sums of differential rent in the form of superprofits resulting from the variations in site and fertility of holdings, all the more so since no income tax had been introduced in rural India, although this issue has long been the subject of acute political controversy in the country. Bourgeois interest in adding to profits by economic means is on the increase, while the scope for feudal and semi-feudal appropriation of the surplus product is becoming more limited, a development that the reform of the country's agrarian structure is promoting.

The large-scale landowners in pre-reform India (apart from planters) as a rule had not engaged in large-scale capitalist farming as a result of which their scope for appropriating differential rent from consistent capital expenditure had been extremely limited. By leasing out land they had been able to capture a considerable share of the differential rent of fertility and site in the form of rent payments, depriving the commodity producer of such opportunities the while. The direct commodity producer, who was held in conditions of servitude, received no differential rent at all. Only when the upper echelons of the peasantry, after becoming landowners in their own

* Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India, pp. 49-50.

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right or tenants with privileged rights of tenure, achieved an increase in the productive forces in agriculture and the market situation remained favourable over a long period, was that part of the peasantry accordingly able to start appropriating part of the differential rent. In so far as the expansion of private capitalist ownership in the countryside was more widespread, the scope for such activities has since become much wider: this development constituted yet another of the main results of the reform.

Although the increased scope for appropriating differential rent in post-reform India attracted capital to agriculture on an undoubtedly wider scale than before, big landownership and the semi-feudal practices that still persisted in agriculture at the same time hindered the free competition between capitals and resulted in the coexistence of capitalist and semi-feudal production conditions. In post-reform rural India spreading capitalist exploitation was becoming the dominating form. Commodity production, gradually bringing about the formation in the Indian village of separate centres of capitalist production relations, now under bourgeois influence in independent India were coming to represent a dominating force, thanks to the capitalist industrialisation under way in the country and the emergence of new bourgeois strata that were growing up and gaining influence in the village. Yet precisely because the central issue of the agrarian reform---the land question---had not been finally resolved, semi-feudal exploitation that once provided the basis of colonial exploitation of rural India was still strong and flourishing and more than ever before firmly bound up with capitalist-type exploitation. On a level with the land question which was still the main issue in the struggle against the landowning class to eliminate feudal practices once and for all, the struggle against the new capitalist masters of rural India was growing apace.

AGRARIAN REFORM IN COUNTRIES OF THE NEAR AND MIDDLE EAST AND SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

BY THE EARLY SIXTIES:

THE CHOICE BETWEEN TWO PATHS

OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT IN THE MODERN CONTEXT

The socialist revolution in Europe and Asia, resulting in the formation of the world socialist system, together with the national liberation movements gave rise to a new historical situation. A large group of states that had broken away from the world imperialist system took shape and started developing. At the same time these states had not joined the world socialist system. Capitalism had not yet come to dominate the entire economy in most of these countries, although even in the least developed of them it was the leading economic formation in both town and country. The states belonging to this group are characterised by a multi-form social and economic structure dominated partly by a natural economy but mostly by a small-scale peasant economy. The broad popular masses have little confidence in capitalism which they regard as virtually synonymous with colonialism. Progressive forces in these countries rightly acknowledge the historical limitations and ineffectiveness of bourgeois methods for eliminating age-old technical and economic backwardness. One of the vital issues of the present period is the charting of the most expedient paths for the future development of this group of countries, the choice of methods best suited for solving their socio-economic problems and for upholding peace and the state sovereignty of these newly independent states. These issues are now fundamental to the struggle waged by progressive forces in these countries against forces of internal reaction and the imperialists and

23*

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it is these issues that are the dividing line in the struggle of classes and parties. Among the socio-economic problems which urgently need to be solved once and for all, is the agrarian problem, the most crucial of them all.

After independence, the radical solution for the land question in the interests of the peasants became a top priority issue. Of course, it could have been dealt with by doing away with the feudal landownership which would have ensured a rapid rate of industrialisation and rapid growth of the internal markets in the countries concerned. Faced by the need to tackle this question of national importance the bourgeoisie, when it came to any practical steps in this direction, proved inconsistent and in the final analysis incapable of arriving at any democratic solution. In those Asian countries where the proletariat had led the national liberation movement, the struggle against imperialism and feudalism had ended in a complete victory for the people which had paved the way for these countries to make the transition to the path of socialist construction and to solve not only the agrarian but also the peasant question, i.e., the restructuring of agriculture on the basis of the co-operation of the peasantry. Meanwhile in those Asian countries where the national bourgeoisie had been at the helm of the national liberation movement and the nation-wide struggle had resulted in the attainment of independence, the tasks of anti-feudal revolution, i.e., steps to solve the land question in the interests of the peasants, had not been carried out fully.

The revolutions that swept the countries of the East after the Second World War did away with imperialist rule but did not eliminate the dominant patterns of landownership in the villages. This inconsistency is the key to the present critical situation in many countries of the East. The bourgeoisie which had been leading these revolutions succeeded in separating the anti-imperialist movement of the masses from the anti-feudal movement. Only in China, North Vietnam and the other socialist countries in Asia did these two currents of the mass movement merge.

The political role of Gandhism, for example, served to channel the revolutionary energy of the working class, the

peasantry and the urban poor---in short, the broad popular masses---mainly in one direction, against British imperialism. Bourgeois nationalism hindered these masses from finding their bearings in the complex situation and prevented the peasants from overthrowing the landowners and the workers from overthrowing the capitalists at one and the same time as the imperialists.

It is by no means a coincidence that all the ideologists of the national bourgeoisie came forward with a relatively detailed anti-imperialist programme but made hardly any mention of any kind of agrarian programme. In a number of countries the national bourgeoisie succeeded in first of all achieving a dominant position in the national liberation movement and then asserting its political power after independence, thus placing itself in a position to protect the landowning class from the danger of any overthrow from ``below''. Precisely this aspect of the behaviour of the national bourgeoisie epitomises the incomplete nature of the national liberation revolutions in these countries. So as to preserve their leading role in the national liberation movement and their influence over the masses, the national bourgeoisie during the struggle to take over power and after asserting that power constantly attempts to isolate the working-class movement from the peasant movement, the antiimperialist movement from the anti-feudal movement, and thus wrest from the working class its main and natural ally ---the peasantry. Since the peasantry makes up the largest mass force of the national liberation movement it was precisely the peasants who determined the impact of that movement by the scale of its involvement.

On coming to power the national bourgeoisie, which had joined in a bloc of one form or other with the landowner elements, decided to ``appease'' the revolutionary struggle of the peasantry with half-hearted reforms and partial concessions. The agrarian reforms introduced by the ruling circles "from above" without the support of the democratic sections of the peasantry were designed to prolong the isolation of the peasantry from the working class.

When considering the agrarian reforms introduced in the countries of the East it is as well to bear in mind one of Lenin's tenets of principle relating to reform in general:

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``Every reform is a reform (and not a reactionary and not a conservative measure) only insofar as it constitutes a certain step, a stage, for the better. But every reform in capitalist society has a double character. A reform is a concession made by the ruling classes in order to stem, weaken, or conceal the revolutionary struggle, in order to split the forces and energy of the revolutionary classes, to befog their consciousness, etc."*

In an analysis of any question connected with the countries of the East in the present period it is vital to depart from the Marxist-Leninist tenet to the effect that it is quite wrong to generalise about the countries of the East for there exist substantial differences between them stemming from the uneven economic and political development in these countries. There are also major differences to be found between the class structure of their societies and the composition of their ruling circles, not to mention the degree of organisation and ideological independence of the working masses. The economic and political foothold the imperialists have made for themselves in these countries also varies considerably from one country to another just as do the relations existing between the individual countries of the East and the socialist states. These facts mean that it would be wrong to draw any conclusion from analysis of any one country or group of countries, without taking into account local features, and assume that it applied to all countries of the East.

At the same time this need for a discriminating concrete approach based on analysis of the characteristic features of each individual country does not mean that no general conclusions can be drawn in connection with the major countries of the East or certain of its regions.

The most important factor to bear in mind when assessing the agrarian evolution of the majority of the Asian countries and one which provides a common denominator for them all is that the national liberation movements have not brought with them any satisfactory solution for the agrarian and peasant question. This still remains one of the main issues

to be dealt with during the new stage of development of the class struggle in these countries.

Here is a short survey of the agrarian reforms introduced in the main countries of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia by the beginning of the 1960s and the conditions in which the peasants of these countries were living.

The Arab countries. Close on 80 per cent of the population in these countries depends on land cultivation for its livelihood, together with animal husbandry, fishing and other types of production closely linked with agriculture.

Favourable soil and climatic conditions in conjunction with artificial irrigation make it possible for many Arab countries to reap two or three harvests per year. However, intensive land cultivation is so far only possible in present conditions in Egypt where agriculture is based on artificial irrigation. In other countries the extent of irrigated land is much more limited. In the Sudan for instance 42 per cent of the farming land is irrigated, in Iraq and Syria between 10 and 15 per cent and in Jordan only four per cent.

Enormous expanses of land that are suitable for cultivation have not yet been utilised. In the south of Egypt and in the Sudan approximately 70 per cent of land suitable for cultivation is used, in Jordan 63 per cent, in Algeria 60 per cent, in Syria 54 per cent, in the Lebanon 54 per cent, in Morocco 32 per cent and in Tunisia 29 per cent. If the overall average for the Arab countries is taken, then no more than 40 per cent of the land suitable for cultivation was utilised. Close on ten million Arabs at this period were engaged in nomadic and semi-nomadic animal husbandry; this figure includes between three and four million people in Saudi Arabia and three million in the Sudan.*

The main means of production in agriculture---the land and water---were still in the hands of the numerically small landowning class.

Landownership in the Arab countries is found in the following three basic forms: private ownership---estates with a single proprietor; state or so-called public ownership of land which in practice involves ownership of land by the

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 237.

* I. An-Nass, The Population of the Arab World and Us Position, Cairo, 1955, p. 326.

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ruling classes as a whole whose interests are represented by the state apparatus; so-called waqf ownership which in practice involves ownership of land by the priesthood although such land nominally belongs to religious and charitable organisations.

In the countries of North Africa some land is also owned by colonists and foreign joint-stock companies.

The type of landowner that predominates in these countries is the private landowner. When a start was made on introducing the land reform in Egypt, 52 per cent of the land under cultivation belonged to a small group of landowners while some 75 per cent of the peasants possessed no land at all. In Syria prior to the land reform (September 1958), 70 per cent of the land under cultivation was in the hands of 8,000 landowners and two-thirds of the peasants had no land. In Iraq prior to the land reform (September 1958), 90 per cent of the land under cultivation belonged to semifeudal landowners while 85 per cent of the peasants---close on four million people---possessed no land. In the Lebanon 50 per cent of the land under cultivation was in the hands of 170 powerful landowners and a third of the peasants had no land. In 1956, 80 per cent of Tunisia's peasants owned no land. The landowning class in Morocco owned up to 50 per cent of the land under cultivation and 60 per cent of the peasants had no land. Some of the large landed estates in these countries ran into several tens of thousands of hectares.

Large landed estates provide the basis for the economic domination and political influence enjoyed by the landowning class in these countries. The land reforms, introduced in Egypt, Iraq and other countries prior to the 1960s, dealt a blow at the interests of the most powerful landowners, who as a rule were the most reactionary of their kind. These reforms were also designed to transfer a good deal of foreign-owned land into Arab hands. Changes were also effected in relation to waqf landownership. In Egypt the majority of the so-called family waqf estates were turned into privately owned estates. However those waqf estates, which belonged to religious and charitable organisations, and the revenues gleaned from the latter, were still disposed of by priests (with the exception

of Tunisia where the lands belonging to religious and charitable organisations were nationalised). Foreign-owned land was cut down considerably. Between 1952 and 1957 foreign-owned land in Egypt was cut down from 600 to 150 thousand feddans. In Tunisia in 1957 an agreement was reached, according to which French colonists were paid compensation for 140 thousand hectares of land in the coastal, and central steppe regions. Similar steps were also taken in other Arab countries of North Africa. The land reforms in these countries did not put an end to large-scale landownership but merely placed certain restrictions upon it. The limit laid down for the maximum size of land-holdings (125 hectares of irrigated land in Egypt, 120 hectares of irrigated land or 460 hectares of dry-farming land in Syria, 250 hectares of irrigated land or 500 hectares of dry-farming land in Iraq, and 50 hectares of irrigated land in Tunisia) made it possible to preserve the foundations of large landed estates. Even bourgeois economists reckoned that with due account for soil fertility the maximum size for land-holdings laid down in Egypt was the equivalent of 600 hectares of farming land in Britain.

Compensation payments for land were a burden even for middle peasants to have to pay. This meant that sooner or later the land taken away from the large-scale landowners came into the hands of the prosperous peasants, as was the case in Egypt. The bulk of the peasantry was obliged either to rent land from big landowners and pay them between 50 and 80 per cent of their harvest for this privilege, or hire themselves out as agricultural labourers, which was not always possible for those peasants who found themselves bereft of all means of making their living. Land rents not only swallowed up the surplus product of peasant plots but sometimes produce vital to keep families alive. This was one of the reasons behind the desperate plight of the Arab peasants. Ruling circles in many Arab countries (Tunisia, Morocco, etc.) were interested in promoting capitalist forms of farming. They were going out of their way to regulate rights of tenure and pass legislation stipulating rent levels. As experience was quick to show, such legislation had little effect.

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As partial mechanisation infiltrated the landowners' and farmers' estates, and there was an increase of surplus population, particularly after the Second World War, tenantfarmers as a rule were paying landowners sums half-way between officially stipulated rents and those demanded by the landowners. In Iraq tenant share-croppers working on landowners' estates officially had to pay rents of 35 per cent of their harvest after deduction of production costs.

The position of peasants in the Sudan, the Lebanon, the Arab Republic of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Morocco and Algeria, where land reforms had not been introduced by the 1960s, was still more desperate. In those countries land prices were on the increase and consequently rents as well. Concentration of land in the hands of the powerful landowners was proceeding apace. The peasants were being reduced to worse and worse depths of poverty. It was no coincidence that in the Sudan and Saudi Arabia (1958) and in Tunisia (1959) the ruling circles were obliged to waive the peasants' tax arrears.

The peasants were also deeply in debt to moneylenders. Often they were in no position to have any more say in their own fate or that of their families. Malnutrition, sickness, illiteracy, chronic underemployment and unemployment condemned the peasants to an existence bereft of any rights, as the progressive press in the Arab countries stressed time and time again. Frequent cases of eviction from landowners' estates where capitalist farming techniques were being introduced (based on exploitation of hired labour and mechanised techniques) also point to the fact that the peasants were deprived of any rights. Over a million full-time agricultural labourers and a total of approximately 20,000 tractors were being used in Egyptian agriculture, the respective figures for Syria being 200,000 and 5,000.

In the Arab countries independent political organisations for peasants and agricultural workers virtually did not exist. Consumer and marketing co-operatives were still weak and under the control of the ruling circles. After the Second World War laws were introduced in the majority of Arab countries, stipulating the length of the working day, weekly days off and annual holidays for agricultural labourers. However, in view of the enormous army of impoverished

peasants and unemployed agricultural and industrial workers it was no problem for rural entrepreneurs and landowners to evade these laws. The trade unions were also extremely weak. In Egypt, for example, the trade union for agricultural labourers had only 16,000 members and used to carry out virtually no organisational work among these labourers.

Cruel exploitation on the part of the landowners, low wages, extremely long working hours and hard working conditions, the lack of any labour legislation and social insurance, the arbitrary behaviour of entrepreneurs, wide utilisation of cheap woman and child labour---such were the conditions to which millions upon millions of agricultural labourers were subjected.

Little by little however the idea of the need for an alliance between the working class and the peasantry came to gain ground among the working masses in the Arab countries. In some countries concrete steps were taken in the direction of organising such an alliance: in Iraq peasant unions were set up which soon had a total of 400 thousand members. Peasant committees appeared in certain provinces of Syria before it was united with Egypt. However taken all in all the influence of the working class on the peasant movement in the Arab countries remained negligible.

The grim living conditions obtaining during the Second World War and the post-war years, the inability of the ruling circles to bring about any substantial improvements in the lives of the peasants and the agricultural proletariat after independence had been achieved were the main reasons for the particularly acute social contradictions in the Arab countries and the increasing discontent of the peasant masses.

The position of the toiling peasantry at the beginning of the 1960s showed no marked trends in the direction of improvement. In the new context of spreading capitalist exploitation side by side with semi-feudal exploitation, the main mass of the peasants were faced by the prospect of a possible deterioration in their position. Various agricultural schemes, which had been implemented in part, were clearly inadequate in the short historical terms to provide full-time work for the peasants and the impoverished landless agri-

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cultural labourers and guarantee rises in rural living standards. The future was bound to bring more intense class struggle to the rural parts of the Arab countries and from there lead on to a still more marked division of class forces.

Turkey: Important changes have taken place in Turkish agriculture since the war.* The area under cultivation and the harvests of the main food and industrial crops increased almost twice over. Agricultural techniques improved and the number of tractors rose from 1,700 to 54,000, average crop yields also showed a marked improvement. Per capita grain production went up from 400 to 560 kilograms a year. Capitalist relations were coming to dominate rural Turkey more and more. A concentration of capitalist production is taking place in the wake of the ever wider introduction of agricultural machinery. These developments are proceeding in conjunction with the absorption of peasant parcel-holdings and the eviction of large numbers of tenantfarmers. All this serves to complicate class relations in the countryside to an acute degree.

After the Second World War the question of land reform became an urgent priority. The law passed in 1945 provided for the transfer to landless peasants and those with small holdings, in return for compensation, lands owned by the state, local administrative organs and also ownerless lands not being used for public purposes (if these covered an area of over 500 hectares). In certain cases this figure was set at 200 hectares instead of 500. In addition this law provided for the transfer to share-croppers and agricultural labourers of the land they worked. In such cases provision was made to ensure that landowners retained holdings three times over and above the norm for redistribution in the region in question (but not less than five hectares) and at the same time they were also allowed to keep the best land in their estates. As early as 1950 amendments were introduced which made any redivision of landowners' estates impossible. In order to make the large landed estates virtually inviolable it was decided to replace the alienation of land-

owners' property through the cultivation of new regions. In the years immediately following the passing of the law, reform was implemented extremely slowly. No more than 5,000 peasant families received land during the year. The growth of the peasant movement at the end of the forties obliged ruling circles to act more quickly and from 1952 onwards state land was transferred to the peasants at a much quicker pace. By 1960 close on 30 thousand families each year received plots of five hectares/^^1^^"

Between 1947 and the end of 1959 a total of 1,749 thousand hectares of formerly unused state and ownerless land was made over to the peasants in return for compensation payments. This land, mostly ill-suited for cultivation and requiring considerable effort and funds to produce anything, was made over to 347,611 peasant families constituting approximately 12 per cent of the country's total number of peasant families. This meant that a certain part of the peasantry came to possess land of its own as a result of the reform.

Yet meanwhile the number of landless peasants was also on the increase. This meant that peasant farming on a nation-wide scale was hardly expanding at all and the number of peasants in need of land either remained at the same level as before or decreased extremely slowly: these peasants still accounted for over half the rural population.

After the inauguration of the republic a system of state land credits and credit-marketing co-operatives grew up rapidly, which had been unknown during the sultanate when moneylenders and traders had held unchallenged sway in the villages. The total credits provided by agricultural banks rose from 34 million liras in 1938 to 2,161 million in 1957.** Taking into account the depreciation of the Turkish lira and the tenfold rise in the market prices this meant a six to sevenfold increase in agricultural credit.

Agricultural co-operation also played an important role in connection with credit facilities available to the peasants. At the end of 1958 there were 1,520 credit co-operatives in Turkey with a total of 891 thousand members, or about

* Source: P. P. Moiseyev, Agrarian Relations in Modern Turkey, Moscow, 1960 (in Russian).

* Zafer, March 6, 1960. ** Forum, January 15, 1960.

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a third of all peasant families, and 200 marketing co-- operatives with a total of 133 thousand members.* In 1939 the shareholders of these credit co-operatives received credit amounting to a total of 22 million liras and a total of 740 million liras in 1958. Over this same period the amount of credit placed at the disposal of each shareholder rose from 172 to 816 liras.

The expansion of credit facilities made available to agricultural co-operatives by state banks placed considerable restrictions on the activity of the moneylenders but it did not do away with moneylending practices entirely. According to official figures on the debts incurred by peasant holdings in 1957 in Central Anatolia over two-thirds of all credits were provided by state banks and co-operatives and the remaining third by moneylenders/^^1^^"* This meant that the position of moneylending capital in Turkey was much weaker than before although in certain districts of the country, particularly in the east, moneylenders still played an important role, but even there the moneylenders had lost their former monopoly of agricultural credits.

In Turkey there had never been any legislation regulating relations between landowner and tenant. This meant that when landowners started to switch to capitalist farming methods there was nothing to stop them evicting tenantfarmers and share-croppers.

In the first ten years immediately after the war approximately 200 thousand tenant-farmers were evicted: these farmers together with their families accounted for approximately one million people.*** The ousting of small peasant holdings belonging to share-croppers and tenant-farmers by large-scale capitalist-type farms of landowners and rich peasants went most likely further in Turkey than in all other countries of the East and it resulted in a situation where share-croppers in the Turkish villages lost their former significance. Share-croppers by 1960 accounted for no more than 20 per cent of the whole peasantry. As a result of the capitalist development in agriculture the scope for feudal and semi-feudal exploitation shrank considerably.

Various feudal and semi-feudal obligations and requisitions which at one time had constituted the very foundation of relations between landowner and peasant also lost much of their former significance.

In 1959, 153 million liras were exacted from the rural population in the form of direct government taxation, a sum which came to 22 per cent of the total state revenue from direct taxation."' The peasants were also subjected to a heavy burden of indirect taxation. In the ten years from 1950 to 1960 the total taxation extracted from the population rose five times over.**

The political and legal position of the peasants had hardly changed at all from what it had been in the pre-war years. The peasants still had no political parties or organisations of their own which might have defended their interests. The political parties which did exist in Turkey were groupings of various strata of the bourgeoisie and the landowners. The Communist Party worked underground. The peasants' struggle proceeded in extremely difficult conditions. The absence of proletarian leadership, the unco-ordinated and haphazard nature of peasant disturbances, and repression from the authorities all hindered the development of an organised peasant movement. Its activities were of a localised rather than nation-wide character. The law on press and censorship adopted in 1956 put a stop to any press coverage of peasant unrest whatsoever.

Yet on occasions there appeared a few lines on peasants' unauthorised seizure of landowners' or state lands, their refusal to pay taxes, clashes with the police, etc. Of course, it is difficult to gain a clear picture of the real scale of the peasant movement from such inadequate material but it does at least give us reason to conclude that the movement never assumed any really significant proportions.

The implementation of the land reform gave peasants the illusion that they might be able to obtain land without having to actually fight for it. Some of the evicted sharecroppers found work building aerodromes or strategic roads (between 1950 and 1958 close on 30,000 kilometres of as-

* Review of International Cooperation, 1958, No. 10, p. 296. ** Turkiye iktisat gazetesi, January 15, 1959. *** Forum, March 15, 1959.

* 7.C. Resmi gazete, March 1, 1958. ** Ulus, February 5, 1960.

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phalt and paved roads were built), refitting ports, building military bases, etc. By this time the Turkish peasants had come under the powerful influence of the bourgeoisie.

In short, post-war Turkey was characterised by considerable development of capitalist relations (although certain feudal practices continued to exist) and by increased class stratification of the peasantry. The stratum of the prosperous peasants took shape during this period and came to form a rural bourgeoisie. The mass of impoverished poor and middle peasants swelled the ranks of the proletariat and semi-proletariat in the towns. The exodus of impoverished peasants to the towns assumed astronomical proportions. By 1950 close on a million peasants had already made their way to the towns.

Iran: Iran is an agrarian country, where by 1960 survivals of feudalism still made themselves most clearly felt and where agriculture was dominated by large landed estates while peasant holdings were for the most part very small/^^1^^' Landowners constituting a mere one per cent of the rural population owned 56 per cent of the land under cultivation. The expanses of land taken up by various tribes in actual fact belonged to khans or tribal leaders. State lands accounted for 50 per cent of the total land in Iran, the Shah lands alone for 10 per cent. Only around 12 per cent of the land under cultivation belonged to the peasants. Of the peasants 40 per cent were legally entitled to own land, the remaining 60 had no right to any land at all.*^^51^^"

Large landed estates owned by a few thousand landowning families provided the foundation of the economic and political domination of the class of feudal and semi-feudal landowners.

The peasant population of rural Iran could be divided up approximately into the following class groups:

agricultural labourers..........

roughly

10

per

cent

poor peasants..............

roughly

65

per

cent

middle peasants.............

roughly

20

per

cent

prosperous peasants............

roughly

4

per

cent

The main type of exploitation to which the peasants of Iran were subjected was share-cropping. The majority of the share-croppers possessed no agricultural implements. The average share-cropper's contract entitled him to between a half and a seventh (if not still less) of the harvest for his labours. From this miserable share of the harvest the peasants had to pay various fines, taxes, etc. They were also obliged to spend considerable sums on bribes. Backward cultivation methods typical in agriculture dominated by large landed estates meant that yields were extremely low. Iranian banks did not give credit to tenant-farmers who owned no immovable property, which meant that the peasants had no choice but to turn to moneylenders who gave them subsidies at an average annual rate of interest of 25 per cent. Iranian peasants were also at the mercy of the traders buying up agricultural produce: offering them subsidies in the spring on the security of the standing crops, they then demanded extremely high interest in the autumn.

After the Second World War the situation in the Iranian countryside became critical. Under pressure from the peasants ruling circles were obliged to introduce some agrarian reforms.

By March 1, 1959, palace lands in 465 villages from various areas totalling 202 thousand hectares were sold to 20,608 cultivators who were given the right to pay for it in instalments."" The average price for one hectare was set at 7,000 rials for dry-farming land and 18,000 rials for irrigated land. The size of plots sold on these terms varied from 1V2 to 20 hectares depending upon site and fertility of the soil. Subsequent instructions were issued to ensure that no holdings from this former palace land should be under five hectares. In order to pay for such holdings peasants on purchasing them had to pay out between 460 and 4,000 rials a year,** a feat that was quite beyond any poor or middle peasant.

In keeping with the law of 1955 state lands under cultivation earmarked for sale had to be divided up into specific categories according to fertility, rotation of crops, irrigation

* Source: S. M. Badi, Agrarian Relations in Iran Today, Moscow, 1958 (in Russian). ** Rahat, September 28, 1952.

* Ettelaat, April 5, 1959. ** Tehran Economist, No. 301, 1959, p. 1.

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facilities and then sold to the peasants by lots and be paid for over a period of twenty years. The size of such holdings was fixed at 10 hectares for land requiring irrigation and 15 hectares for dry-farming land. After 1955 several other laws were passed providing for further amendments to existing rules of land-tenure.

The peasants' struggle between 1941 and 1946 resulted in the abolition of numerous obligations, the distribution of some of the state lands among the peasants, a reduction in the share of the harvest that went to the landowner and an increase in the share to be left to the tenant-farmer in many parts of the country. Steps were also taken to set up mutual benefit funds for tenant-farmers and peasants with holdings of their own. A law passed on October 6, 1952, increased the share-cropper's part of the harvest by 10 per cent. In addition the landowner was to set aside 10 per cent of the harvest to make improvements in the village and set up co-operatives for the inhabitants. That same year another law was passed abolishing requisitions exacted by landowners. This law, however, did not extend to the execution of certain kinds of work in the service of public administration or church bodies.

However, after the coup d'etat of August 1953 all more or less progressive legislation came to an abrupt end. Yet the government was unable to ignore the grim state of affairs completely. Special resolutions were passed restricting landowners' rights, and the sale of Shah and public land to peasants continued on a larger scale.

The law of 1955, designed to promote the development of public services and amenities and increase cultivators' shares in the harvest, obliged the landowners, who exacted more than 50 per cent of the harvest by renting their irrigated land, to concede an additional 10 per cent to the sharecroppers. Meanwhile they were now made to hand over 10 per cent of the harvest in the form of a land tax and a further 10 per cent on improvements in the villages. Another law passed in 1959 reduced this last figure to five per cent.* In accordance with this law special boards were set up in most Iranian villages. These boards are financed on the

strength of the above-mentioned landowners' share of the harvest.

The law of 1955 gave the district boards the right to drive out from the villages any persons convicted of "breaches of the peace" whenever the landowners saw fit.* A law passed in 1957 providing for the observance of public security led to the setting up in each district of so-called public security commissions to investigate cases of " incitement to breaches of the peace in towns and villages". These commissions had the right to drive out of the villages any peasants whom the landowners chose not to tolerate.

In every village where land was put up for sale it was bought up by a small section of the peasants while the majority was left with no land. After sales of Shah and state lands approximately 25 per cent of Iran's land under cultivation was transferred to the upper stratum of the peasants. In order to support the prosperous peasants whose position was much stronger after their purchases of Shah and state lands a special credit fund and special banks were set up. The social and political motive behind the sale of these Shah and state lands was to create and consolidate a stratum of prosperous peasants in the village so as to ensure the regime of reliable social support. Ruling circles endeavoured in this way to split the ranks of the Iranian peasantry setting one section against the other.

Apart from these basic contradictions between the peasant masses as a whole and the class of landowners in rural Iran, two new contradictions soon emerged: between agricultural labourers, landless peasants and the prosperous upper echelons of the peasantry, and secondly, that between the stratum of prosperous peasants and the state (in connection with the question as to the size of holdings and the periods during which compensation payments could be paid).

In addition to the adoption of the laws outlined above which introduced changes to rights of land-tenure, additional laws providing for restrictions applicable to large landed estates were also drawn up. In December 1959 a draft law calling for the stipulation of a maximum size for holdings (600 hectares for dry-farming land and 300 hectares for

Keikhan, July 4, 1956.

Otage Bazergani, No. 16, 1955, pp. 10-16.

24»

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irrigated land) was approved by the mejlis. In some parts of the country landowners started to sell their land surpluses. This meant that under the influence of the struggle waged by the peasant masses after 1953 the ruling circles in Iran started introducing reforms "from above" so as to reinforce their social support in the villages.

Pakistan. Ceylon (Sri Lanka): Agrarian legislation introduced in Pakistan was too half-hearted to be really effective. The agrarian laws introduced in that country, which had much in common with the Indian laws, got no further than the paper they were written on. In East Pakistan, for example (now the People's Republic of Bangladesh), where the new agrarian law provided for alienation of zamindar property in return for compensation payments, by 1960 only three per cent of the lands had been bought up. The granting to peasants of the right to become owners of the holdings they had been renting provided for in this law was only put into practice in two districts. The first agrarian laws, introduced in West Pakistan in 1950, entitled tenants with hereditary rights of tenure to buy the holdings they had been renting. However, as late as 1959, these laws had only been put into practice in the North-West Frontier Province (where approximately 242 thousand tenants with hereditary rights purchased their holdings).* Such tenants only accounted for a small part of the province's total peasant population: they worked 10 per cent of the total arable land.

This meant that conditions had only improved for a small group of tenant-farmers and mainly in a legal respect. There was no reduction in tax levels as compared with former rent levels.

In 1959 a new agrarian law was passed in West Pakistan which stipulated a ``ceiling'' for private land-holdings, much higher than that used in India. As a result it affected landed estates over 500 acres which accounted for only 15.4 per cent of West Pakistan's farm land.

The section of the peasantry that benefited from this reform was extremely small---145,825 tenant-farmers from a total of 1,936,081, or some eight per cent. Only prospe-

rous peasants were in a position to pay the high compensation money involved.

Compulsory requisitions from the peasants that went into the landowners' pockets were officially prohibited but actually only the prosperous peasants were in a position to resist such practices for refusals to comply with landowner's demands resulted in expensive and lengthy legal proceedings regarding the lawfulness or unlawfulness of requisitions imposed upon the peasants. The economic advantages which the peasant might gain by having such requisitions banned were more likely than not to be cancelled out by increases in rates of taxation.

In 1949 the water tax was raised by 40 per cent; in 1959 the rates for water and land taxes rose by 25 per cent, while between 1948 and 1959 indirect taxation went up eight times.*

The agrarian laws introduced in Pakistan made no provision for redistributing land in the interests of the peasants. In this sense they differed from the laws passed in India. Poor peasants constituted close on 80 per cent of the peasantry in Pakistan. According to figures relating to the period prior to the reform of 1959, only 15 per cent of the land (or 7,400 thousand acres) was taken up with holdings of under five acres, while the powerful landowners (who made up only 0.12 per cent of those in possession of their own land) with estates of over 500 acres accounted for 1,500 thousand acres of land.

Agrarian legislation in Pakistan imposed far fewer restrictions on landownership than the laws passed in India. The legislation only served to weaken the influence of the most privileged section of the feudal landowners and improve conditions only for the prosperous peasants, and even that less so than in India. The position of the mass of the peasants remained virtually unchanged not only from an economic but also from a legal point of view.

In the first years after the 1947 division, the food position in Pakistan was better than in India and the peasants were able to profit to some extent from the favourable

* S. M. Akhtar, The Economy of Pakistan, Moscow, 1957, p. 126 (in Russian).

* Source: Collection of Articles entitled Agrarian Relations in the Countries of the East, Moscow, 1958, pp. 206-07 (in Russian).

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market situation. The absolute size of agricultural debt decreased slightly. In Punjab, for example, the Council for Economic Surveys estimated the agricultural debt at 280 million rupees at the beginning of the 1950s, while before the creation of Pakistan this debt in the undivided Punjab was in excess of 1,000 million rupees. Since many Indian moneylenders emigrated to India a virtual cancellation of debts dating back to the colonial period took place.

Later however the food situation in Pakistan deteriorated: rises in food prices went hand in hand with a decline in prices for agricultural raw materials and higher prices for manufactured goods, all of which had a negative influence on the position of the peasantry. The peasants' debts to the moneylenders started to grow again. The main sources of credit for those directly engaged in cultivation were the landowners and prosperous peasants. The prosperous peasants were soon in a position to gain far-reaching control over the buying up of peasant produce. So-called limited land pledges became widespread. The prosperous peasants would grant subsidies in kind at the periods of the most acute food shortages when food prices were at their highest. Such debts were calculated in money terms but had to be returned in kind at the period when prices for agricultural raw materials were at their lowest immediately after the harvest. These limited land pledges enabled creditors for a certain sum to take over virtually complete control of the holdings worked and sown by their debtors until after the harvests had been gathered in. This practice served to consolidate the prosperous peasant's position as middleman between producer and the market. Agricultural co-operatives at this period were also coming to play a growing role in providing credit for the peasants, although in absolute terms their role was not yet really significant.

However the co-operative movement in Pakistan grew at a slower pace than its Indian counterpart. In 1955 cooperatives supplied credit for 12 per cent of Pakistan's rural population. After the Agricultural Development Corporation (1952) and the Agricultural Bank (1957) were set up their activity expanded somewhat. Between 1953 and 1957 the Corporation issued 3,974 subsidy checks of a total value of 15,224,035 rupees: in West Pakistan most of these subsi-

dies went to rural co-operatives and in East Pakistan to the owners of small holdings. The concentration of trade and subsidy capital functions in the hands of the upper echelons of the peasantry and the growing role of the co-operatives in providing credit for this sector served to strengthen its position in the Pakistan countryside.

Between 1947 and the early 1960s capitalist accumulation and the development of capitalist relations proceeded at a much more rapid pace than had been the case during the colonial period. Capitalist enterprise was coming to predominate in both large-scale and peasant farming. Stratification of the peasantry accelerated as the toiling peasants were brought to ruin and were being proletarianised.

In this connection it should be pointed out that the material position of the agricultural labourers had not improved either. According to figures provided by the International Labour Organisation for 1953 no rises in wages had taken place in Pakistan and as before their wages were insufficient to provide these labourers with even the bare minimum.* According to figures put out by official Pakistan sources the position did not improve at all between 1953 and the early 1960s.

In Pakistan according to the 1951 census there were 1,650 thousand landless agricultural labourers and 659 thousand tenant-farmers who at the same time worked as hired labourers: these two groups together accounted for some 15 per cent of the rural population. The percentage of agricultural labourers among the Indian peasantry was considerably higher: the average for the country as a whole was over 40 per cent and in the south it was sometimes as high as 50 per cent.

In Pakistan where relative rural over-population was on the increase another urgent task was to put an end to underemployment or unemployment: this was rural Pakistan's social problem most overdue for a solution, a problem that might well give rise to major class conflict. Between 1950 and 1953 the number of poor and totally unemployed was over a million. In East Pakistan in 1953, according to press estimates, about 15 per cent of the whole rural population

* See Russell Andrus and Azizali Mohammed, The Economy of Pakistan, Stanford, California, 1958, pp. 437-38.

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was virtually unemployed and thus obliged to go and seek work in the towns. Official figures show that after 1953 underemployment and unemployment assumed still more catastrophic proportions. Almost all the peasants with plots of under five acres depended on seasonal earnings and this meant the overwhelming majority of the country's peasantry.

Changes in the position of the various groups of peasants affected the character of the peasant movement and the political climate in the countryside. Capitalist development and the agrarian reforms brought about certain changes in the social basis of the mass peasant movement. Once the agrarian laws had been passed the prosperous stratum of the peasantry and more firmly established middle peasants in areas dominated by zamindars started gradually having less and less to do with the united anti-feudal peasant movement. The mass peasant movement went into decline and the peasant organisations (Kisan Sabha in East Pakistan and Kisan Jirga and other organisations in West Pakistan) grew much weaker. Prior to 1957 there had not been any united peasant organisation for the whole of Pakistan. The tenantfarmers' and agricultural labourers' dependence on the landowners, the weakness of the peasant organisations made it almost impossible for these two groups to make use of the democratic rights they had formally been granted (for example, the right to vote in elections to organs of local and central government).

At the same time as the prosperous peasants gained more and more economic power they naturally grew anxious to play a more significant role in the political life of the villages and that of the country as a whole. The achievements made in expanding Pakistan's network of primary and elementary schools in the villages after independence were of particularly strong importance among the families of the prosperous peasants. Education was now accessible to more and more of the prosperous peasants and this in its turn led to an increase in their political activity.

In so far as the question of transferring land to the peasants was for all practical purposes still unsolved and many of the new laws published had not been put into effect, signs of the peasant movement's vitality came more and more to the fore.

The mounting activity of the peasant movement was one of the factors which led the more far-sighted representatives of the landowning class and the powerful bourgeoisie to seek a new source of social support in rural Pakistan so as to safeguard their power. To this end the agrarian reform of 1959 was introduced after a military dictatorship had been set up.

It should be remembered that as the prosperous peasantry gained more influence so their interests started to clash more and more with those of the landowning class. On the one hand, they were anxious to achieve the abolition of privileged rights for the powerful landowners, and on the other, these peasants were now more interested in owning land they did not work themselves, instead frequently employing methods of semi-feudal exploitation. However, the prosperous peasants in some areas of Pakistan opposed on the whole the feudal landowners side by side with all the toiling peasants.

The main demands put forward by the peasant movement in Pakistan were as follows: abolition of large landed estates, reduction of taxes and rents, cancellation of debts to moneylenders, improved purchasing prices and measures to hold in check the capitalist and trading monopolies. Tenant-farmers devoid of any rights at all were the most active members of the peasant movement. The agricultural labourers of Pakistan were only involved in the mass movement to a very small extent.

In Ceylon the agrarian question possessed a number of features distinguishing it from those in India and Pakistan: the most important of these was the large proportion of land occupied by plantations (37 per cent of all land under cultivation) and the wider use of hired labour this involved. After independence the percentage of agricultural labourers among the rural population rose from 35 to 44 per cent. This meant that the largest section of the peasant poor in Ceylon consisted not of owners and tenants of small holdings as in India and Pakistan but of landless agricultural labourers. Thirty-three per cent of peasant families consisted of poor peasant farmers.

Agrarian legislation in Ceylon did not provide for radical redistribution of land in the interests of the peasants. The

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law of 1958 applicable to land used for rice-growing restricted landowners' rights to evict tenants and introduced a maximum rent of a quarter of the harvest or 15 bushels of rice per acre. This law also prohibited the exaction of feudal requisitions. Some tenant-farmers were granted hereditary rights of tenure. Special committees to supervise land cultivation were set up in villages and land not previously used for purposes of cultivation was made over to these committees.

Thus the Ceylonese agrarian legislation provided for improvements in the economic and legal position of above all the prosperous and middle strata of the peasantry. This legislation was of a more limited nature than the Indian equivalent in that it did not grant the richer tenant-farmers the opportunity to become owners of their holdings even in return for compensation payments. Meanwhile the position of the agricultural labourers in Ceylon remained virtually unchanged.

All these details regarding the position of the rural population in Pakistan and Ceylon make it clear that the changes which took place after these two states had gained their independence led to an expansion of capitalist enterprise in agriculture. In the main they affected the landowners whose feudal powers were weakened and the prosperous strata of the peasantry whose economic position grew undeniably stronger. A certain improvement in the legal position of the peasants was effected and the tenant-farmers became less dependent on the powerful landowners. The material position of the toiling peasantry did not improve or improved only negligibly, and in certain specific regions. The position of agricultural labourers remained unchanged. The political rights of the peasants were extended, in particular those of the prosperous peasants.

Southeast Asia: Changes have also been taking place in the agrarian situation and the position of the peasants in the countries of Southeast Asia. Before the Revolutionary Council came to power in Burma in 1962 existing agrarian legislation included laws regulating rents, leasing rights and nationalisation. The rent laws included a fixed maximum for land leased out for purposes of rice-growing, which was equivalent to roughly 25 per cent of the rents exacted

for such land in colonial Burma, and more or less the same as the land tax exacted for such land. The laws concerning land-tenure stipulated that all questions connected with leasing out land should be decided not by the landowners as had been the case in the past but by rural committees consisting of representatives from the local authorities, peasants and landowners leasing out land. The law guaranteed the right to work the rented holdings provided that tenants paid their fixed rent regularly, paid up their outstanding debts for various types of agricultural subsidies and worked their land themselves.

Land-tenure legislation in independent Burma undermined the position of the landowners and to a certain extent improved conditions for the peasants. The law of 1953 providing for nationalisation of the land was of crucial importance for Burmese agrarian legislation. It provided for the alienation of land in return for compensation from powerful landowners, whose holdings exceeded 50 acres: in this way 6,200,000 acres of a total area of 19,900,000 acres under cultivation were nationalised. The land was made over to the state and then transferred to landless peasants and those with small holdings in such a way as to ensure average holdings of ten acres per peasant family in Lower Burma and seven acres per family in Upper Burma. The state paid out compensation to the moneylenders and landowners whose property had been nationalised on the following scale: 12 times the land tax for the first hundred acres, 11 times the land tax for the next hundred acres and so on in diminishing progression. In 1958 the total compensation payments for 6,200,000 acres came to 136 million dja, or in other words, approximately 22 dja per acre, which is not a particularly high rate of compensation. Yet the financial straits of the government made it difficult to pay out even this sum to the landowners: approximately four-fifths of the compensation payments were paid out in the form of bonds cashable after a period of fifteen years. Over that period bond-- holders were to receive an income of three per cent of the value of their bonds every year.

In Burma, between 1953 and 1958, 3,357,000 acres of the 6,200,000 liable to confiscation were taken over bv the

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state. Of this total 1,456,000 acres were redistributed among 191,000 cultivators, mainly tenant-farmers from the ranks of the landless agricultural workers and the peasants with very small holdings. This meant that at the time of the 1962 coup 54 per cent of this land had been taken over by the state and only 23 per cent of the acreage set aside for redistribution among the peasants had actually been redistributed.

i

This law substantially restricted scope for large-scale landownership. It was the landowners and prosperous peasants then caught up in the transition to capitalist patterns of agriculture who benefited most from its implementation, although some sectors of the toiling peasantry also achieved certain improvements in their conditions. The implementation of this agrarian legislation was, to a certain extent, detrimental to the interests of the powerful feudal landowners and the moneylenders. Certain changes were also effected in the field of agricultural credit. A law providing for the alleviation of peasants' debts to the moneylenders cancelled all debts incurred prior to October 1, 1946. This and other laws served to restrict the scope for traditional moneylending in the Burmese countryside. Rural banks that received credit from the state at an annual rate of interest of six per cent provided subsidies for the peasants at an annual rate of interest of 12 per cent which was several times lower than the rate of interest demanded by the moneylenders. The credits granted peasants by the rural banks and co-operatives were of a short-term variety and were mainly used for purposes of consumption. Yet the peasant farms were desperately in need of substantial long-term credit. For this reason state and co-operative subsidies did not make possible any marked improvements in the productive forces of the peasant economy. The total credits granted peasants each year came to an average of between 48 and 50 million dja, in other words, they only satisfied between eight and ten per cent of the demand.

When considering the question of agrarian reforms in Burma prior to 1962 it is important to remember that in this country as opposed to the other states of the East an insurrection involving large sections of the peasantry

went on over a long period. This inevitably resulted in more radical agrarian legislation being introduced by the ruling circles of this particular country.

In Indonesia no major changes had been made in patterns of landownership. As a result of long years of colonial-cum-feudal exploitation of the peasantry prior to independence most of them had been deprived of land. A certain sector of the peasantry had been turned into poor peasants desperately short of land, impoverished coolies. According to official figures for 1940 seventy per cent of cultivators in Java were working holdings of a third of a hectare and under. Despite the fact that under the Japanese occupation and during the initial period of the national revolution the peasants had succeeded in unofficially taking over part of the lands belonging to landowners and planters, the feudal landowning class and foreign landowners (both individuals and companies) were able to retain most of their former influence in the country's agriculture. Approximately three-quarters of the land under cultivation in Indonesia was still in the hands of these two groups in 1960, while the position of the bulk of the peasantry was virtually the same as before.

In Indonesia there still existed archaic forms of rent in kind and share-cropping. Share-croppers were obliged to hand over between 50 and 80 per cent of their harvests to the big landowners. A particularly hard lot was that of the peasants working land that belonged to the regents. Various kinds of feudal obligations were applied outside the regencies as well, in particular in those regions where big landowners predominated (West Java, North Sumatra, South Sulawesi, Bali, Lombok, etc.). Traders and moneylenders exacted enormous interest (200-300 per cent) for the subsidies they made available to the peasants. The vast majority of the peasants were embroiled in debts they had little prospect of paying off.

Agricultural production of a number of crops had not attained the pre-war level: rice yields had dropped from 2,150 kilograms (1930) to 1,540 kilograms (1959). Indonesia had to import a considerable proportion of her foodstuffs.

In its struggle against the landowners and feudal rulers the peasantry achieved some success. Under pressure from

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the peasant movement Ali Sastroamijoyo's government passed a decree in July 1954 prohibiting the landowners from evicting peasants from the land they cultivated. The regency of Surdantra was abolished and the regency of Djokjakarta was divided up into autonomous regions and democratic elective councils were set up in the villages. The regents were stripped of the right to exact rent from the peasants for use of their land and to demand that they carry out feudal obligations or pay taxes, etc. The Indonesian regents only retained jurisdiction over the lands immediately contiguous to their palaces and land not cultivated by peasants. Within the various regencies another oppressive rent practice was abolished as well, namely so-called conversions. In some districts of Sulawesi peasants seized land belonging to feudal rulers and divided it up amongst themselves. Similar redivision of land took place in some regions of Flores, Bali and elsewhere.

The peasants started actively to oppose the obsolete system of rural administration based on laws introduced under foreign rule, and also the compulsory fulfilment of various obligations that could be traced back to the feudal

The ruling circles planned to implement an agrarian reform on the following lines:

a) to prepare large areas of virgin land for cultivation and resettle some of the peasants in sparsely populated regions; in the process of granting land to peasants to stipulate a maximum and minimum size for land-holdings so as to put a stop to excessive fragmentation of land-holdings, on the one hand, and prevent excessive concentration of land and the

emergence of new rich landowners, on the other;

b) to introduce new agrarian legislation to do away with colonial patterns of landownership and land-tenure;

c) to streamline the exploitation of land resources throughout the country in accordance with the republic's development plans.

This plan for agrarian reform was not designed to do away with the large landed estates, but merely the rights of foreign individuals or companies to own land.

The main distinctive features of the agrarian-peasant question in the non-socialist economically weak countries of Asia were as follows: first, the local bourgeoisie in those countries where it assumed power after the Second World War was able to count on the peasants' support, second, it was still in a position to hold the bulk of the peasants under its influence, and third, it succeeded in averting any radical agrarian revolution from ``below'' or at least postpone such a revolution, although in some countries this involved suppression of the peasant movement by force of arms. In these countries the peasantry was not in a position to abolish the landowning class as such. It was not strong enough and was not led by the working class. At the same time the bourgeoisie and other ruling groups were no longer in a position to retain and consolidate their domination without introducing compromise agrarian reforms, bourgeois in their objectives, anti-feudal in their economic implications and anti-peasant in their class methods, reforms which served to do away with peasant unity and intensify the natural process of stratification within that class.

era.

The government attempted to adopt various measures designed to improve the situation in agriculture. It was with this end in view that government investment in agriculture was increased: such investment accounted for 7,500 million rupees (of a total of 30,000 million invested) in the budget for the five-year plan (1956-1960). However, this plan like many subsequent ones was not carried out. A number of irrigation and land improvement schemes were drawn up. Measures were also introduced to cancel at least part of the peasants' debts to moneylenders and ``freeze'' peasants' debts to state finance organisations. Yet most of these measures because of their half-heartedness proved ineffective. A State Credit Bank to provide additional resources for the peasants was set up: the subsidies were granted at preferential rates. According to another government resolution, a special committee was set up to draft a law on landownership. The basis of the new law was to be the stipulation of two hectares as the minimum size for peasant land-holdings.

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385

the industrial and agricultural proletariat. This bourgeoisie was also well aware of the mounting tide of peasant discontent, the increasingly revolutionary mood of the peasants since the Second World War and the dangers inherent in an alliance between the peasantry and the proletariat. When the ruling circles in the Asian countries drew up their land policies they based their thinking on the consideration that either they would succeed in retaining their influence over the peasantry and hence their power, or they would lose that influence and thus be unable to keep their new-found power. The ruling bourgeoisie was usually obliged to rely on support from the landowners. This coalition was of course not prepared to introduce any radical redistribution of land in the interests of the peasants, hoping to be able to pacify the peasants with measures of secondary significance: in this way the national bourgeoisie attempted to a certain extent to preserve intact the landowning class as its ally in face of the growing radicalism of the peasant masses. The national bourgeoisie does not wish and is indeed unable to confront the peasantry face to face on its own. It is well aware that without the help of the landowners and the growing sector of rich peasants it would be unable to keep the tens and hundreds of millions of peasants under control. While the national bourgeoisie has need of the landowner as an ally, at the same time the landowner needs the national bourgeoisie. This situation explains why after the first round of the reforms in many countries of Asia and Africa a political coalition of these two groups directed against the peasantry and the working class took shape.

This is why the national bourgeoisie is always anxious to carry out such land reforms which are intended not to do away with the landowning class as such, but rather to consolidate its position. At the same time these reforms serve to modernise the economic role of the landowner in the country and accelerate his transformation into capitalist landowner. Those responsible for new legislation in Asia presume that this type of legislation will allow them to do away with the typical feudal traits of the old-style landowner, build up a firmly established stratum of peasant entrepreneurs and in this way keep the temperature of the villages low.

The objective need for the agrarian reforms introduced in the non-socialist countries of Asia should be viewed in conjunction with the land question and socialist restructuring of rural life in the people's democracies of that continent, which together possess a population of over 800 million. When charting its political course in respect of the peasantry the national bourgeoisie in the newly independent Asian states was obliged to take into account the experience in solving the agrarian problem already amassed in the socialist countries of Asia. It is impossible for the ruling circles in the non-socialist countries not to introduce elementary agrarian reforms, not only in view of internal factors of profound importance resulting from the processes of economic development at work in rural areas and the class struggle of the peasantry against the landowners, but also in view of the fact that large numbers of peasants in Asia, Africa and Latin America are informed as to the just solutions for the land question effected in the socialist countries of Asia. This is recognised quite clearly by the ruling circles of even those countries where cliques are in power which are hand in glove with the imperialist military-political blocs. The inconsistent, half-hearted agrarian reforms introduced in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, South Vietnam, the Philippines and South Korea after the war also testify to the fact that not in a single Asian country have the ruling classes been able to avoid making at least partial changes in the agricultural system.

In almost all the non-socialist countries of Asia some kind of agrarian reforms had been introduced by the beginning of the sixties. Despite the differences in scale and pace the social or class aims of these reforms were the same: they were designed to steer agricultural development onto a capitalist path. While what the peasants wanted were radical agrarian reforms that would do away with the large landed estates once and for all, the half-hearted reforms that actually were introduced were of benefit above all to the bourgeoisie, to the ruling classes in those Asian countries consolidating their position and promoting capitalist development. In so far as the national bourgeoisie in those countries was weak, when it came to agrarian policy it was obliged to take into account the growing numbers and influence of

25---919

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In most of the countries under consideration agrarian reforms restrict, and only in some do they do away with large-scale estates of the privileged parasitic landowners and only partly affect moneylending practices. They do not solve the land question in the interests of the peasants seeing that they do not do away with the landowners as a class, nor transfer all the land to the immediate producers, which would satisfy the desperate land hunger of those peasants with no or blatantly insufficient land. Meanwhile some of the landowners evolve from feudal into bourgeois landowners after embarking on capitalist farming.

The reforms introduced up until the late fifties were, as a rule, designed to accomplish the following goals:

a) to intensify the development of productive forces in agriculture on a commodity-capitalist basis;

b) to redistribute---with compensation---a fairly considerable section of state land and landowners' surpluses

in the interests of the peasants so as to consolidate the position of the prosperous stratum of the rural population and win the support of the middle peasants for the national bourgeoisie;

c) to curtail and regulate rents to a certain extent;

d) to wipe out feudal obligations and requisitions;

e) to clamp down on foreign ownership of land;

f) to expand state agricultural credit facilities;

g) to encourage and promote co-operation in agriculture; h) to make agriculture more competitive on the world

market;

i) to set up large and medium-scale private farms run on capitalist lines.

Agrarian reforms led to an increase in the area of peasant holdings, in the number of peasants owning the land they worked and improved their legal rights. They did away with the most despicable forms of feudal obligations and requisitions. Terms of agricultural credit and land rents were made lighter. All types of so-called "servicing co-operatives" catering to the needs of tens of millions of prosperous and middle farmers spread rapidly. These were soon infiltrated by capitalist elements who came to dominate them. Mean_r while the overall area of land actually worked by the peasants in a number of countries remained the same as before,

in others it showed only a negligible increase and in still others it even shrank as a result of the fact that some of the landowners, traders and moneylenders started running their own farms and then proceeded to expand these farms to a size comparable with the old-style large and medium-scale holdings adding land formerly rented out to tenant-farmers. In connection with the large increase in the population that was not accompanied by a corresponding rise in the area of farming land and industrial expansion the supply of land per capita in the main countries of Asia decreased. Given that the prosperous sections of the peasantry together with the capitalist landowners added considerably to their landholdings during this period it is quite obvious that the land hunger experienced by the main mass of the peasants had yet to be satisfied. Nor did the measures adopted to curtail moneylending practices free the peasants from that form of exploitation either. The considerably expanded state and co-operative credit facilities for the peasants still remained inadequate. Moreover, such credit was mainly accessible to only the prosperous and middle sections of the peasantry, for as a rule land, or in some cases, other forms of security had to be guaranteed. The lower strata of the peasantry were virtually unable to make use of such credit facilities.

The bulk of the rural population---the peasant poor and the agricultural labourers---had no prospects of coming to own the land they worked, nor did these groups derive any appreciable material benefit from the land reforms. Some advantage from the reforms was reaped by that section of the peasantry that was in a position to buy rights to landownership. In some countries (India, Burma) this was a fairly large section of the peasantry. Compensation payments and increased rates of indirect taxation devoured smaller sums of the peasant farmer's income than the tenant-farmer had previously had to pay the landowner in rent.

The landowners that went in for more modern methods, the prosperous upper stratum of the peasantry and some of the more well-to-do middle peasants enjoyed the most enviable position in the new conditions. However, the advantages gleaned by the prosperous peasants did not satisfy them fully. These sections of the rural population might well still be found participating in the common peasant struggle

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aimed at doing away with feudal practices, in particular, the rights and privileges enjoyed by the old-style big landowner, wherever such patterns of landownership still existed in lesser (Turkey, India, Sri Lanka) or greater (Iran, Indonesia and the Arab countries for example) measure. Yet in a number of countries and regions by the end of the fifties the prosperous peasants had in practice ceased to associate themselves with the peasant movement. This new development resulted from the introduction of the new reforms that served to accelerate the split in the ranks of the peasantry.

Semi-feudal exploitation, especially in the form of sharecropping, was still to be found throughout enormous stretches of territory in the Asian countries, although in a number of countries (Turkey, India) the share-cropper devoid of any rights had ceased to be the central figure of the rural community as had been the case fifteen to twenty-five years earlier. Although special legislation had been introduced to curtail their activities, moneylenders still continued to play a significant role in village life. Those successful in accumulating money capital in rural conditions tended more and more to turn their attention to industry, particularly the branches associated with the processing of agricultural produce and raw materials. The development of capitalist agriculture which accelerated after the Second World War a0d the post-war agrarian reforms both served to intensify and deepen the process of class stratification at work within the peasantry. This meant that in a number of countries (such as India, Burma, Syria, Turkey) or in certain major regions of this or that particular country, prosperous sections of the peasantry started to compromise with landowner elements.

The problem of peasant underemployment still remained acute in view of the dire shortage of land. A partial transition to mechanised methods on the farms of the large and medium-scale entrepreneurs, which made possible an increase in organic capital, led to still further under- and unemployment. In many places, where large-scale farms run by capitalists or former landowners were on the increase, peasants were being driven off the land (Turkey, Iran, India, Pakistan). The exodus of the rural population, in par-

ticular the younger generation, to the towns was on the increase.

The accelerated development of commodity-money and capitalist relations in rural areas has led to a tremendous upheaval in established patterns of social relations. This process, which brings considerable hardship to the popular masses, affects tens and hundreds of millions of peasants. The war and the post-war national liberation movement in Asia shifted tremendous masses of the rural population from place to place. Military and social upheavals disrupted former patterns of day-to-day life. In a number of countries the peasants, on a much larger scale than ever before, were compelled to sell not only their produce but also their labour power and in this way seek new means of livelihood. Millions of peasants were discontented and ready to cause disturbances at any moment. Their interests varied widely; they were contradictory and at times ill-defined. Among a very small section of the progressive peasantry socialist leanings were to be observed. The example of the restructuring of the villages in the people's democracies of Asia was starting to have an effect. Yet at the same time religious ideas still had a strong hold over the peasants---illusions of brotherhood, equality and justice and Utopian concepts of the society of the future. Bourgeois nationalism was able to channel these patriarchal beliefs in a direction of which it could make good advantage: Buddhist, Hindu and Moslem ideas all served to keep alive illusions of a class peace and foster among the peasants awareness of the need to wait patiently for a just solution of the land problem on the basis of fair reforms and the superfluity of getting rid of the landowners and moneylenders.

However, in the majority of Asian countries it was most difficult for the ruling bourgeois or landowner party to put forward the idea of capitalist development as a slogan aimed at winning the trust and support of the masses, and, in particular, of the millions of working peasants. This led ruling circles even in the countries developing along capitalist lines to put forward vague projects for the construction of some sort of socialist society (often presented on a co-operative basis) as far back as the early sixties. An active organisational and ideological struggle to win the peasants over to

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their side was under way: the national bourgeoisie was seriously afraid of losing its influence over the working peasants so dissatisfied with the turn things were taking in rural development. It was striving to retain their support by introducing various agrarian reforms and still more so by keeping alive the illusions fanned by these reforms and through social demagogy.

The progressive anti-imperialist potential of the national bourgeoisie has not yet been exhausted. The sector of the national bourgeoisie, which is not collaborating with imperialist circles, is "objectively interested in carrying out the basic tasks of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolution".* The national bourgeoisie in the majority of Asian countries continues to play a progressive role in the struggle against colonialism, in the struggle for political and economic independence and for the consolidation of their countries' sovereignty, for peace and disarmament. The polarisation of social forces in these countries continues unabated; the contradictions between them grow deeper and the struggle between them more fierce. In these conditions the bourgeoisie in a number of independent Asian countries shows tendencies to collaborate with the imperialists and feudal rulers and in some of these countries the ruling circles maintain perfectly open political and military ties with aggressive imperialist blocs. The internal policy pursued in these countries is for the most part reactionary while their foreign policy is geared to the task of upholding the military-political system of the aggressive blocs. A priority task in such countries is suppression of the masses' struggle against the forces of colonialism and the military-police dictatorship of the ruling classes; "dictatorial methods of rule are combined with a fiction of parliamentarism devoid of democratic content and reduced to a pure formality. Many democratic organisations are outlawed and are compelled to go underground; thousands of fighters for the cause of the working class and for peace have been thrown into prison."*""

The working masses of town and country are demanding

more radical domestic reforms that will really improve their conditions. The contradictory process of capitalist development, growing speculation, the promotion of the big industrial and trading bourgeoisie, corruption in the civil service, not to mention the social evils of mass pauperisation, hopeless poverty and hunger and chronic unemployment, bring the masses nothing but disillusionment, making them indignant opponents of bourgeois rule. The national bourgeoisie endeavours to keep alive its prestige as a champion of national independence and thus to retain the masses' support. Its reactionary wing attempts "to pass its selfish narrowclass interests for those of the entire nation"/^^1^^" However, the disillusionment of the masses grows apace. In some countries more or less clearly defined class divisions have emerged but in others this process is by no means complete. A solution for the land problem in all the non-socialist countries of Asia has become the most burning political and social issue. "Without deep-going agrarian transformations it is impossible to solve the food problem and to do away with all vestiges of medieval practices fettering the development of the productive forces in agriculture and industry."**

Past experience has shown the peoples of Asia that only an alliance of the working class and the peasantry can provide that vital force capable of consolidating national independence, implementing democratic reforms and promoting social progress for the people as a whole. "This alliance is called upon to serve as a basis for a broad national front. The participation of the national bourgeoisie in the liberation struggle in no small measure depends on the strength of this front."***

The level of class consciousness among the peasants varies considerably not merely from country to country but also within one and the same country, or even region, where different social strata and groups are to be found. To a considerable extent this depends on the political maturity, activity and degree of influence of the Marxist-Leninist parties. The main task before them is to win over the peasant masses

* Policy Documents of the Struggle for Peace, Democracy and Socialism, Moscow, 1961, p. 66 (in Russian). ** Ibid., p. 71.

* Ibid., p. 68. ** Ibid., p. 66. *** Ibid.

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to the side of the working class; this achieved, the main condition for the formation of an independent national-- democratic state will be at hand. At the beginning of the 1960s national democracy was rapidly taking root in a number of countries of the Middle East and Asia. The national democrats were striving to assume power, to put an end to the national bourgeoisie's monopoly of power and were pressing for a new course of internal and foreign policy in Egypt, Syria and Algeria involving profound social change. In Burma as well the national democrats at that time were about to assume power.

The very fact that the agrarian question still requires to be solved serves to make the national democrats' policy more radical.

When studying the agrarian structure of the non-socialist countries of the East it is important to remember that a significant role in the agriculture of these countries is still played by the foreign sector, consisting mainly of plantations. In certain countries (India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Tunisia and Morocco, for instance) this sector is of key importance with regard to the production of tea, rubber, coffee, copra, citrus fruits, sugar-cane and spices. The presence of foreign-owned estates serves to foster reactionary class and political relations. Since the plantations are directly linked up with the monopolies of the world capitalist market, their foreign owners actively oppose any agrarian reform, the nationalisation of land and the stipulation of maximum norms for the size of land-holdings, trying to obtain for themselves the while special rights of landownership and land-tenure. The foreign capitalist investing in plantation farming always comes out in favour of the harshest possible exploitation of the coolies and peasants from the local neighbourhood. The foreign sector in the agriculture of the non-socialist countries of the East usually indulges in such practice as all-out plunder of soils, unabashed exploitation of land and water resources, efforts to avoid investing capital in the renewing of plantations, the entering of enormous profits in reserve funds, the export of profits and superprofits abroad, the appropriation of differential rent. No serious agrarian reform could leave untouched the rights of landownership and land-tenure enjoyed

by these foreign planters. In certain countries of Asia (Sri Lanka and Indonesia, for example) steps have been taken to limit or partially liquidate the foreign sector in agriculture and transfer plantations to the state or co-- operatives; however, these measures, despite their progressive character, do not provide any really satisfactory or final solution to the problem. In the majority of Asian countries the national bourgeoisie after assuming power demonstrated its intrinsic insincerity by failing to nationalise foreign-owned plantations and estates. Future agrarian reforms to be introduced under pressure from the peasantry, agricultural proletariat and millions of coolies will undoubtedly put an end to foreign capitalist sector in agriculture and result in a transfer of plantations to the local population.

As capitalist development in agriculture accelerates, so the struggle of the most revolutionary sections of the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat against capitalist and semifeudal exploitation and for real change in the agrarian system on democratic principles goes from strength to strength. Successful accomplishment of the main strategic task---the welding of a firm alliance of progressive forces with the peasantry and the gradual freeing of the latter from the influence of the bourgeoisie and landowners--- constitutes, as noted in the Statement issued at the end of the Meeting of Representatives of Communist and Workers' Parties in 1960, the vital condition for the transition of the predominantly anti-imperialist national liberation movement to a higher stage---the struggle for the formation of an independent national-democratic state, opening the way to a transition to non-capitalist development.

When analysing the socio-economic processes now at work in the agrarian structure of the non-socialist countries of the East, it would be imprudent to apply theoretical assumptions appropriate to any specific country or historical epoch to other countries or historical epochs.

Lenin pointed out the possibility of two paths of capitalist development (``American'' and ``Junker'' or ``peasant'' and ``landowner'') in agriculture in Russia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. At the

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same time he went all out to press for a radical solution of the agrarian question in the interests of the peasants, and them alone, through complete elimination of landed estates. Back in those days Lenin noted that not one of these paths of capitalist development in Russian agriculture was to be found in a pure form. Both types of agrarian evolution were clearly proceeding side by side. Lenin also pointed out that an endless variety of combinations of elements peculiar to this or that type of capitalist evolution in agriculture was possible.

When considering agrarian reform and paths of capitalist development in agriculture in the non-socialist countries of modern Africa and Asia, it would be wrong to describe the bourgeois agrarian reforms effected there as exclusively meeting the interests of the landowners, i.e., as ``Junker'' reforms.

Lenin held that the economic foundation of the Russian agrarian revolution opened up two basic alternatives for future development: either the old patterns of landownership closely bound by serf traditions would continue, slowly evolving in the direction of capitalist Junker-type, agriculture, or this system of landownership together with all survivals of serfdom, large landed estates above all, would be ousted in the course of revolution.

The ``Junker'' solution to the agrarian revolution would without doubt have involved the retention of the former landed estates reorganised on a new, bourgeois footing. The old-style landowners whose methods were still moulded by the practices associated with the era of serfdom would gradually go in for Junker-style capitalist farming. Patterns of landownership based on the utilisation of serf and semi-serf labour provide the starting-point for evolution of this kind. Precisely the serf-owning landowners would represent the key figures of this Junker-type capitalist evolution.

It is common knowledge that the agrarian reform introduced in Russia in 1861 was accompanied among other things by the following: a) otrezki---the best tracts of land belonging to the peasants were made over to the landowners; b) an increase in the division of peasant and landowners' land into small plots; c) the confiscation of the best communal lands for the landowners; d) more hard and fast

rules covering peasants' obligations to work off their debts to the landowners on the latter's estates and the introduction of the semi-feudal category of so-called temporarily bound peasants; e) the growth of crippling rents reducing the peasants more or less to the status of serfs.

In respect of the peasant reform of 1861 in Russia Lenin wrote: "The 'great Reform' was a feudal reform; nor could it be anything else, for it was carried out by the feudal landowners. But what was the force that compelled them to resort to reform? It was the force of economic development which was drawing Russia on to the path of capitalism.""'

The system of large privately owned estates, existing side by side with peasant allotments, gradually evolved in a capitalist direction and in historical terms can be represented as the material-production foundation for Junker-type development of agriculture. In the history of Russia, Prussia, Poland and indeed the majority of countries east of the Elbe the capitalisation of large landed estates proceeded in such a way that the serfs on the large estates gradually started to work as free labourers; this development meant that in the course of a considerable period hired labourers and virtual serfs were to be found side by side working the large landed estates. Landowners built and put into operation wine and vodka distilleries, tanneries, flax, fulling, sugar and oilmills, mechanised flour-mills, hulling and wool-beating mills, stud farms, animal-fattening depots, and other enterprises. This meant that by the beginning of the twentieth century the landowners in Russia had not only succeeded in retaining their enormous tracts of arable land, that was being worked by hired farm labourers or poor peasants, but had also organised thousands of small-, medium- and large-scale capitalist enterprises. The large landed estates made it possible for them to embark on these projects, i.e., not the parasitic large-scale landownership now found in the countries of Asia and many African countries (above all in the Middle East), but large or medium-scale entrepreneur farming.

By 1913 there were 367 million hectares of farming land in Russia, 152 million hectares of which belonged to landowners, state organisations or monasteries, and 215 million

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 17, p. 121.

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hectares to peasant farmers."" The area of farming land owned by the landowners was the equivalent of 375 million acres, i.e., almost the same amount of farming land as India has with her population of 540 million. The Russian villages at that time were gradually switching to capitalist patterns of production; not only did they have at their disposal tremendous resources of as yet untapped land, but also vast expanses of land on which landowners for tens or hundreds of years had been running their own farms, which after the reform of 1861 were worked on progressively capitalist lines involving hired labour as opposed to feudal practices of corvee and peasant obligations.

The Russian landowner when switching to capitalist production was not faced with the need to launch this process by evicting millions of peasants, because he already had large expanses of land that he had been farming himself, while the peasants had their own allotments. On these allotments the peasants used to produce enough to feed their families, while on the landowners' estates, that were territorially and economically separate units, they created the surplus product that was appropriated by the landowner.

In Turkey, Iran, India and the countries of Southeast Asia, on the other hand, prior to the introduction of agrarian reforms there was no developed farming run by the landowners which set the pace for the agrarian system as a whole. Nor was there any such farming in the Arab East. In these countries estates belonging to landowners embraced almost all the farming land and were of a scale no less than that of the estates belonging to the landowning elite in Russia. Yet these estates did not practise large or mediumscale land-tenure, that material-production foundation on which the big landowners in Russia started Junker-type capitalist development in agriculture a hundred years ago. This meant that the concentration of landownership in the hands of the big landowners in the Asian countries was very great, their property accounted for close on 80 to 90 per cent of the total land, and in some countries even more. The farming concentrated in the hands of the rich land-

owners, on the other hand, was almost negligible. In this lies the tremendous qualitative difference between the countries of the East since the last war, and tsarist Russia.

In this connection the comments Marx made on a book published by Maxim Kovalevsky, a Russian sociologist who made a study of feudalism, agrarian structures, the origins, development and decline of the communal system of landownership in the East in the 1870s,"' are of great interest.

While analysing Kovalevsky's work, Marx wrote:

``On the grounds that 'the benefice system', 'scale of sales' (the latter by no means a purely feudal phenomenon, however---viz. Rome) and commendation occur in India, Kovalevsky regards this as feudalism in the West European sense. Yet Kovalevsky forgets all about serfdom, which does not exist in India and which is an extremely important element."**

Serfdom is one of the most brutal and cruel forms of personal bondage and non-economic coercion associated with the exploitation of peasants working on landowners' estates. The absence of this form of non-economic coercion in India and a number of other countries is really interesting and deserves of explanation. Serfdom, an essential aspect of feudalism, presupposes that peasants at one and the same time work holdings of their own, on the one hand, and their masters' fields, on the other.

The more important the role of the corvee system and the more developed state or privately owned estates run on feudal lines, the more oppressive this type of non-- economic coercion. A specific feature marking the development of agriculture in India and a number of other countries in Asia and the Arab East, to which both historians and agricultural experts have drawn attention, is the absence of large or medium-scale farming of a developed feudal type shaping the agricultural structure in these countries. This situation

* See Sovietskoye vostokovedeniye (Soviet Oriental Studies), 1958, Nos. 3, 4; Problemy vostokovedeniya (Problems of Oriental Studies), 1959, No. 1; M. M. Kovalevsky, Obshchinnoye zemlevladeniye, prichiny, khodi posledstviya ego razlozheniya (Communal Landownership: Origins, Course and Consequences of Its Breakdown), Vol. 1, Moscow, 1879 (in Russian). ** Sovietskoye vostokovedeniye, 1958, No. 5, p. 12.

* The Economy of the USSR. Statistical Manual, Moscow, 1956, p. 97 (in Russian).

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remained the same throughout the whole of the medieval ages in these countries and held good both before and after European penetration of these countries. Moreover, the existence of large and medium-scale landownership in these countries, where no large or medium-scale land-tenure was practised (i.e., where there were no farms employing serf or semi-serf, free or semi-free peasant labour), was still typical for these countries right up until the 40s and 50s of this century.

Specific forms of private feudal landownership, which, however, never went as far as the organisation of feudaltype farms, naturally did not require organisation of serf labour to ensure that the peasants worked the landowners' estates. Communal patterns of land-tenure or individual peasant land-tenure (or a combination of both methods) went hand in hand with appropriation of the immediate producer's surplus product, most frequently of all through a system of rent in kind (which in India, for example, was at certain periods replaced by a system of rent in money).

Thus, the agrarian structure in India and a number of other countries in the Arab East and Asia was characterised by small-scale peasant farming on land rented from the feudal-type landowners. This factor assumed decisive importance when these countries embarked on the transition to simple commodity and later capitalist farming as a result of European colonial penetration. The latter development did not alter the economic structure of land-tenure. Apart from the plantation crops, the production of which soon became a virtual monopoly of foreign capitalists, landtenure in most countries continued on small and very small peasant holdings.

This historic feature of the material and economic structure of feudal society predetermined a substantial difference in the transition to simple commodity and later capitalist farming in these countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as opposed to that found in Europe, where one of the decisive factors in that transition had been the very existence of large-scale farming on landed estates which gradually evolved in a capitalist direction.

After the Second World War, as a result of the abolition of colonialist rule and the attainment of political indepen-

dence, large and medium-scale farming on landowners' estates started to develop in the wake of the agrarian reforms. This led to the eviction of small tenant-farmers or owners of small peasant holdings (in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, etc.). At the same time the peasants' struggle to do away with the traditional landed estates was growing apace. The belated setting up of capitalist-type farms on these estates inevitably involved depriving millions of peasants directly engaged in agricultural production of their land and stripping them of their rights to own or rent land so as to benefit the landowners and capitalist farmers; this inevitably intensified the class struggle in these countries. The vital task with regard to the land question now was not only to do away with the obsolete rights of the tiny minority of large-scale landowners who did not engage in farming but merely collected in land rent. Indeed, this had been accomplished in a number of Asian countries. What was important was to get rid of all landed estates, all landowners' farms and all foreign landownership and do away with the exploitation of peasants at the hands of traders and moneylenders. These demands were incorporated into the agrarian programmes of the progressive political parties and the peasantry rallied to the campaign for their fulfilment. So far the peasantry has not scored any decisive successes in this aspect of the struggle for land but even those half-hearted agrarian reforms that are now being introduced by ruling circles are the result of the peasants' struggle and therefore can be regarded as their achievement.

Thus it can be seen that the historical features of feudal development in Asia which Marx singled out on a number of occasions are still making themselves felt today. They must on no account be ignored in any study of topical aspects of agricultural evolution in the countries of presentday Asia.*

* This question is treated in more detail in a paper delivered by L. S. Gamayunov and R. A. Ulyanovsky at the XXV International Congress of Orientalists entitled: "The Work of the Russian Sociologist M. M. Kovalevsky, Communal Landownership: Origins, Course and Consequences of Its Breakdown, and Its Criticism by Karl Marx", Moscow 1960 (in Russian).

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When, for example, a landowner-entrepreneur in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey or Iraq brings a tractor into a village and begins to engage in mechanised farming, more often than not he starts out by evicting tenant-farmers from his land because he owns no or virtually no land that is not leased out to peasant farmers. This is where a really tense situation develops which requires a large degree of social and political courage. Lenin wrote in this connection: "Stolypin and the landlords boldly took the revolutionary path, ruthlessly breaking up the old order, handing over the peasant masses as a whole to the mercy of the landlords and kulaks."* Sixty years ago in Russia there were tremendous tracts of open land where capitalist and kulak farming could be developed even if at times this necessitated driving peasants out of their homes to go and work the new farms. Stolypin's agricultural reform was introduced after the defeat of the 1905-1906 revolution. This situation has no parallel in a single Eastern country. The national liberation movement is gaining momentum and the bourgeoisie is worried at what the future holds in store for the landowners, knowing only too well that the introduction of modern farming methods on their estates involves evicting millions of peasants. Despite this the national bourgeoisie, on the one hand, tries to defend the interests of the landowning class to the best of its ability, helping part of it to develop along bourgeois lines, yet, on the other, it is reluctant, and not without reason, to accelerate this risky process more than absolutely necessary. This explains why the national bourgeoisie manoeuvres and seeks compromises with the landowners and with the peasants, trying at one and the same time to retain its influence over the peasantry and also to split its ranks. In this situation the bourgeoisie, its ruling circles, sometimes find themselves obliged to introduce considerable restrictions on the landowners' rights and power in rural areas even in face of resistance from certain groups in its own ranks and fierce opposition from the landowners themselves. That was what happened in Kashmir, for instance, where the ruling circles did away with the large landed estates and introduced a ``ceiling'' for

land holdings of 22 acres. In another state of India, Punjab, landowners and prosperous peasants are given tens of millions of rupees by state credit organisations with which to purchase tractors to use on their modernised farms. This modernisation of farming in Punjab led to the eviction of tens of thousands of peasant farmers working rented holdings, which in its turn resulted in an intensification of the class struggle in this extremely important state and was one of the major reasons for the emergence of a mass peasant movement there. Those who attempt to pursue a policy of coercive ``depeasantisation'' cannot fail to realise that the opportunities for such a policy are limited. The authorities of the state under pressure from the peasants were obliged to pass legislation to stipulate ``ceilings'' for both existing land-holdings and those as yet to be acquired. This step was undoubtedly a concession to the peasantry. Later, as was noted in the press, these laws were sabotaged. Only 22,500 of the 46,700 owners of large landed estates in Punjab registered their land surpluses over and above the stipulated maximum, while the remainder sought to conceal their surpluses. Only 25,000 acres of the 450,000 acres of surplus land that was to have been redistributed among the peasants was officially registered (close on 6 per cent). The landowners divided up large expanses of land among their relatives or sold them to fictitious purchasers. In that same state in the 10-12-year period over which various reforms were introduced, 485,400 families of tenant-farmers obtained the right to own a total of 5,056 thousand acres in return for compensation. These were the contradictory results of the active peasant struggle against the landowners so as to gain more land and the efforts on the part of the bourgeoisie and the landowners to sabotage the agrarian reforms which they themselves had devised. The two-faced behaviour of the national bourgeoisie in its elaboration of agrarian legislation, in its methods used to implement this legislation and in the goals it set itself comes to the fore most clearly in the present situation.

Capitalist development in the non-socialist countries of Asia is distinguished by several features. In Asia, as in prerevolutionary Russia, capitalism in agriculture started to strike root in conditions still coloured to a large extent by

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 457.

26---919

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feudal survivals. Russia, however, was an independent country, while these Asian countries have only very recently shaken off the chains of colonial or semi-colonial dependence that had lasted for centuries. However, the most important difference between the two situations is that while political power in Russia remained in the hands of the landowning class as represented by the autocratic monarchy both up to and after 1861, in India and other countries of Asia where similar conditions obtain, political power already belongs to the national bourgeoisie, which to a certain extent allies itself with the landowning class. In post-reform Russia of the 1860s and 1870s the bourgeois-democratic revolution was still to come, while in the majority of Asian countries the agrarian reforms, however inconsistent they may have been, were the result of a national liberation revolution, spearheaded first and foremost against the foreign imperialists and to a certain extent against the feudal landowners, that had already been accomplished.

In those distant days when agrarian reforms were being introduced in Russia, capitalism still had prospects of longterm development open to it and the transition to the highest, imperialist stage was still to come, while capitalist development in agriculture in Asia is proceeding in quite different conditions, i.e., in conditions in which there exists a powerful world socialist system, the imperialist colonial system has collapsed, a large group of national-democratic states of a socialist orientation have grown up, and the balance of world forces has as a result tilted in favour of socialism. The question as to possible paths for capitalist development in rural Asia today should only be approached in close connection with the overall conditions for development in the world as a whole, with the growth of socialist and democratic forces, including those within Asia itself. The historic struggle of the peoples of Africa and Asia themselves has brought forward an alternative to capitalist development in agriculture, namely the non-capitalist path which has already proved itself in the countries of Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Far East where settled arable farming and nomadic livestock-breeding are the dominant patterns of agriculture.

Economic and political opportunities for implementing a course of capitalist development in agriculture along `` Prussian'' or ``Junker'' lines in the countries of Asia today are infinitely more limited than they were in Russia or Prussia in the 19th or early 20th centuries. This stems from a whole complex of historical and economic features of development of Asia in the past and also from the present historical stage of world capitalism, which is decisive for its future.

Historical experience of economic development in the capitalist world shows that obvious survivals of feudalism continue to exist side by side with modern capitalism. In Western Europe and America monopolies and servitude are to be found side by side over and over again. On the one hand there is developed capitalist industry in the towns and on the other working conditions in the countryside are semi-feudal. A similar combination can be found in the most unlikely forms throughout the continent of Latin America. In Europe where capitalist development in agriculture was held back by vestiges of feudalism, survivals of bond labour and serfdom, which monopoly capital has turned to its own advantage, are still more conspicuous. Suffice it to draw attention to rural conditions in southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Portugal and Greece and also those in the countries of Eastern Europe prior to the introduction of socialist transformations there. Yet even in the United States, where we find the classical example of ``American'' capitalist development in agriculture, the forms of rural servitude outlined above are an essential part of economic life not only as a result of the black slavery of the past, but also because they are being reproduced by monopoly capitalism which has vested interest in preserving servitude for large numbers of both coloured and white workers.

This explains why the fundamental difference between the ``American'' and ``Prussian'' paths of capitalist development in agriculture, that was so significant when capitalism as such was in its early stages, is now of little importance in the context of the general crisis of capitalism, in the age of the transition to socialism. The question as to the course of capitalist development in agriculture in the agrarian

20*

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countries is no longer such an important issue as it was before. This applies, moreover, not only to the West, but to the East as well. The very formulation of this question of two paths of capitalist development in agriculture demands a new approach nowadays.

The fact that the big landowners have evolved as bourgeois, capitalist entrepreneurs is the result of a natural process of capitalist development. However, this process was actually initiated by the national bourgeoisie that assumed political power and is striving to keep the peasantry under its influence, when it comes out against colonialism and imperialism, powerful feudal lords and princes, absentee landlords and the resultant plight of the peasants deprived of any rights. Such is the situation that had taken shape in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Burma, Egypt and other countries by the beginning of the 1960s.

The abolition of the princedoms in India in this context represented not merely an administrative reform but one possessing deep socio-economic significance. The abolition of crown estates and large-scale landownership in Egypt immediately after the revolution of 1952, of the large and middle feudal-type regencies in Indonesia, the nationalisation of land in Burma and waqf land-holdings in Tunisia, the restrictions placed on foreign landownership in a number of countries and even the complete abolition of landed estates that took place for instance in Japan cannot be viewed as examples of the classical ``Prussian'' path of development in agriculture familiar from the history of Russia and Eastern Europe. These reforms cannot be called feudal.

Solutions to the agrarian problem that openly further the interests of the feudal-type landowners, as were effected in Russia a hundred years ago, are not possible in the situation obtaining today in the countries of the East. The national bourgeoisie is not in a position to enforce such reforms, most important of all it would not be in its interests to do so. At a time when in many Asian countries reactionary feudal and semi-feudal elements are, as a rule, of an anti-national, pro-imperialist character, the national bourgeoisie, anxious to consolidate its political power, is obliged---in order to retain its influence over the peasantry and, what is most important, to try and avert the establishment of a firm

alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry---to introduce agrarian reforms of such a kind that while they do not do away with the landowning class as a whole, place considerable restrictions on its activities and sometimes even undermine that class's political and economic power in the countryside. All this finds expression above all in considerable restrictions everywhere, and sometimes elimination of traditional patterns of landownership in individual regions, an increase in peasant landownership, the elimination of the legal privileges enjoyed by the landowning class and efforts to bring about a split in the ranks of the peasantry and accelerate its stratification.

The economic advantage which the bourgeoisie stands to gain from curtailing the sphere of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation of the peasantry, and in a number of cases from doing away with it altogether, from stepping up the pace of capitalist development, encouraging capitalist penetration of land cultivation and industries for processing agricultural produce and from placing under its own control the activities of traders and moneylenders is undoubtedly on the increase. Yet not only these objectives oblige the bourgeoisie to embark on a course of reform, although they provide the economic basis of these reforms.

Political objectives often play a major role in this process as well. The national bourgeoisie and its political parties are wary of the forces of social progress, their agrarian programme and the work of the progressive political parties active in rural areas. The national bourgeoisie is no longer powerful enough to be able to ignore the interests of the peasants in the agrarian question and introduce no changes in rural conditions, implement no reforms or only such as meet the exclusive interests of the landowners. It is precisely this state of affairs which obliges the national bourgeoisie to take into account the interests of the peasantry at least to some extent. It is well aware that if it loses its influence over the peasants it will not be in a position to consolidate its political power. The national bourgeoisie sees its strategic objective as the continued isolation of the peasants from the working class. The more far-sighted representatives of the ruling circles realise that long drawn-out agrarian reforms will inevitably lead to a situation in which sooner

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or later the peasants will be unable or unwilling to tolerate delays in the solution of the land question and will start to voice their dissatisfaction. They will start to redistribute the land themselves, as they think fit. Such developments have already taken place in the non-socialist countries of Asia in the post-war period. The ruling circles of those countries succeeded in undermining the strength of the peasant movement directed against the landowners by exacerbating the contradictions within the peasantry and the internal struggle in their ranks. The kulaks and more well-to-do middle peasants started to make use of their new rights to acquire land of their own by paying out compensation money for it. The}' made the most of high market prices which in a number of countries were kept up artificially by the process of industrialisation. All these factors make it possible for the ruling classes to manoeuvre in relation to the land question and procrastinate its final solution. In this connection it should also be noted that the influence of the working class over the peasants is not sufficient in order through joint efforts to renovate the country's ruling stratum or compel the ruling circles to embark on radical reforms in the interest of the poor peasant masses.

In so far as this situation is part of the objectively advancing process of economic development, revolutionary democrats and even some of the more moderate representatives of the national bourgeoisie support free development of the national economy impeded neither by semi-feudal landowners nor by foreign capital. Communists in the Asian countries consider that precisely this type of economic development for rural areas directed against the landowners and foreign capital would secure the most favourable conditions for class struggle, for the next stage in the national liberation movement, when the peasantry together with the working class will march forward to build up an independent national-democratic state.

The question then arises as to whether the choice of methods, paths and forms for the development of national capitalism is the main task now facing the working class and its party, when bourgeois agrarian reforms have not been completed in such countries as, for example, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Indonesia. As made clear in the

Statement issued by the Meeting of Representatives of Communist and Workers' Parties (1960), the main task facing progressive, democratic forces is no longer to define methods for ``building'' national capitalism and selecting the better of the two theoretically possible paths for capitalist development in agriculture aimed at doing away with their countries' age-old backwardness, as the countries of Europe and Russia were obliged to do seventy years ago.

``The popular masses are being convinced that the best way of eliminating their age-long backwardness and improving conditions of their life is a non-capitalist path of development. Along these lines alone will the peoples be able to get rid of exploitation, poverty and hunger. The working class and the broad peasant masses are called upon to play an important part in solving this vital social problem."*

In the countries of Asia the main question now is that of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry, the winning over of the peasantry to the side of the working class^so as to found a progressive, independent nationaldemocratic state thus making it possible to embark on farreaching preparations for the transition to the path of noncapitalist development.

The Indian National Congress took up the slogan of the peasant movement "Land to Him Who Tills It" over a quarter of a century ago. This slogan was really calling for the transfer of land from the landowners to the peasants and was thus a slogan of radical agrarian change, a slogan of revolutionary democracy.

However the Indian National Congress at the end of the 1950s was_ not a revolutionary-democratic organisation but a bourgeois one, some of whose members were actually liberal landowners. Why did they adopt the slogan, "Land to Him Who Tills It"? The National Congress was obliged to make use of that slogan since it was proposed by the peasant unions, otherwise it would no longer have been in a position to maintain its influence over the peasants. However, the National Congress at the same time was not in a position to adhere consistently to that slogan. The national

* Policy Documents of the Struggle for Peace, Democracy and Socialism, p. 67 (in Russian).

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bourgeoisie follows up this radical slogan only in so far as it needs the new social support of the rural population, needs to consolidate its political influence among the peasantry, and also in so far as it needs for its own interests to expand the internal market and promote industrialisation. Since the national bourgeoisie cannot afford to lose the support of the semi-feudal landowners and is reluctant to abolish the landowning class, as this might be taken as a precedent for the elimination of bourgeois property rights as such, it opposes any straightforward and consistent implementation of the slogan it has advanced. The dual nature of the national bourgeoisie is reflected nowadays not only in its relations with foreign capital and imperialism: after it came to power its dual character came to the fore more than ever before, in its policy towards the semi-feudal landowners. The fluctuating stance of the national bourgeoisie consists above all in its tendency to combine apparent progressiveness with a readiness to collaborate with imperialism and feudalism.* This does not mean that the national bourgeoisie implements reforms exclusively in the interests of the landowners. Such an interpretation of its conduct would indicate a failure to grasp either the bourgeois character or the political significance of the reforms that have been introduced in the Asian countries, and also a failure to appreciate the available opportunities for making use of these reforms in the interests of the peasantry and the working class against the landowners and the bourgeoisie.

Progressive parties in the Asian countries do not put forward the ``American'' path of capitalist development as an alternative to the ``Prussian'' path. All paths and forms of capitalist development today are opposed by the noncapitalist path of development that is being followed in the socialist countries of Asia and shaping the lives of hundreds of millions of peasants. Of course, the Communist and revolutionary-democratic parties in the Eastern countries are campaigning energetically to have rents and taxes cut, moneylending and feudal requisitions done away with, and a just ``ceiling'' for land-holdings stipulated as a basic con-

dition for land redistribution, and not because all these steps pave the way to an option for the free ``American'' path of capitalist development. These parties base their policy on the fact that if an agrarian revolution from below will inevitably pave the way to non-capitalist economic development, then consistently implemented bourgeois reforms regardless of the legislators' wishes or rather despite their wishes will make it possible to organise a wide-scale movement of the peasant masses to work towards agrarian revolution, and consequently contribute to the accomplishment of such a revolution.

In India and a number of other countries a difficult period for the peasants is under way, when they are buying out land from the landowners, i.e., a period of direct implementation of agrarian reform. The bourgeois form of landownership that has been familiar in Asia since the advent of the Europeans, mainly as a caricature of itself, as Marx pointed out, is precisely at the present time assuming its true economic importance.

Peasant parcel-holdings and large landed estates are now being replaced by bourgeois landownership as soon as variable and constant capital start to function there, i.e., as soon as kulak farmers and capitalist landowners start to appear on the scene. Until that period landownership may outwardly assume bourgeois characteristics (being private, hereditary, freely alienable, used for purposes of farming, and free of ``noble'' social-estate characteristics) but it is not yet capitalist in content. What is precisely typical of the majority of Asian and African countries is the fact that forms of landownership in these countries have for a long time, indeed ever since the establishment of European rule, been more or less bourgeois, while their actual essence remained pre-bourgeois. In colonial agriculture the emergence of variable and constant capital proceeded at an excessively slow pace; capitalisation affected not so much farming itself, the mode of production and agricultural techniques, as forms of ownership and property in land, i.e., not the sphere of material production but that of economic circulation. Bourgeois post-war reforms were designed to bring about at least an approximate correspondence between forms of ownership and the actual mode of agricultural

* Policy Documents of the Struggle for Peace, Democracy and Socialism, p. 67 (in Russian).

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production. This means that the national bourgeoisie is concerned with far-reaching manoeuvres and attempting to find a compromise with both the landowners and the peasantry.

In the light of all this, peasant economy becomes more market-oriented, the class of agricultural workers grows, the stratification of peasants is enhanced, capitalist productive forces develop and a new agriculture is formed which to a certain extent takes the place of the old one. All these factors serve to intensify the class struggle in the countryside.

The capitalist system of leasing out land as a means of transforming feudal patterns of cultivation, that was so typical of Europe, has not in the past been adopted on a wide scale in India or other countries of Asia and Africa. Recently however it has been gaining ground rapidly.

The British latifundia were not in a position to hold in check the expansion of capitalist farming. It proceeded despite them through the promotion of capitalist forms of land-tenure on a wide scale. Russian latifundia did a great deal to hold back the growth of peasant capitalism, being the bastion of feudal survivals. However in the course of time they came more and more to represent the main nucleus of capitalist-landowner development in agriculture, and peasant capitalism was unable to do away with them. Peasant capitalism which developed apace after the reform of 1861 gave rise to Stolypin's land reforms---the second series of bourgeois agrarian laws designed to promote capitalist enterprise in agriculture. Stolypin's reforms were put through not by an old, feudal, autocratic monarchy, but a monarchy founded on bourgeois and landowner support in the period 1907-1910, in conditions in which revolution had been temporarily suppressed and the country was on the brink of another revolution. The large landed estates in Russia were eliminated and the land redistributed in the interests of the peasantry after the proletarian socialist revolution of 1917. Viewed from a historical perspective it is unlikely that the British method of by-passing the latifundia by capitalist methods of leasing out land would prove feasible in the countries of the East. This would involve evicting all the peasants from the land and turn-

ing the peasantry into an agricultural proletariat. Capitalism in Asia and Africa has no hope of asserting itself in the foreseeable future by adopting Prussian methods or those underlying the Stolypin reforms. Historical conditions are now taking shape that will soon make inevitable the elimination of feudal survivals and the implementation of agrarian transformations in the interests of the whole peasantry.

The essential issue in the class struggle in the form now found in the Asian and African countryside is not a question of a choice between the two paths of capitalist development, but a tug-of-war between capitalist and non-capitalist paths of development that echoes the competition between the two world systems. In the light of this situation all democratic and progressive forces in the Eastern countries, taking into account the specific situation facing each and nationalhistorical features of the agrarian structure, are endeavouring to ensure that the agrarian reforms already announced are consistently implemented. While organising the peasant movement they prepare it for truly radical agrarian transformations that will do away with feudalist survivals and make possible the unimpeded development of rural life on a fundamentally new basis.

AGRARIAN QUESTION AND PEASANTRY

THE PEASANTRY AT THE PRESENT STAGE

OF NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT

AND THE RESULTS OF THE AGRARIAN REFORMS

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 1970s

The acceleration and intensification of revolutionary processes in countries that have rid themselves of colonial dependence is one of the characteristic features of the period we are living in.

At the present stage, the bulk of the population in these countries consists of the peasantry which possesses farreaching revolutionary potential. Its attitude to the developing national liberation struggle and to social transformations is turning into one of the main issues in the class struggle and an object of particular attention for any political movement endeavouring to play an active part in the life of the newly liberated countries.

Referring to the prospects of the social revolution in the East, Lenin remarked over 50 years ago (in connection with a report delivered by A. Sultan-Zade, the prominent Iranian Communist) that in such countries "a large part of the population are peasants under medieval exploitation", and "small artisans" in industry.* Lenin did not hesitate to describe countries of the East as areas in which pre-capitalist "feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal-peasant relations predominate".** However, he did not include the Latin American countries in this category but rather referred to them as countries with a medium level of capitalist devel-

opment. This viewpoint found expression in the documents of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Comintern congresses.

Since then over half a century has elapsed, but to this day the bulk of the population of the countries of Asia and Africa is still engaged in agriculture. The newly liberated countries are nothing more than a world countryside, an agrarian hinterland for the world capitalist economy. The peasantry still comprises a very great part of the total population. If we consider only the gainfully employed population, the share of those engaged in agriculture is as follows (in percentages)"":

Arab East

South and Southeast Asia

Tropical

Africa

Sudan .....

.80^^1^^

Thailand ....

8?,

Zambia

... 84

Syria

. 58

Cambodia . . .

Senegal .

... 83

Tunisia

India . . .

Liberia

... 80

Egypt .....

. 57

Burma .....

Republic of

Zaire . 77^^1^^

Morocco

Indonesia

Nigeria

. . .70

Algeria . , .

. 50

Philippines . .

Ghana . .

... 58

Iraq .....

. 48

Malaysia ....

Lebanon ....

. 37

Sri Lanka . . .

48 fi

Libya . ...

. 36

Jordan ....

« Estimate.

The peasantry comprises between 65 and 70 per cent of the population in the entire group of developing countries (apart from those of Latin America).

The land cultivated by this majority is almost exclusively communal, privately owned or leased. Certain kinds of more or less primitive crafts and small-scale industry of a domestic or manufactory type inherited from pre-capitalist social systems are practised in villages and also in small towns located in rural areas. Rural crafts have long been on the way out; domestic industries, simple co-operatives and

* The journal Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodniye otnosheniya (World Economics and International Relations), Nos. 11, 12, 1970.

* V I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 42, p. 202. ** Ibid., Vol. 31, p. 149.

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primitive capitalist manufactories are supported by the state, but they are hardly flourishing.

In the major urban centres of the Asian and African countries the impact of capitalism is making itself felt more and more.^::' Bourgeois ownership and hired labour are becoming firmly established and social wealth and social poverty are becoming more marked there. Accordingly, these are both a nerve centre of social contradictions and decisive focal point of the class political struggle. Their inhabitants are engaged in industry, trade, transport, construction, administration, and the service industries. Most cities with a considerable degree of capitalist development, even the largest, can, however, still be regarded as islands in a sea of villages, for they have not brought fundamental changes to the life of the mass of the population.

The social structure found in the villages and small towns is based on century-old traditions. In respect of the working population, class relations in the major urban centres are based mainly on hired labour. However, the relatively small number of such centres, the absence of developed capitalist methods of production in the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy, the vast influence of religious, tribal, social-estate and caste customs, various traditional occupations and craft forms of production and exchange, and the blending of crafts and domestic industry with trade and the Oriental bazaar---all these create in the towns of Asia and Africa a variegated edifice in the form of a ``secondary'' social structure which, together with the basic structure of the major cities and ``modernised'' areas, comprises an original symbiosis without any historical parallel in the West. In this accumulation of pre-bourgeois and bourgeois forms of production and exchange, human relationships and social psychology inherent in obsolescent transitional social structures that are hardly effective industrially and possess insufficient social mobility, lies that essential quality that distinguishes the cities in the present-day East from those of the capitalist West.

At the same time that the Afro-Asian countries have gained political independence and capitalism has made

* This does not apply to countries that are developing along noncapitalist lines.

notable progress there, there is a rapid increase in the number of ``modernised'' areas with capitalist methods of production and exchange, where the corresponding relations between people are growing up.

There is every reason to term this state of society a transition to capitalism, inasmuch as the capitalist mode of production (though it is not predominant in the rural areas and small towns and coexists with pre-capitalist economic patterns even in the major cities and the ``modernised'' areas) is nevertheless the sole and dominant economic pattern in that group of developing countries whose ruling circles are making every effort to follow the capitalist path of development.

Predominant in the agricultural areas of the newly liberated countries are traditional social relations---clan and tribal (as in Africa), patriarchal-feudal (as in Asia), or, most frequently of all, their derivatives that are transitional from natural economy to small-commodity production and from small-commodity relations to the capitalist pattern. The peasantry as a whole is caught up in this transition. Although the social structure in the countryside is more stable and less fluid than that of the ``modernised'' areas and cities that have been affected by capitalist development, whose vehicles they are, the relations between the classes and their economic, social and political positions in the countryside reflect not only the still strong traditional social structure, that is, however, being gradually eroded, but also the mounting commodity and capitalist penetration which has been particularly marked during the last twenty years.

Thus, there are few areas even in the deepest hinterland of the two continents which have escaped the substantial influence of the market economy. The tribal or religious community of cultivators and craftsmen has disintegrated or is gradually withering away. Neither have the large united patriarchal families belonging to one and the same social unit survived intact. There exists no homogeneous peasantry sharing one and the same property rights. Of course, social codes prescribed by religion, custom and tradition have survived in the countryside, in agricultural production (arable farming and cattle-breeding) more than in any other branch of the economy or life, but, though they

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take precedence over all other laws, they are losing their effectiveness, their former implications and significance.

The economic laws of commodity economy are forcing their way through hidebound tradition and asserting themselves. Shared cultural, caste, religious, language and tribal traditions which used to hold the rural areas in the grip of outwardly unchanging traditions are growing weaker and dying out.

The population, once tied to the land, is now in a state of flux under the impact of social and economic change in the countries of the East; the interdependence of the rural and urban economies, the agrarian and industrial sectors and the rural and urbanised population is growing apace. So rapid has been the growth of the urban population in Asia and Africa in the last 25 years, mainly as a result of the influx from the countryside, that it has exceeded the size of the entire urban population in these continents on the eve of the Second World War.

The natural self-sufficiency of the rural economy has been undermined by the expansion of international trade and the extension of communications: the rigid division of labour in the traditional countryside has been greatly weakened; the former social barriers holding back individual enterprise and private economic initiative are gradually being removed; in most of the rural areas of Asia, barter exchange has long been replaced by the use of money. This process is also proceeding apace in the depths of Tropical Africa. The comparatively extensive use of hired labour in agriculture, particularly in the Arab East and in South and Southeast Asia (though far less in Africa---see Table 5), shows that the ordinary commodity-money relations .so widely employed by traders and moneylenders to enslave the small commodity producer are being extended to an increasing extent by the development of "variable capital" ---the exploitation of labour power as a commodity.

Ethnographic studies conducted by Western and Soviet scientists have shown that the growth of urban centres, the ever greater variety of trades and forms of gainful employment, and the considerable advance in education are doing away more and more with the undivided sway of the family and the clan elder.

The Percentage of Hired Labour in the Working^Populafion*

Arab East

South and Southeast Asia

Tropical Africa

a"

B

>.

o

a

o

o

OJ

p

<P 0)

t~

<U 0>

t*

O) ^

u.

~-< *o

1^

, 'Q

z*

^ 2

•^

fl

If

o

o ^

£a w

+j CO

ctf

em

M

5«

M

f< to

^

Z co

**!

& ra

``!

Kuwait

Singapore

Liberia

Lebanon

Sri Lanka

Ghana

Algeria

Malaysia

Zambia

Tunisia

Pakistan

Zaire**

Egypt

Philippines

Senegal**

Libya

India

Nigeria

Morocco

Indonesia

Syria

Burma

Iraq

Cambodia

Sudan**

Thailand

* World Economics and International Relations, Noa. 11 12 1970 ** Estimate.

The achievement of state independence, the continuing advance of national political movements, the striving towards economic independence, the abolition of large-scale landownership in many countries of Asia and Africa, ubiquitous parcelling of the land, the extension of tenantfarmers' formal rights and the growth in the number of peasants owning the land they till, the spread of plantations and of seasonal employment have all opened up broad new vistas for the rural population. The gradual replacement of the old social order by the new one is more and more often linked up with more modern forms of socio-economic structure, which means that the time is ripe for radical

27---919

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changes in the conditions of the peasantry and for greater resistance by the working people in the countryside to every kind of oppression by the landowners and other rural exploiters.

political scene, while in the remoter areas of the hinterland inhabited by downtrodden and illiterate peasants, almost undivided sway is often enjoyed by landowners, tribal chiefs and local officials.

In these conditions, the alliance between the working class and the peasantry acquires certain specific features. The peasantry plays a more influential and mass role in that alliance than in the industrial or industrial-agrarian countries. As for the leading role of the working class, against the background of quite feasible socialist prospects for national liberation revolutions via the path of non-capitalist development or the development of bourgeois-democratic revolutions into socialist revolutions, this role manifests itself in two ways: both as an international force in the effective forms of influence exerted on revolutionary democracy by the ideology of scientific socialism, the socialist world ( including its material and economic potential) and the international working-class and communist movement, and also in the form of the mounting influence of the national working-class and communist movement on the course of the anti-imperialist liberation struggle and the peasant movement.

The Marxist-Leninist parties have to wage a struggle for socialist influence in the highly complex conditions of an atmosphere dominated by petty-bourgeois attitudes. In these circumstances the working class cannot always exert its influence on as wide a front as it would wish, or independently---through direct organisational and political guidance by the proletariat.

Now that the role of the world socialist system is growing apace, the revolutionary forces in the newly liberated countries cannot afford to wait until all the necessary preconditions appear for socialism to be achieved via the development of capitalism and the emergence of a powerful working class. Seeking support from the working peasantry and the ``plebeian'' section of the urban and rural population, they are striving to pursue a policy that brings as near as possible the goal of victory for a socialist course. Is this possible? After all, such a task, and on such a scale, has never before been undertaken or tackled. Of course, the experience of the October Revolution in Russia testifies to

Marxism-Leninism has provided a solution to the agrarian and peasant problem, a solution which has been borne out by the experience of many countries which have built or are building socialism. The Marxist-Leninist teaching on the agrarian and peasant question, and revolutionary practice proceed from the premise that the alliance between the working class and the peasantry guarantees the triumph of the genuinely popular revolution and is an essential condition for the transition to socialism.

Clearly, however, the situation in the developing countries has lent this problem new features all of its own. These are unexceptional inasmuch as the question of the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry has always been approached and solved by Marxists on the basis of a careful study of the specific features and stage of each country's historical development.

In determining the possible stands to be taken by the proletarian parties on the peasant question in most countries that have achieved independence, due account must be taken of the relative weakness of the working class against the background of the tremendous numerical preponderance of the peasantry in the overall population. This weakness stems not only from the relatively small size of the working class, but also from a lack of experience in the struggle against the bourgeoisie and the landowners and for the peasantry, from poor organisation, insufficient development of class consciousness, tremendous labour fluidity and its close links with the peasant economy and entanglement in patriarchal, tribal, caste and other traditions and religious and language barriers, all of which greatly undermine proletarian unity.

All this goes to explain why the working class in many developing countries is insufficiently prepared to lead the peasant liberation movement. Bourgeois-nationalist and pettybourgeois circles of. different shades dominate the rural

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/j21

of the small producer and adopt the viewpoint of the proletariat. Given this condition, the Social-Democrats are, of course, in duty bound to accept him in their ranks. Moreover, they must make it easier for him, through their propaganda and agitation, to go over to a new point of view he is not accustomed to. However, until that transition takes place, and as long as the farmer demands measures that will ensure him his existence as a small producer and as long as he strives, not towards social revolution but only towards certain social reforms that would delay the triumphant advance of big capital or restrict the area of its infiltration--- until then he is no socialist, and he has no place among socialists. If the Social-Democrats decided to give support to these strivings of his, they would thereby fall into irreconcilable contradiction with their own radical task, which consists not in checking the development of capitalism but in taking advantage of that development in the interests of the social revolution."""

These words were written about 70 years ago. This viewpoint was firmly accepted by European Social-Democrats in respect of the peasantry in general and the colonial peasantry in particular. It is still alive today. Now, as in the past, it proceeds exclusively from the experience of the history of certain European countries, and holds aloft the idea of the advance towards socialism, always and in any conditions, only and exclusively via a developed capitalist society. This solution of the question of socialism's attitude towards the peasantry is entirely abstract; it has no bearing on conditions of struggle, concrete situations, national or historical features. It takes no account of the actual role of the colonial peasantry in the anti-imperialist, national liberation, agrarian-peasant revolution, and therefore has always been and remains inapplicable and consequently lacks any vital significance. With reference to our times this view completely ignores the radical features in the agrarian and formerly colonial countries, and disregards the fact that the socialist orientation becomes possible as generaldemocratic, peasant, national liberation, and anti-imperialist

the possibility, in principle, for a comparatively small, but well-organised, politically independent and experienced working class to inspire vast peasant masses to follow it along the path of socialist revolution, the more so because that revolution also came to grips with the tasks of the peasant-agrarian, national liberation and anti-imperialist revolution. Soviet power, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat and a Marxist-Leninist Party, enabled the Russian working class, though it only comprised a minority force in the country at that time, to win over to its side the vast majority of the peasantry, the craftsmen and artisans---the vast mass of the small-commodity producers.

The current period of the general crisis of capitalism and the transition to socialism makes it possible---given a correct Marxist-Leninist policy vis-a-vis the peasantry---to pose and solve the problem of how to exert maximum influence on the peasant masses by the working class in certain countries, even if that class is still numerically weak and does not yet dominate political affairs.

Two diametrically opposed views exist on the question of the peasantry's attitude towards socialism and, in this connection, on the attitude of the revolutionary vanguard towards the peasantry.

One can be summed up as follows: the peasant will come to support socialism only if he abandons the traditional attitudes he grew up with that stem from his social nature, and, after becoming a hired worker, rural or urban, he learns to accept the views of the proletariat. This is a traditional Social-Democratic viewpoint characterised by a passive approach to the peasantry, a failure to understand its place and potential role in the struggle for socialism. In Russian literature this viewpoint was outlined by Georgi Plekhanov in his work The Proletariat and the Peasantry. "For the petty farmer to stand under its (the Social-- Democratic---R.U.) banner," he wrote, "a certain vital psychological condition is absolutely necessary: he must be convinced that small-scale farming has outlived itself and private ownership of the means of production must yield to social ownership. In other words he must abandon the viewpoint

* G. V. Plekhanov, Collected Works, Vol. 12, Moscow, 1924, p. 293 (in Russian).

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movements develop, which are in no way socialist at the outset. However, a socialist vanguard that is small in number cannot but support and organise them, and, given the right subjective and objective conditions, lead them, if it does not wish to lag behind the revolutionary process. The Social-Democratic conservative stand has long been rejected by the revolutionary movement and it was never trusted in the Afro-Asian countries. This can be put down to the historical experience amassed by the Bolshevik Party in the Russian revolutions, to the Leninist agrarian programme, the activities of the world communist movement, and to the Communist International which was the first to adopt a new approach to the complex problem of the links between the peasant movement and socialism, particularly with reference to agrarian colonial countries.

Today, as the revolutionary movement in the agrarian countries gains ground, a new, entirely different concept has acquired a certain following. This is the no less one-sided concept which asserts that the peasantry, taken as a whole, is a convinced and consistent supporter of socialism. In certain statements and documents drawn up by national democrats in countries of the Arab East, Africa and Asia, this viewpoint interprets as favourable conditions wherever basically general-democratic transformations are given pride of place, changes that the peasantry, together with other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata, is vitally interested in, and therefore plays an active part in implementing. The contribution made by the peasantry, as the most numerous class of society, to the struggle for national independence and for land, especially where that struggle takes the form of armed conflict, serves as a condition for an uncritical transposition of the revolutionary spirit peculiar to the peasantry at the general-democratic stage to another, socialist stage, that is to say, a mechanical transposition of that revolutionary spirit from a lower to a superior level of revolutionary development. Here the peasantry's devotion to communal and clan traditions, to the social principles of Islam, Buddhism and Catholicism, is interpreted as proof of its dedication to socialism. These religious views are indeed highly influential in many developing countries, though they have to a considerable extent shed the features

of patriarchal socialism ascribed to them by those who adopt an idealised approach to the peasantry.

From this follows a highly specific understanding of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry and of the role each of these classes is called upon to play in the struggle for socialism. The significance of the proletariat and of its role of vanguard in the struggle for socialism is played down. This is done in various ways: in some cases, the working class and the peasantry are presented as equally devoted to socialism---and hence as playing an equal role in the construction of socialism. Instead of the hegemony of the proletariat, the leading role of the peasantry and the proletariat taken together is stressed, and the peasantry sometimes put first in a broader class bloc, including patriotic elements from among local capitalists.

A variant of this stand is the unscientific approach to the proletariat, not as a social class occupying a definite place in the process of capitalist production but as the totality of all those who are poor and exploited, in other words, not only the working class in the precise sense of the word but also the peasantry, and representatives of petty-bourgeois strata, and the intelligentsia. In practice, this means that entire nations that have been oppressed by imperialism are designated as proletarian nations. That is the way the proletariat has been defined, for example, by the Mali national democrats Idrissa Diarra, Madeira and Modibo Keita. When this approach is adopted, the slogan of the leading role of the proletariat obviously becomes vague and loses its class significance. It may even go beyond the bounds of the leadership of the peasantry and the working class, and fully coincide with even more indeterminate concepts advanced by certain national democrats, such as the "working forces of the people", "non-exploiter capital", "positive action of the nation", and the like.

Nevertheless, certain varieties of the concept held by the national democrats on the question of the alliance between the workers and peasants are not hostile to Marxism, and, moreover, they seem to hold out prospects for a certain degree of evolution. What is important is that such concepts acknowledge the revolutionary character of the proletariat, although they do not as yet fully acknowledge its specific

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425

nist and working-class movement, and between the developing countries and the world socialist system.

In all cases, though in unequal measure and with varying consequences, a rejection of the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, or non-recognition of the leading role of the proletariat in this alliance during the transition to the socialist revolution and the ensuing reconstruction of society stems from an idealisation of the peasantry as a whole, a romantic and naive exaggeration of its natural attachment to the ideals of patriarchal communism, and from a disregard of the fundamental factor, an analysis of which is absolutely essential for a correct formulation of the question of the peasantry's attitude to socialism, namely, the social and class stratification within the peasantry.

historic mission as leader of all revolutionary forces that are striving towards socialism, a mission conditioned by its place in production, social life and the class struggle. With the further advance of national liberation, anti-imperialist revolutions such concepts may well, under pressure from the actual course of the struggle, develop in a scientific-socialist direction.

Due consideration should also be given to the existence of another group of petty-bourgeois nationalist ideologists and politicians, who oppose the revolutionary potential of the peasantry to that of the proletariat, seeing in the former a superior type of revolutionary potential. They sometimes flatly deny the revolutionary potential of the urban proletariat. For instance, Frantz Fanon's book Les damhes de la terre puts across the idea that genuine socialism can develop only on the basis of fidelity to peasant, communal traditions, that the working class is part of a corrupt ``Western''', ``urban'', ``bourgeois'' civilisation and consequently cannot claim to be the bearer of socialist ideals. Some ideologists of the African national liberation movement who hold views on this question closely allied to those of Frantz Fanon, mistakenly set the interests of the peasantry against those of the working class, this leading to a distortion of the very concept ``proletariat''.

The special role of the working class and its alliance with the peasantry is also rejected from various other premises linked with Maoism which advocates to the exclusion of all else peasant, mainly armed, guerilla and often anarchist methods of struggle. The Maoist concept does not take into account the need to combine armed forms of the struggle in rural areas with strike action and, whenever necessary and given the right conditions, with the armed struggle of the working class in the cities. It presents the urban centres as bulwarks of reaction, and calls for the cities to be encircled by the forces of a rebellious insurgent peasantry, thus ignoring the vast revolutionary energy and political experience of the proletariat in large-scale industry. Besides, the Maoist stand completely ignores the international aspect of the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, that is to say, the need for firm unity between the revolutionary movements in the agrarian countries and the world commu-

These two diametrically opposed viewpoints are considered unscientific and non-realistic by Marxists-Leninists, who reject views that deny the possibility of and the need for the working class's struggle for socialism in an alliance with the working peasantry, inasmuch as that stand places the peasantry at the mercy of the bourgeoisie and deprives the proletariat of its strongest ally. Neither does Marxism accept the romantic and populist exaggeration of the peasantry's revolutionary character, or the idea of the peasant as the most consistent fighter for socialism, since that idea leads at best to socialism being replaced by petty-bourgeois radicalism and anarchism, or at worst by bourgeois reformism.

The founders of Marxism-Leninism consistently favoured proletarian support for the peasantry in all cases of action by the latter against feudal oppression, exploitation by traders and moneylenders, national oppression and colonial domination. When it is endeavouring to take political power, the party of scientific socialism is called upon to win the small peasant over to its side. "The conquest of political power by the Socialist Party has become a matter of the not too distant future. But in order to conquer political power this party must first go from the towns to the country, must become a power in the countryside,""" Frederick Engels

K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 458-

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wrote in 1894, with reference to the Germany and France of the end of the 19th century.

In The Agrarian Programme of Russian Social-- Democracy, Lenin expressed this idea as follows: "And in order to facilitate for our farm labourers and semi-farm labourers the subsequent transition to socialism, it is highly important that the Socialist Party begin to 'stand up' at once for the small peasants, and do 'everything possible' for them, never refusing a hand in solving the urgent and complex `alien' (non-proletarian) problems, and helping the working and exploited masses to regard the socialist party as their leader and representative."*

This proletarian stand stems from that class's striving to win allies in the struggle for socialism. But, while supporting the peasantry, acting in alliance with it, and striving to lead its revolutionary action, the proletariat naturally has to take into account the dual nature of the peasantry, and the class stratification at work within it.

These far-reaching processes of class stratification everywhere lead ultimately to the peasantry ceasing to exist as a single class, although certain shared interests and ideas still exist. There emerges, on the one hand, the rural bourgeoisie, an exploiter stratum, and, on the other, landless farm labourers, rural proletarians. In social standing, these strata are no longer of a dual nature, for they are objectively opposed to each other as class enemies. The duality of the peasantry's class nature still makes itself felt among the mass of poor peasants, who have not yet lost all their land and become proletarianised, and especially among the middle peasants.

The complexity of the present-day situation in the agrarian countries of the developing world consists in the fact that the struggles against feudal and capitalist exploitation are taking place at one and the same time. Lenin often spoke of the two class wars that the peasantry has to wage ---on the one hand, against survivals of feudalism, a struggle in which the entire peasantry takes up a united stand, and on the other, the struggle against capitalist exploitation in the villages which creates a split among the peasantry.

Extensive strata of the peasantry, who fail to appreciate the dangers inherent in capitalist tendencies, may feel inclined to an exclusively anti-feudalist struggle, especially in the early stages of the peasant movement. The mission of the working class consists in remaining the most consistent fighter for socialism in the mass general-democratic movement while giving full support to the peasantry's anti-- feudal action. This approach demands that the proletariat should preserve its organisational and political independence and single out, organise and forge into a political force within the framework of the general peasant movement those proletarian and semi-proletarian elements that can provide class support in the struggle against capitalism, for a socialist countryside. This was how the founders of Marxism-Leninism viewed the problem.

The Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry holds good and is relevant in respect of the developing countries. It may be asked: do the necessary conditions already exist there for the working class to assume leadership and is it not advisable to refrain from the recognition of the socialist orientation of a developing country until conditions are ripe there for the proletariat to assume a leading role in the national liberation and peasant movement? Inasmuch as opportunities for many developing countries to adopt a socialist orientation have opened up or are opening up---and that is how the idea of the non-capitalist path of development, as recognised by the international communist movement, should be understood---it is already time to pose the question of the proletariat's leading role in the struggle for socialist change. Of course, a scientific analysis of this problem calls for a realistic appraisal of the complex social situation in the developing countries and certain differences between the latter.

There are as yet no grounds to consider that the decisive role of the proletariat has been firmly established in most of the developing countries. The political immaturity, numerical and organisational weakness of the proletariat in the majority of Tropical African countries, as well as the

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 136.

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insufficiently wide influence of the Marxist-Leninist parties in the Afro-Asian states, where they exist and are engaged in political and economic struggle, give grounds for the conclusion that as yet conditions for the immediate hegemony of the working class do not exist everywhere. At this juncture it is important to ensure, in the foreseeable future, all-round extension of the working class's influence and the creation of conditions enabling it to play a leading role throughout the Third World.

The range of means by which the working class can assume an increasingly influential role and even be accepted as leader of the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, is today much wider than in the past. It is common knowledge that in most countries that have open to them real prospects for non-capitalist development (and their number is increasing), political leadership is provided by revolutionary-democratic circles of various political shades. Taken as a whole, no radical contradictions separate national democracy, especially its Left wing, from the working class, scientific socialism; in a number of countries it does not hamper them from extending their influence. Of course, this kind of situation develops wherever the national-democratic leadership is of a clearly expressed revolutionary and antiimperialist type, actually pursues socialist goals, and does not adopt an anti-Soviet or anti-communist stand.

Although in most of the developing countries the proletariat itself is insufficiently prepared to assume direct leadership of the general-democratic stage of the revolution, its influence on the course of the revolutionary process is making itself felt more and more. The working class's strike and political struggle, mass actions by the trade unions, active Marxist-Leninist parties, or when such parties do not yet exist, Marxist-Leninist groups, the role of the communist press, literature and policy documents, action by adherents of scientific socialism, and, lastly, the vast and all-embracing influence of the world socialist community are all exerting a considerable influence on the course of the national liberation revolution, on class-conscious workers and peasants, and on the intelligentsia which constitutes a significant force in the revolutionary movement.

In every non-capitalist, national-democratic country there

exists a revolutionary intelligentsia which has already assumed leadership of the revolutionary movement, or is anxious to do so. Insofar as it has adopted an anti-- imperialist stand and is resolutely implementing general-democratic transformations of an anti-capitalist character, and insofar as its interests and mission at the current stage objectively coincide with the class interests of the proletariat, the national-democratic leadership is obliged, by the logic of its struggle against imperialism, feudalism, and powerful compradore and conciliatory capital, to act in a way that is also in the interests of the working class. Of course, if the working class were already prepared to head the revolution it would use other methods, boldly relying on the whole-hearted support of the working masses.

In countries where power has been assumed by the revolutionary democrats, after they have stripped the bourgeoisie and the landowners of all power, their practical activities have shown that they seek support in certain measure from the toiling masses of the people, though they often do so timidly and irresolutely. Unlike the representatives of national-bourgeois and reformist political trends, the national democrats, taken as a whole, and especially their Left wing, do not and cannot have in states with a noncapitalist orientation, as well as in a number of developing countries where an active struggle is being waged to adopt such an orientation, any other mass social foundation than the working people. This naturally imposes considerable responsibility on the national democrats.

Their social programme, anti-imperialist practical activities, slogans and socialist orientation obviously preclude any support from the bourgeoisie and the landowners, and objectively demand support from the working class and the peasantry. The revolutionary democrats depend in considerable measure on that support. It is this situation that provides ample scope for active influence by class-conscious workers, peasants, intellectuals and the country's MarxistLeninist party on the national democrats and their stand in the revolution of the kind necessary for the success of that revolution. The more consistent the socialist orientation of the national-democratic ruling parties and the greater the encouragement given them in this respect by adherents of

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scientific socialism, the smoother will be the drawing together of revolutionary democrats and Communists. The very socialist orientation of the national democrats---whenever they serve the people's interests honestly and consistently--- ultimately serves to pave the way for the assumption of the leading political role by the working class.

The revolutionary democrats cannot immediately accept the idea of proletarian leadership. To do that, they must become Marxists-Leninists, something they can achieve only in the course of a long struggle against imperialism, capitalism and reaction. In the ideological respect they have been making definite progress over the last ten years or so, i.e., since the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties (1960) first advanced and substantiated the concept of national democracy and the need to join forces with the national democrats in the struggle against imperialism, capitalism and reaction. First and foremost, the national democrats are influenced by their own experience of the anti-imperialist and social struggle, as well as by the experience of the world socialist system and of scientific socialism. It is quite possible that, guided by their own experience and the example of the socialist countries, the genuine revolutionary democrats will, at a later stage of the struggle, come to adopt a scientific-socialist, a MarxistLeninist stand. This prospect is regarded as perfectly feasible and, of course, most desirable by the Communist Parties of the non-capitalist countries. Nor, of course, can one exclude another possibility---that of individual leaders or groups of national democrats moving over to the side of the bourgeoisie and reaction.

Thus, given the present stage of the working-class and the communist movement in the developing countries, the national democrats may become, and in some countries are already becoming, important allies of socialism, who can exert an influence on the revolutionary process, an influence that is all the more effective if they co-operate closely with the Marxists-Leninists.

The Marxist-Leninist parties have always pressed for the proletariat's leading role in the process of the democratic transformation of society, so that at the proper time and in alliance with the working peasantry and the intermediate

urban strata, they might make use of favourable objective and subjective conditions, interrupt capitalist development and adopt a path of socialist development. At the same time il; should be stressed that present-day national-democratic transformations, which open up the non-capitalist path to many countries of Asia and Africa, are proceeding despite the absence of direct proletarian leadership, which explains why they are being implemented at a slower pace, in a different order and on a different scale, than need be, and not without difficulties and internal crises.

Parallel with the non-capitalist transformation of society, national democracy is itself undergoing a process of transformation. And if its progressive elements will strive more and more towards socialism, actual conditions will make them appreciate more and more profoundly the great historical truth that the practical implementation of socialist ideals can take place only on the basis of the theory of scientific socialism, that is to say in unity and co-operation with the Marxist-Leninist parties and in close alliance with the world socialist community. It is in this unity of revolutionary forces that the possibility lies for the successful solution of the problem as a whole and the question of the pace of transition to socialism.

For all the differences between the economically and socially backward peasant countries of Asia and Africa, the possibility of the transition to the non-capitalist and then to the socialist stage of the revolution is also determined to a large extent by the anti-imperialist potential of the working peasantry which comprises the bulk of the population in these countries. Of course, it is very important, when using this potential, to educate and organise the working peasantry, the more so because the proportion of semi-proletarian and proletarian elements in the rural population is continually growing. No transition to socialist transformations is possible without organisation and education of the peasantry by forward-looking political forces, and without taking into account the interests of the working peasantry and the rural population. Without that, power can neither be won, nor retained in a peasant country. No programme of socialist change can be effected in a peasant environment without firm support from the small peasants,

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without a close alliance with them. This has been borne out by the experience of many decades and many countries and parties.

The stand taken by Lenin on this question is absolutely straightforward and possesses exceptional importance today. Not only did Lenin substantiate the thesis that the antiimperialist movement of the overwhelming majority of the world population, once it gathers momentum, will ultimately be directed against capitalism, but he also showed, as stated above, that, by entering the revolutionary struggle to assert their vital demands, the petty-bourgeois strata, that is to say, above all the peasantry, will inevitably "bring into the movement their prejudices ... their weaknesses and errors. But objectively, they will attack capital. . . ."*

Lenin had in mind the huge human reservoir, the mass that is amorphous in the class sense, the for all intents and purposes peasant ``material''. It is from that ``material'' that we are now witnessing the emergence of the new classes of today. In waging a struggle against imperialism and feudal survivals, for demands that might seem highly specific, the peasants in the Afro-Asian countries cannot but "attack capital", both foreign and home-bred varieties, both that capital which is penetrating rural areas from without and that which is gradually evolving within them. Pre-capitalist oppression of the peasantry was never combined in the past with capitalist exploitation on such a scale as it is today. All this objectively leads to the peasants, the working poor and the semi-proletarians---central figures in rural Africa and Asia---inevitably and spontaneously opposing capitalism.

Today we are confronted not only with objectively anticapitalist peasant actions. As capital comes more and more to be personified both in rural oppressors of the new type and in the traditional objects of the peasantry's fierce hatred---the landowner and the moneylender---the working peasant is also coming out subjectively and more or less consciously against the developing capitalist order. The interests of this type of peasant are reflected in various degrees and in different forms by the Communists, the van-

guard of the working class, and by the revolutionary democrats who represent the vanguard of radical democracy.

Consistent national democracy is not only an anti-- imperialist and an anti-feudal force, but also one that "attacks capital". If the national democrats confine their role only to the revolutionary elimination of colonial and feudal regimes, they would merely clear the way for capitalism and no more. They would have no "socialist orientation". Nor would there be any prospects for collaboration with the Marxist-Leninist parties and the adherents of scientific socialism.

By attacking capital it is possible to start the advance along the non-capitalist path of development. However, to advance successfully in this direction, to ensure a transition to socialism and later the victory of socialism, it is not enough merely to attack capital. What is required for that is to know how to construct a socialist society, how to analyse and assimilate the vast experience of the construction of socialism and communism, and to be able to apply that experience in the concrete situation of the country in question; what is ultimately needed is to become genuine and active adherents of scientific socialism and to advance towards that goal in a united front with the MarxistsLeninists.

Proletarian leadership cannot at present but give priority to the task of creating a united anti-imperialist and anticapitalist front of the progressive forces. It is, however, not a question of forming a bloc on the basis of upper-crust alliances. A bloc with all those who are in fact heading the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal national liberation movement should make its immediate aim the progressive forces' direct access first and foremost to the broad masses of the working people. This is precisely the objective of the tactics based on the principle of a united anti-imperialist front.

In striving to make the greatest possible use of the potential of the national revolution at the present stage, the working class and the Marxist-Leninist parties cannot but proceed from the Marxist-Leninist principle of the leading role of the proletariat. To achieve leadership of the peasant

28---919

* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 356.

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masses and the middle urban strata in a united front with the national democrats---such is the realistic goal the working class should aspire to.

stage leadership has not yet been assumed by the working class and its political vanguard.

Naturally, in order to define the agrarian programme and policy to pursue, it is necessary to ascertain which of the two contradictions linked with the peasantry is of decisive importance---the contradiction between the peasantry and those who use feudal, pre-capitalist, and landownercapitalist methods of exploitation, or the contradiction within the peasantry. It is the former contradiction that is still predominant at the present stage of non-capitalist development. In this sense, in certain countries and large regions (states and provinces) the peasantry as a whole still possesses a certain potential for joint revolutionary action. At the same time, development along a non-capitalist path calls for most careful attention to be paid to the class stratification in the countryside, vigilance towards kulak and landowner-capitalist exploiter tendencies, which are often disguised by patriarchal, tribal and caste relationships, and for rallying and organising the semi-proletarian and proletarian strata of the rural population.

It should be remembered that most of the countries ( especially those in Asia) that are developing along the capitalist road are characterised by a high degree of "de-- peasantisation", that is to say the pauperisation of the peasantry as a consequence of long-standing colonial and feudal exploitation, and delayed industrial development, also the fruit of colonialist policy (as in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia). As for the stratum of rich peasants it is fairly considerable in a number of countries (between 10 and 20 per cent of all farms) while in other countries (especially in Tropical Africa) it is only just emerging. However, because of the illdefined class stratification in the countryside and the absence of an established urban industrial bourgeoisie, the rich peasants, together with the commercial and bureaucratic bourgeoisie, are the main and most determined vehicles of capitalist trends on a nation-wide scale.

The obvious solution to these important contradictions lies in the widest possible joint struggle on the part of the entire peasantry to assert their interests---a struggle against neo-colonialism and the oppression of the foreign monopolies, against the seizure of communal lands for plantations

What goals is national democracy calling upon the peasant masses to attain? What is the agrarian programme of its political vanguard? The answers to these questions depend on an appraisal of the present stage of the revolutionary process and an understanding of the subsequent path of development for the national liberation revolution. Today many young states are either already following or preparing to follow the path of non-capitalist development by introducing socio-economic transformations in the - interests of the masses. Significant steps are being taken in relation to the land problem: important agrarian reforms have been effected in Egypt and Syria and work has also started to this end in Somalia and Algeria. All land has been nationalised in the People's Republic of the Congo. Largescale landownership has been abolished in Burma and has also been greatly curtailed in Iraq. A far-reaching antifeudal reform is under way in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. The national democrats are eradicating feudalism in the countryside and are all set to attack capitalism.

The view has grown up in Marxist literature that it is mainly general-democratic transformations that are being implemented in countries that have opted for the noncapitalist path, with due allowances being taken for future socialist developments. This means a policy that not only precludes the possibility of converting the emergent bourgeois elements (as in Tropical Africa) or the national bourgeoisie (as in the Arab East and Burma) into a class that is economically and politically predominant or consolidating its influence, but, on the contrary, undermines these social forces. Here a highly complex and at times contradictory overlapping takes place between general-democratic and socialist trends, an interlocking of elements from two qualitatively different stages of a single revolutionary process, but with the unmistakable predominance of the general-democratic and anti-imperialist transformations. At this

28*

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and the mining industry and against high indirect taxation, and for the establishment of prices for agricultural produce acceptable to the peasantry, the granting of easy credits, the development of marketing and consumer co-operatives, and so on. To this end, the semi-proletarian strata of the peasantry, as well as farm and plantation workers, should prepare organisationally and politically for a decisive struggle against rural exploiters of all kinds.

However, there cannot be any single and comprehensive approach to this problem. There are extensive areas in a number of Afro-Asian countries in which capitalism in agriculture has made great strides. As a result of bourgeois agrarian reforms in these countries, the exploitation of the peasantry by feudal landowners has been greatly undermined and curtailed, certain aspects of that exploitation have indeed already been eliminated. These reforms have benefited first and foremost the national bourgeoisie (the expansion of the home market, higher differential rent, influx of capital into agriculture, and intensive exploitation of farm workers), a small section of capitalist landowners reminiscent in certain respects of the Prussian Junkers, the entrepreneur stratum of the peasantry, the prosperous middle peasants (from among the tenant-farmers who have become owners of land, lease extra land, are closely connected with the market and often employ hired labour). However, even in these regions many of the former contradictions between the peasant masses and those who apply pre-capitalist and semi-feudal methods of exploitation still persist. There has been an increase in the number of peasants who are landless or unemployed and who have in fact been ousted from agricultural production. The relative agrarian over-- population has become intolerable and threatens at any moment to give rise to a social explosion. With regard to the number of owners and acreage, peasant landownership has increased but peasant land-tenure in terms of acreage has remained at more or less the same level and has even decreased in a number of countries. Millions of tenant-farmers have been driven off the land on which powerful capitalist landowners and peasant entrepreneurs have set up largescale farms.

Let us examine the post-reform norms for landownership

introduced in several countries, or what is usually called the maximum level (``ceiling'') of landownership. Indeed it may well be said that in many respects this ``ceiling'' characterises the effectiveness of the reforms in question.

Since neither nationalisation of all land nor confiscation of the large estates in favour of the peasants have been carried through, the fixed maximum extent of landed holdings reflects as it were the degree of radicality achieved in the solution of the main problem---the quantity of privatelyowned land permitted. Of course, what we are concerned with here is not a question of averages, but of the class approach as reflecting the alignment of class forces in rural areas. If this indicator is combined with figures on the total area of land confiscated from landowners and redistributed among the peasants a fairly clear overall picture is obtained.

Egypt: At the beginning of the 1960s a radical change took place in the country's internal policy. The people opted for a socialist course and the country embarked on a path of non-capitalist development. After the high ``ceilings'' stipulated for landed holdings in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, norms that may be considered temporary or intermediate, the most recent maximum has been set at 42 hectares. By 1966, 397,000 hectares or 10 per cent of the entire area under cultivation had been confiscated from the landowners; 350,000 peasant families (of which 40 per cent landless peasants) were given 351,000 hectares of state, fallow or confiscated land.

The progressive implications of the reform are selfevident. This is also emphasised by the fact that the Egyptian peasants are not required to pay the landowners any compensation for the land they have been given and they receive extensive aid from the state in credits, seed, machinery and other equipment.*

* At the end of October 1971, certain retrograde steps in the implementation of the agrarian reform in Egypt were made. The authorities responsible for the agrarian reform decided to pay compensation to approximately 5,000 landowners, whose land had been confiscated in keeping with the agrarian reform law of 1969, which had stipulated the ``ceiling'' per family at 100 feddans and per capita at 50 feddans. The compensation was fixed at 70 times the land tax that had been exacted

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The Israeli aggression held up the implementation of the agrarian reforms in Egypt. The main reserve of arable land consists of new areas which will come under cultivation as a result of the exploitation of the Aswan dam.

In keeping with the ten-year development plan, on which Egypt embarked in 1972, 720,000 feddans of new land (1 feddan=0.42 hectare) are to be brought under cultivation and over 500,000 feddans of land already prepared for cultivation are to be farmed. The government has put aside to this end 120,000,000 Egyptian pounds, since it attaches great importance to the cultivation of this new land and its active utilisation, as one of the major means for increasing agricultural production by 50 per cent over this ten-year period.

Syria: Following a number of reductions, the ``ceiling'' for land-holdings still remains relatively high in this country: the maximum is between 15 and 55 hectares for irrigated land and between 80 and 300 hectares for dryfarming land. This has allowed the more prosperous peasants to engage in market farming.

In the mid-1960s Syria embarked on a course of socialistoriented development. The reform made it possible by 1968 to confiscate 1,400,000 hectares or 25 per cent of all the arable land from the landowners. Of this area, 672,000 hectares were transferred to 40,000 peasants, a step which,

however, satisfied only 11.1 per cent of peasant families in need of land (350,000).

The reform in Syria has been positive, inasmuch as it has considerably reduced large-scale landownership and has given a quarter of all the land to the peasants. In respect of the working peasants the significance of the reform has been greater still, because of the new areas brought under cultivation which will grow in particular once the Euphrates dam is completed, and a large reservoir thus formed.

Iraq: 1969 saw the official introduction of a fairly high level for maximum land-holdings, the ``ceiling'' being set at between 10 and 150 hectares for irrigated land and between 250 and 500 hectares for dry-farming land. The extent of the feudal or semi-feudal exploitation of the Iraqi peasantry can be deduced from the fact that even with so high a ``ceiling'' over 3,000,000 hectares, or 50 per cent of all the arable land was alienated. The landowners' surpluses, as well as unoccupied state, fallow or recently cultivated land (in all 3,300,000 hectares) were distributed among 268,000 peasant families. As a result close on 35 per cent of the landless peasants were given land-holdings. In 1969 rules providing for compensation payments to the landowners for the land confiscated from them were dropped and likewise those payments formerly exacted from the peasants.

Algeria: The French-owned land in the north of Algeria (over 2,000,000 hectares) had been nationalised very soon after the triumph of the Algerian revolution and large, autonomous farms were set up on this land, for the main part consisting of vineyards. This was a considerable achievement of the national liberation revolution. It was only in 1971 that radical agrarian reforms were introduced in the central and southern parts of the country, reforms that were directed against feudal and large-scale landownership. The issue of radical changes to be introduced in the traditional Algerian villages assumed prime importance. The peasantry, which had constituted the main force of the national liberation revolution and which made up three-quarters of the total population, was still living in conditions of poverty and backwardness. The vast majority of the fellahs either possessed very little land or none at all. There also existed

for privately-owned land in 1966 and it was to be paid over a period of 9 years. Meanwhile no compensation was granted for lands confiscated prior to that date.

A revealing statement in this connection is that made by the wellknown Egyptian journalist, Mohammed Oda, regarding the inadequacies of the agrarian reform in Egypt (Al-Gumhouria, October 28, 1971):

``The peasants are the main force behind socialist changes in Egypt, and thus a radical transformation of agriculture is the most important aspect of the national action programme at the present decisive stage. The chief defect of Egypt's agrarian reform was that it was a purely administrative undertaking without broad political implications. The peasant masses took no part in its implementation, so that the feudal elements and rural bourgeoisie were able to retain their influence. They did everything in their power to hinder the development of agriculture on a socialist basis, trying to divert it along capitalist or semi-capitalist lines and promoting class struggle in the countryside. The time has come to resolutely eliminate these forces politically and economically.''

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a small strata of powerful landowners (16,500) which owned 27 per cent of the land under cultivation in the private sector.

Algeria's government and Revolutionary Council issued in July 1971 the draft of a law on agrarian revolution. This defined the basic principles underlying agrarian changes to be introduced in that country. The law provided, among other things, for the curtailment of large landed estates, for the introduction of new norms for maximum and minimum land-holdings, for the nationalisation of land belonging to powerful landowners resident in the cities who rented out their property, for the setting up of a National Agrarian Revolution Fund, for the reorganisation of animal husbandry and the elaboration of new legislation prohibiting private sale of water, etc. According to this law, fellahs who received land-holdings would join together in co-operatives which were to be organised throughout the country.

On the basis of this draft law, on November 1, 1971, a new Agrarian Revolution Charter came into force; this charter outlined the aims of the changes to be introduced in rural Algeria and the means that would be used to this end. This agrarian revolution represents an important effort to treat justly the Algerian fellahs who made the greatest sacrifices in the course of the national liberation struggle. This step was also vital with regard to the economic development and progress of the country as a whole. The agrarian reforms did not do away with private ownership entirely, but were definitely aimed at putting an end to exploitation of man by man,

Pakistan: In the western part of this country (now Pakistan) which is ruled by powerful landowners and the bourgeoisie, a very high ``ceiling'' for land-holdings was introduced in 1963---200 hectares of irrigated land and 400 hectares of dry-farming land. However, even this maximum made it possible to confiscate 1,200,000 hectares of landowners' surpluses, which were then handed over to 300,000 peasant families. However, the real significance of this reform has been negligible, for the entire area of confiscated land amounts to a mere 4.1 per cent of all the land under cultivation in West Pakistan, which is otherwise the unchallenged property of landowners.

As for densely populated East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the ``ceiling'' was set at 40 hectares of irrigated land and 48 hectares of dry-farming land. In view of the fact that peasant land-holdings were exclusively small or very small (the ``bargadar'' system---a variety of oppressive share-cropping), it may be said that the reform has had little effect on the position of the landowners and the rich peasants. In this area of intensive multi-yield and highly productive market farming, specialising mainly in jute and rice production, the ``ceiling'' stipulated serves to gloss over the surplus land in the hands of the landowners. For all intents and purposes the latter have been able to reduce the reform to nought.

India: This country's 400,000,000 peasants (who make up almost 25 per cent of the world's total) can become a tremendous force of epoch-making significance, if they rally behind the banner of the working class. It was from this angle that Lenin appraised the role of India in world politics and that of the Indian peasantry in the world-wide antiimperialist struggle.

The claim sometimes made to the effect that India's rural economy is stagnant, is one-sided and thus does not reflect the actual situation. True, there were grounds in the 1930s^ for the claim that Indian agriculture was on the decline in conditions of feudal domination and under the yoke of British finance capital and its agents among local traders and moneylenders. Between 1901 and 1945, the increase in gross agricultural output was only 12 per cent, while the population went up by almost 45 per cent. The advent of independence saw considerable changes: between 1951 and 1969, the gross output of agriculture went up by 71 per cent, while the population increased by 50 per cent (this despite the fact that the gross harvest dropped by almost 17 per cent in 1965-1967 as a result of drought).

However, these changes did not bring about a radical improvement of the situation in agriculture. One of the world's largest agrarian countries, potentially capable of producing cereals and foodstuffs for almost the entire world, India has been unable over many years to feed her own population, and for many years depended to a large degree on food imported from the USA.

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The replacement of colonial rule by that of the national bourgeoisie was accompanied by a period of agrarian reforms. However, the landowning elite and the state officials in charge of agriculture and the conduct of reforms were able to freeze the redistribution of land for a considerable period. For many years a struggle has been in progress over the question of the ``ceiling'' for land-holdings between the democratic and the reactionary forces both in the states and in the centre. The level originally stipulated was too high and frequently resulted in partial ``decentralisation'' of large estates by means of parcelling, while medium-sized estates in the possession of landowners remained intact.

The census conducted at the end of the reform period (1961) showed that peasant farms of under 2.4 acres comprising 39 per cent of their total number, account for 6.9 per cent of the total area under cultivation; farms between 2.4 and 7.3 acres comprising 35.5 per cent of the total, account for 24.1 per cent of the total area under cultivation. Consequently, the two lower and most numerous peasant groups, which account for 74.5 per cent of all farms, own only 31 per cent of the land under cultivation. The disproportion between the number of such farms and the land they occupy is very great---2.4:1. At the same time, the two upper brackets in landownership, with farms between 25 and 50 acres and from 50 acres and more, account for only 4.5 per cent of the overall number, but occupy 29 per cent of the arable land. In other words, 4.5 per cent of owners---landowners and rich peasants---possess almost the same area of land as that taken up by 75 per cent of the farms belonging to the lower brackets. But that is not all. There are also between 50 and 70 million peasants who possess no land at all. The nation-wide sample survey conducted in post-reform conditions (1959-1961) showed that 61 per cent of all Indian peasants do not own the land they till, i.e., they are landless tenants.

Given this tremendous inequality in landownership, the bulk of the peasants naturally expected a just solution of the land problem. But the bourgeois and landowning circles "in the states, not without the connivance of the centre, established landownership ``ceilings'' that were patently designed to keep the landowners' estates out of the peasants'

hands, to conceal surplus land that had been shown to exist, and to make use of all kinds of machinations and loopholes so as to evade the laws. The following maximum levels of landownership were established (family ``ceilings'' also being taken into account) on the individual estates: in Andhra Pradesh---between 27 and 324 acres; Assam---50 acres (recently reduced to 25); Bihar---between 20 and 60 acres; Gujarat---between 19 and 132 acres (per family); Jammu and Kashmir---22.75 acres; Kerala---between 15 and 36 acres (in 1970 the government headed by Communist A. Menon lowered this ``ceiling'' to between 6 and 20 acres per family); Madhya Pradesh---25 and 75 acres; Tamilnad---between 24 and 120 acres (per family); Maharashtra--- between 18 and 126 acres; Mysore---between 27 and 216 acres; Orissa---between 20 and 80 acres; Punjab---from 27 to 100 acres; Rajasthan---from 22 to 336 acres; Uttar Pradesh---from 40 to 80 acres; West Bengal---25 acres; Delhi--- from 24 to 60 acres; Himachal Pradesh---30 acres; Manipur ---25 acres and Tripura from 25 to 75 acres.

Even a cursory glance at this list makes it clear that strictly speaking no real maximum level was established that could in fact meet the needs of the working peasants. The leeway here is so wide that, given the tenacity and dexterity, which the corrupt officials undeniably possess, it can be used to conceal all or almost all the semi-feudal landed estates existent in India by parcelling the big estates among the members of a single family and its relatives. True, landownership by the big zamindars, who, as a rule, were parasitic absentee landlords, has been done away with. The former statutory zamindars and jagirdars, once a bulwark of British rule in India, no longer exist, but, as surveys have shown, this process, from the viewpoint of the peasantry, has involved little more than a lengthy parcelling-out and redivision of large zamindar holdings into medium-sized ones, accompanied by an obvious trend towards capitalist development.

The concealment of surplus land and deception of the peasantry, so widespread as to assume the form of official policy, were the landowners' main weapons in the struggle against the reforms. For instance, of the total 340 to 360 million acres of arable land, where large estates predomi-

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nated, recorded surpluses as against the fixed maximum comprised only 2,410,000 acres, or a mere 0.6 per cent of the arable land. Moreover, only 1,039,000 acres, or less than one half of these meagre surpluses, were distributed among the peasants. In Jammu and Kashmir alone, where the ``ceiling'' was 22.75 acres, the 450,000 acres of surplus land recorded were immediately distributed among the peasants in the first years of the reform.

An interesting picture emerges: of the 2,400,000 acres of surplus land found 1,000,000 acres were distributed among the peasants, and almost half of this surplus was accounted for by a single state---Jammu and Kashmir---which incidentally has the smallest population. The example of Kashmir brings out certain aspects of the agrarian policy pursued by the bourgeois and landowner circles. This state has a population of 3,600,000 and 83 per cent of this total live in rural areas. The peasants are of Moslem faith, while the landowners are Hindus. As is common knowledge, Kashmir has been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan, a fact which induced the ruling circles in the state to give effect to the most radical solution of the agrarian question in favour of the peasantry, thereby strengthening their position in this area of tension between the two countries.

Kerala is another Indian state where a radical agrarian reform is being carried out. The ``ceiling'' of between 6 and 20 acres established here by the state government led by Communist A. Menon, as well as the active participation of the peasants in the implementation of the reform, lend it a consistent anti-feudal character.

It should be emphasised that at the time the bourgeoisie and the landowners were trying to ``reform'' patterns of rural landownership to their own advantage, no nationwide peasant movement existed in the country, although there was sporadic local action. The most politically conscious sections of the peasants demanded land, work and bread, but tens of millions of peasants suffered in silence from starvation, poverty, unemployment and a short supply or total lack of land to till. But on the whole the peasantry believed that the great day would come when they would be given land. The rural elite consisting of officials, landowners and rich peasants did its utmost to foster among the

peasants the illusion of a forthcoming fair distribution of land. Taking advantage of the organisationally weak peasant unions enjoying little influence, and of the caste, ethnic, tribal, language and religious differences among the peasants, this elite tried, and not without success, to preserve intact its basic privilege---ownership of the land.

A new period has now set in, one of profound change in rural India and in the consciousness of the peasants. The advance of capitalism has thoroughly destroyed the unity of the peasantry as a social class. The entrepreneur elements among the peasantry who comprise about 10 to 15 per cent of the latter, are satisfied with the reform and making good use of it. More or less well-to-do peasants, who are out to become farmers in their own right, make up a similar percentage, so that together these two groups comprise between 25 and 30 per cent of the proprietors, while the rest of the peasant population ranges between the middle position and the poverty line, some owning tiny plots of land that they are paying for in instalments. Then come the mass of tenant-farmers and finally the army of landless rural workers, farm hands and day labourers.

Recognising the straits of the Indian peasants, the government headed by Indira Gandhi is endeavouring to give them every assistance. At a conference of the first ministers of the states called in late 1969, in Delhi, by the Prime Minister, the Ministry for Home Affairs reported on the causes and nature of the present tension in agrarian affairs. The implementation of the agrarian reforms, the report stated, which was so enthusiastically embarked upon immediately after independence, had come almost to a complete standstill. It was not surprising, the report continued, that a sense of injustice and widespread land hunger had led to organised action. The report went on to say that there existed a great concentration of property in land. A considerable portion of the land divided into small plots was being tilled by tenants and share-croppers who had no confidence in the security of their lease-holds and had to pay exorbitant rents. Inequality in landownership still existed, as the laws covering the maximum permitted land-holdings were not carried out. That was why inequality was being built up, thus exacerbating social tension, the report added.

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Many of the first ministers emphasised the great significance of the agricultural measures implemented in the course of the so-called green revolution. Proceeding from this appraisal of the state of affairs in the countryside, Indira Gandhi told the first ministers that if the green revolution did not go hand in hand with a revolution based on social justice, it might possibly not remain green.

The incompleteness of the agrarian reform, the increasing class stratification in the countryside, and the deterioration in the conditions of the mass of working peasants and agricultural labourers led to sharp agrarian conflicts in a number of states in the autumn of 1970: the poorest of the peasants took possession of land illegally held by the landowners. Rejecting the selfish policies of the Right, the leadership of the Indian National Congress is out to resume the agrarian reform interrupted by the reactionaries. The impressive victory won by the INC in the March 1971 parliamentary elections provides scope for doing away with large and medium-scale landed estates and redistributing the land in favour of the working peasantry in vindication of the rural population's long-cherished hopes. The peasants are desperate for land and hope to attain it through just legislation.

Let us now consider the figures for Iran and Turkey.

Iran: Agrarian policies over the last decade illustrate the gradual adaptation of the feudal village to the conditions of intensive capitalist development. Such has been the class policy of the ruling circles, which has been aimed at carrying through ``prophylactic'' reforms, whose essence has consisted in curbing the power of the feudal landowners.

For centuries Iran has been a country of large-scale feudal landownership. The landowner did not engage in agriculture himself but leased out the land of the tens and hundreds of villages he owned on a share-cropping basis. Since he owned the land, the water resources and, in many cases, all the draft animals and the seed, he was able to appropriate between 40 and 80 per cent of the crops. In conditions of rural over-population, this oppressive system of share-cropping was a form of exploitation of the peasants which brought maximum advantage to the landowners who gathered in rent without themselves engaging in farming.

Plots cultivated by any share-cropper who could not make his way or was driven off the land, were always in demand. Some 10 to 15 years ago, rural Iran was in the grip of a serious agrarian crisis. The agrarian reform from above that had got off the ground in 1960, met with stubborn opposition from the feudal landowners. In the first stage of the reform, the ``ceiling'' for land-holdings was set at 300 hectares of irrigated or 600 hectares of dry-farming land. In the second stage (1966), the maximum size of holdings was considerably reduced, to 30-50 and 80-200 hectares respectively. As a result 513,000 peasant families or 40 per cent of all landless peasants were granted land.

Significant survivals of semi-feudal relations still exist in rural Iran today. Now it is not only the land problem which is already somewhat less acute, but a number of other, new problems in the life of the working peasantry and agricultural labourers which are at the forefront of attention as a result of the newly instituted agrarian relations and the intensive development of commodity and capitalist economy. Turkey: This is one of the few if not the only Eastern country where there exist not only large-scale landed estates---found everywhere---but also a long-standing and expanding system of privately-owned large-scale farming. In 1965 a ``ceiling'' was stipulated of between 200 and 500 hectares (a level designed to preserve and develop effective commodity production on landowners' and capitalist farms), which, moreover, was also designed to raise the upper stratum of rich peasants to the level of the largescale modern farmer akin to the landowner.

Though, as a result of the reform and a long period of development, capitalist principles have struck root in about half of the big estates (4,000,000 out of 7,700,000 hectares), the introduction of the above-mentioned maximum has enabled the state to limit itself to alienating from the landowners an almost symbolical total area of 59 thousand hectares or 0.3 per cent of all the land under cultivation. This, of course, has in no way helped solve the problem of land for the peasants with little or no land to cultivate. To ease this problem, the peasants were granted 2,000,000 hectares of state, fallow or newly cultivated land (according to data for 1960); 394 thousand families, or 30 per cent of

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the landless peasants were given land. Thus, the reform has given active support to the large-scale capitalist farming that has already struck root.

Burma: Agriculture is the main branch of this country's economy. More than 90 per cent of the working people are employed in the private sector of agriculture. For a variety of reasons (the low level of agricultural techniques, the shortage of technical equipment and mineral fertilisers, the activities of insurgents in the agricultural regions, etc.) the growth rate for agricultural production is low. For the last few years the annual growth of agricultural production averaged 2 per cent (1968/69---2.1 per cent, 1969/70---a little over one per cent).

When the Revolutionary Council came to power, the state started to play a much more significant role in agricultural production. The new government introduced a number of important changes affecting land relations, agricultural credit, the purchasing of farm produce, the expansion of the co-operative network and the introduction of more advanced cultivation techniques. The laws on leaseholding (1963), protection of peasant rights (1963) and the abolition of land rents (1965) were aimed at putting an end to feudal and semi-feudal exploitation of the peasants. In accordance with these laws redistribution of land was effected in the interests of small and medium peasants and tenant-farmers. This led to a conspicuous improvement in the position of over a million peasants and tenant-farmers and dealt a major blow at feudal patterns of landownership in the countryside; however, it did not do away with rural exploitation completely and the working peasants were still not entirely free of such exploitation.

No decisive change was brought about in the correlation between farming based on lease-holding and privatelyowned peasant plots. In 1968/69 rented holdings accounted for 35.2 per cent of all land-holdings (in 1961/62 the equivalent figure had been 36.3 per cent) and these holdings accounted for 41 per cent of the total land area (in 1961/62 ---44 per cent). It is more than likely that it was first and foremost the tenants of middle-scale holdings who made use of the right of permanent lease-holding in accordance with the law of 1963, while the rank-and-nle tenant-farm-

ers with small plots continued to rent their land on the same basis as before. In other words, there was little prospect of them coming to own their holdings. At the present time the prosperous peasants and kulaks constitute a considerable proportion of the owners of land in rural Burma: 7 per cent of the total (whose holdings account for 10-100 or more acres) possess 23.2 per cent of all the land belonging to the peasants. This rich stratum of the village population consists of 299,500 owners of 5,200,000 acres. Efforts to impede the continuing exploitation of the peasant masses by traders and moneylenders, who still continue their illegal activities in the villages, and by rich peasants using semifeudal methods of exploitation are vital in present conditions to ensure further socio-economic development in rural Burma. The Revolutionary Council attributes particular importance in this context to the work of the popular peasant councils.

The state also devotes considerable attention to promoting agricultural co-operatives; this work consists in the main of setting up supply and marketing co-operatives. It furthers the consolidation of co-operative principles in Burmese agriculture and does a good deal to undermine the position of the traders and moneylenders. At the present time agricultural and multi-branch co-operatives are coming to represent the main procurers of agricultural produce and already constitute a monopoly organisation through which state trading corporations supply the villages with manufactured goods. The number of agricultural co-- operatives between 1962 and 1968 increased almost 3.5 times over and the total figure in 1968 was 12,512. The amount of rice purchased from peasants by the co-operatives rose from 4,870 baskets (one basket equals 20.9 kilogrammes) in 1964/65 to 66,935 baskets in 1969/70.

It is planned that these agricultural supply and marketing co-operatives should in the future be adapted as producer co-operatives. Despite the fact that there are many considerable obstacles to this reform, successful development of agricultural co-operation in the political conditions now obtaining in Burma could provide a basis for the gradual transition of rural Burma to a non-capitalist path of development.

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An analysis of the policies pursued by the Revolutionary Council with regard to agriculture shows that they are based on the endeavour to enhance the role of the state in this vital field of the national economy and to bring about substantial improvements in the difficult conditions to which the vast mass of the peasants are subjected. Between 1962 and 1970 the Burmese Government set aside 430 million dja for the development of agriculture and rural area: of this sum some 60 per cent was spent on the construction of irrigation installations. The peasants are now being supplied with better seed, pedigree cattle, mineral fertilisers, pesticides and weed-killers, at preferential rates. By 1970, 410 villages had been supplied with electricity and the number of tractors employed in Burmese agriculture was already in excess of 4,000. A wide network of state-run machine and tractor stations had been set up and tractors were being sold to agricultural co-operatives on a credit basis. A centralised system had been introduced for the purchase of agricultural produce from the peasants at fixed prices, and broad-scale propaganda was under way to encourage peasants to use more scientific methods of cultivation. Qualified agricultural experts were being sent out to the villages.

These steps taken by the Burmese Government in its effort to improve the living standards of the working peasants, who comprise in the main large groups of owners of small and medium plots, tenant-farmers or landless peasants, had a positive influence on the mood of the peasants, who are now coming to appreciate more and more clearly the importance of the socio-economic changes in Burmese agriculture introduced by th£ Revolutionary Council.

Indonesia:The share of agriculture in the gross national product of this country is 52 per cent, and 70 per cent of the self-employed population is engaged in this branch. The largest concentration of the population is found in Java and Madura where close on 70 per cent of the whole population live. There are 8 million peasant households on these two islands with 7,600,000 hectares of farming land. According to the 1963 census, 52 per cent of the peasants were working plots of less than half a hectare and 27 per cent owned plots of between half and one hectare.

In 1960 an agrarian reform law was introduced which stipulated a ``ceiling'' for land-holdings of 5 hectares. By the end of 1963 land surpluses totalling 124,000 hectares had been registered in Java, but only 13 per cent of these surpluses had been redistributed. Land surpluses of 35,000 hectares had been registered in the island of Bali, and of these only 3,000 hectares had been redistributed. The blocking of these agrarian reforms continued with each passing year.

In the tense period which set in after September 30, 1965, after the Communist Party, trade unions and peasant organisations had been crushed, in various parts of Java, land that had been granted to peasants was taken away and returned to the previous owners. In accordance with the agrarian reform law, special courts were set up in the early 1960s to investigate cases of surplus land confiscation and under pressure from the popular masses the verdicts reached were sometimes in accordance with the peasants' interests. After September 30, 1565, these courts were closed and the peasants found theiriselves with still less rights than before in their dealings with the local authorities and the landowners.

The fragmentation of land-holdings as a result of the natural increase of the rural population and the concentration of land in the hands of the big landowners proceeded far more rapidly than industrial development. Rural overpopulation attained a very high level. An enormous mass of unemployed left the villages. This led to the appearance of a large d6classe section of the rural population and the rapid growth of an urban lumpen-proletariat.

The exodus of peasants from Java and many other densely populated islands to peripheral relatively empty islands is negligible because this involves tremendous expenditure which the state is not prepared to subsidise.

The military-bureaucratic regime now in power shows no readiness to solve the agrarian question in the interests of the peasants; instead it endeavours through various schemes aimed at intensifying food production and other spheres of agriculture, geared above all to exports, to put off solving this basic social issue. The fact that the agrarian question still has to be solved accounts for the highly tense situation

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in the villages, which may well at some later date prove a real threat to this military-bureaucratic regime. The fact that the peasants are deprived of almost any rights, have far too little land and live in conditions of extreme poverty sometimes leads to spontaneous uprisings even in conditions of the present regime which is based above all on terror.

In a document entitled "Vital Tasks for the Communist Movement in Indonesia" the position of the peasants in present-day Indonesia is outlined in the following terms: "The working peasants who constitute the majority of the Indonesian population have lost even the little which, with the help of the Communists, they gained from the agrarian legislation of 1960. After the merciless campaign directed against the Communist Party, the feudal lords, landowners and rich peasants have instituted a new reign of cruel terror. The intimidated peasantry has little hope of any brighter future." The Indonesian peasants are in a sorry plight: they have no legal organisation to protect their interests.

The Philippines: The Magsaisai reforms introduced in the mid-1950s led to little more than a certain restriction on the size of estates owned by the big landowners, who were paid compensation for the surpluses confiscated from them, to a negligible reduction in rents, to an increase in the funds set aside for resettlement of landless peasants on lands reclaimed by the state, to the extension of credit facilities to peasant farmers and the elimination of the more backward practices employed in the exploitation of sharecroppers.

The fact that a new agrarian law was introduced in 1963, and by no means prematurely, pointed to the limited character and relative ineffectiveness of the earlier laws and to the exacerbation of class contradictions in rural areas.

At the present time the Macapagal agrarian reform is in force (this is the name usually used to refer to the Rural Land Reform Bill No. 3844 that was signed by President Macapagal on August 9, 1963).

This law introduced bolder measures for redistribution of land than those included in the 1955 law: in a number of cases surpluses were obligatorily confiscated from landowners leasing out their property to share-croppers grow-

ing rice and maize in return for compensation, and a new lower limit was introduced for landed estates, to which such landowners were entitled---75 hectares (the initial draft of the law had even provided for a limit of 24 hectares). According to the new law, on receiving a petition signed by a third of his tenants, a landowner was supposed to sell his land surpluses on a voluntary basis. In such cases the landowner's relatives were entitled to priority rights provided that they did not lease out land acquired in this way to share-croppers; if landowners refused to sell these surpluses after receiving petitions, the purchase of such land with compensation was effected on an obligatory basis. The purchasing procedure was as follows: first unoccupied or deserted land, then surpluses over and above 1,024 hectares, then those of 500-1,024 hectares, then those of 144-500 hectares, and finally those of 75-144 hectares."" Ten per cent of this compensation had to be paid in cash, 60 per cent in state land bonds (interest from which was not subject to taxation) and 30 per cent in--shares in state companies. Landowners were allowed to use land bonds to buy virgin land from the state in remote regions provided that the farming of such land proceeded according to capitalist patterns. Landowners could also sell these bonds to third parties allowing the latter to acquire land from the state fund. The bonds could also be used to purchase agricultural implements and fertilisers from the state at fixed prices. All these measures were designed to encourage landowners to up-date their farming methods on capitalist lines.

The main purpose of this new legislation was gradually to wipe out the practice of share-cropping. At the present time 95 per cent of rented holdings are worked by sharecroppers; these holdings account for one-third of the land under cultivation.'^^1^^''"' Share-croppers in regions, officially designated as "ready for the introduction of the reform", are automatically geared to a fixed rent (which is on the average about half the rent paid by share-croppers). The law envisages that in the course of time (no dates have been fixed) these new tenant-farmers will be able to own their

Philippines Free Press, July 13, 1963, pp. 1, 8; August 17, 1963. Ibid., September 7, 1963, p. 1.

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holdings after buying them from the state by paying compensation over a period of 25 years. The peasants who are granted plots from redistributed landowners' surpluses become land-holders with the state and pay a fixed rent. In the course of 25 years the tenants are obliged to pay for the expenditure which the state was to make in connection with compensation arrangements and the implementation of the reform. These compensation payments made in equal instalments are relatively high, for the state undertook to pay landowners "just prices" for their land as indicated in the constitution, i.e., market prices. The state also pledged itself to provide new tenant-farmers with financial and agrotechnical aid.

The 1963 law contains a special section dealing with agricultural labourers. For the first time they are officially accorded rights on a level with those enjoyed by industrial workers. They are granted union rights, the right to engage in "joint action", i.e., strikes. Minimum wages have been raised to 3.5 pesos a day, overtime rates have been fixed and agricultural labourers are also entitled to social insurance.

Officials acknowledge that this reform is being implemented very slowly because of inadequate means with which to finance it and because of a shortage of qualified personnel in the organisations responsible for the implementation of the reform.

At the end of 1970, 161 municipalities in 16 provinces were designated as regions where the land reform was to be introduced (i.e., the share-croppers in these regions were automatically given the status of tenant-farmers paying a fixed rent); in addition, certain landowners agreed to introduce a fixed rent in other provinces on a voluntary basis. When surveys were being conducted in order to decide in which regions the reform could be introduced, four electoral districts in the Pangasinan province, a large number of the municipalities in Iloilo, Quezon, Isabela and all municipalities in the province of Camarines Sur were placed in this category.

In the latest four-year development plan for the period 1971-1974 it is planned that 195,000 peasant rice-growers working 458,000 hectares in 154 municipalities of 16 prov-

inces should be geared to a fixed rent, while 26,000 peasants have already concluded contracts with their landowners, for which the rest are meanwhile negotiating.

In order to implement these reforms the state is obliged to set aside 75 million pesos a year (i.e., increase its expenditure to this end by 300 per cent). The purchase of 1,200,000 hectares of land even at very low prices (1,000 pesos per hectare) will cost the state 1,200 million pesos. The essential credit due to peasants (growing rice and maize) for strictly production purposes comes to 500 million pesos a year. The state simply does not have the means to finance these programmes.

When it comes to compensation due to landowners, in February 1970 the state took over 21 estates with a total area of 2,218 hectares to be transferred to 859 share-croppers with the help of the Land Bank. This purchase cost 7,500,000 pesos.

_._ •

The slow implementation of the Ireform was the reason for large-scale rioting in 1969 when the peasants were demanding a just solution of the agrarian problem and the introduction of the reforms. As a result of mass unrest, the Government and Congress drew up draft laws for accelerating the implementation of the reform and for means of finding supplementary funds for financing the measures provided for in the Rural Land Reform Bill. However, not one of these new draft laws was actually passed.

How can the overall results of the agrarian reforms be summarised?

In countries with a socialist orientation the stage-by-stage nature of the radicalisation of agrarian reforms stands out, in some more clearly than in others. This applies, in particular, to the consistent reduction of the maximum area for land-holdings in Syria and Egypt. In certain measure, Iraq is following in the footsteps of these two countries.

Also improving are the terms on which the peasants are being provided with land. Egypt has abolished almost all payments to former landowners for estates confiscated from them. In 1969 Iraqi peasants were totally released from payments for the land transferred to them, this costing the former landowners a total of 50 million dinars. In Syria, the peasants have been granted a 75 per cent reduction in

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the price of their new land and in outstanding compensation instalments.

This has led to a certain consolidation of the position of the small-commodity sector, in which the greater part of the peasantry is engaged. Thus, between 1952 and 1965 the number of owners of small holdings in Egypt (i.e., of up to 5 feddans) increased by 15 per cent (from 2.5 to 3 million), the area of the land cultivated by them increasing by 74 per cent (from 2.1 to 3.7 million feddans). At the same time, the greatest increase in the number of owners of land still pertains to the more prosperous peasants (owning between 20 and 50 feddans). This increase stands at 32 per cent, the increase in respect of the middle peasants being 30 per cent and that in respect of the poor peasants 14.8 per cent. Though being limited to a certain extent, the laws of social stratification continue to operate in post-reform conditions.

The position of the petty proprietors and commodity producers is still unstable, in view of the increasing stratification within the small-commodity sector. Besides, they are still exposed to harsh exploitation at the hands of traders and moneylenders. Co-operatives, which could greatly improve the lot of the peasants, are only just appearing on the scene. The number of credit and marketing co-- operatives in Syria, for example, rose from 245 to 1,125 between 1959 and April 1970; in Iraq they numbered 742 by April 1970. Only in a few countries is the transition to producer co-operatives (Syria, Egypt and Iraq) already under way. An "autonomous sector" in agriculture has grown up in Algeria.

In the countries with a socialist orientation, the small peasant proprietors are a major class force, which exerts a considerable influence on social life. In their striving to secure firm support from the peasantry, the authorities are compelled to reckon with them.

The increasingly radical nature of the reforms as a result of pressure from the peasantry also makes itself felt in countries that are developing in a capitalist direction. Here, however, that process is being slowed down even more by opposition from the reactionaries. In Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines and some other countries, large landed estates still very much dominate the picture. Agrarian reforms have

exacerbated antagonistic class contradictions and promoted the development of capitalism, the influence of which is being felt ever more acutely by the working peasants. Though the small-commodity sector is expanding (both as a result of land being given to some of the peasants with little or no land, and to tenant-farmers for purposes of private ownership, and also thanks to the ever wider substitution of natural economy by commodity-money relations), its position is being undermined more and more.*

The reforms conducted in countries developing along capitalist lines have not decreased the tense situation in the villages. Capitalist methods of exploitation have not yet fully ousted the pre-capitalist forms of oppression of the peasantry, which are manifest in oneroiis forms of lease-holding and share-cropping, in the rapacious activities of the traders and moneylenders, in the social humiliation of the poor and the arbitrariness of officialdom. Bourgeois reformers of the agrarian system are trying to camouflage its pre-capitalist features so as to make them less obvious to the peasants than they were prior to the reform. It is not only the landowners, the feudal lords, but also the bourgeois-entrepreneur elements in the countryside---the capitalist landowners, traders, moneylenders and rich peasants---who are interested in the preser-

* Sources to this section on reform are as follows: Egypt---Statistical Handbook of the UAR, 1952-65, Cairo, 1966, pp. 44-48; Syria---Agrarian Programme of the Syrian Communist Party, discussed and approved at the Third Party Congress, Damascus, June 1969; Iraq---A New Agrarian Reform Law of May 21, 1970 (Baghdad Observer, May 22, 1970), quoted from the Arab original; India---Problems of the Economic and Social Development of Independent India, Moscow, 1967, p. 123 (in Russian); V. Rastyannikov, M. Maximov, Development of Capitalism in Indian Agriculture Today, Moscow, 1965, p. 68 (in Russian); New Age, January 10, 1971, p. 7; Iran---Agrarian Question in Asian and North-African Countries, Moscow, 1968, p. 175 (in Russian); Pakistan---M. Yakovlev, Agrarian Pakistan, Moscow, 1968, pp. 38-51 (in Russian); Agrarian Question in Asian and North-African Countries, Moscow, 1968, p. 171 (in Russian); Turkey---P. Moiseyev, Agrarian Structure of Present-Day Turkey, Moscow, 1970, Supplement, pp. 295-96 (in Russian); R. Ulyanovsky, "Agrarian Reforms in the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia" (Agrarian Question and National Liberation Movement), Moscow, 1963, pp. 186-226 (in Russian).

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vation of non-economic, pre-capitalist methods of exploitation, which place such a burden upon the agricultural system of the post-reform villages in the East. As a rule, these elements exploit such survivals to complement capitalist methods of accumulation with non-economic appropriation of the products of the peasant's land and labour.

In recent years, rural credit and trade co-operatives have been developing apace in those Eastern countries that are developing along the capitalist path. Closer study shows that, in such countries, co-operatives are usually exploited by the rich peasants, ``up-dated'' traders, moneylenders and capitalist landowners in their own selfish interests. It is they who usually become promoters and leaders of co-operative organisations, which they mould to serve their own purposes. Such co-operatives are designed to disguise the class contradictions between the bulk of the peasantry and the exploiter groups.

It is thus obvious that, even after the reform, the working peasantry in countries developing along the capitalist path remains not only the most numerous, but also the poorest and most exploited class. The semi-feudal lords, landowners who have adopted bourgeois methods, the rich peasants who are increasing in number, and the foreign planters have remained powerful land proprietors; in a number of countries they also own the water resources---the key factor in agriculture in the East. That is why there is good reason to maintain that, despite the reform, no basic solution for the land question has been found that relieves the plight of the working peasants (those with little or no land) and the agricultural labourers. Completion of the land reforms in the interests of the peasants to put a stop once and for all to the feudal and semi-feudal patterns of landownership in the countries of South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East (with a total population approaching 1,000 million) has yet to come. What has been done in this respect merely demonstrates the inconsistency and indecision of the national bourgeoisie, which has shown itself capable of no more than meeting the peasants' interests to the minimum possible extent, so as to avert outbreaks of peasant unrest.

An appraisal of 10-25 years of post-war agrarian reforms implemented in many countries with a capitalist orientation

shows that they have pursued three major and interconnected objectives: in the first place, to stimulate the development of the entrepreneur and prosperous stratum of the peasantry and thereby to split the peasantry, to increase its stratification and to cause discord among the peasant masses; in the second place, to induce the feudal and semi-feudal lords to switch over to capitalist farming instead of merely collecting exorbitant rents, make them invest their capital in agriculture and not only use non-economic methods to extract revenue from the land they rent out; in the third place, to wrest the initiative from the working class and the progressive intelligentsia in posing and coping with the agrarian problem by the ``plebeian'' method, in the interests of the people.

It would be wrong to assert, as is sometimes done, that the reforms directed to this end have all failed. That is not true. They have led to a redistribution of land in favour of the upper and middle brackets of the peasantry and have increased the number of peasant proprietors by making them purchase land from the big landowners through the agency of the state. The reforms have been made use of by those whose interests they were designed to promote---the bourgeoisie, the rich peasants and the capitalist landowners. The rich peasants and the upper stratum of the middle peasantry have come less and less to associate themselves with the peasantry's mass struggle for land, although they still take part in that struggle on a number of other issues of concern to the peasantry as a whole. Their land hunger has been more or less satisfied. They have begun in part to switch over to capitalist methods of running their farms, and, in a number of countries, have come out against any lowering of the land ``ceiling''. Cracks have appeared in the hitherto nation-wide, united front of the peasants' struggle for land; a new situation is taking shape in the rural areas.

The position of the semi-proletarian, and a considerable part of the middle peasantry, to say nothing of the savagely exploited farm hands, day labourers and seasonal workers, has not improved. Indeed, it has grown worse in a number of countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, the countries of the Middle East and so on. The rich peasants, the moneylenders and the capitalist landowners are stepping

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up their exploiter activities. The bulk of the unprivileged peasants have received no land.

That is why the demand for genuinely democratic and radical agrarian reform in the interest of the majority of the peasants continues to hold a central place in the class struggle in the country. It will continue to do so for many years to come, although this struggle is no longer waged exclusively against the feudal and semi-feudal lords, but also against the capitalist landowners and the rich peasants, who tend to ally themselves with the latter. This is a struggle, not only for land, but also in defence of labour against capital.

The current land question in the East differs radically from the situation that obtained in Russia in the early 20th century. A radical solution of the question will no doubt liberate both the peasants and landownership from survivals of feudalism, the clan system and patriarchalisin. But even a consistent and radical redistribution of the land and the implementation of the slogan most popular in the East: "Land to Him Who Tills It"---cannot automatically, in conditions of the capitalist system, lead to a fundamental improvement in agricultural production. In the conditions of enormous agrarian over-population, an acute shortage of cultivated and irrigated land and an unparalleled fragmentation of peasant holdings, especially in countries with a Moslem population, the implementation of that slogan would most probably lead to the appearance of a vast mass of small and very small, predominantly consumer households intended to feed the families they belong to. Still worse poverty for the small peasant and proliferation of big farms, with all the concomitant hardships for the working peasants, would be the result.

As distinct from the conditions in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this class struggle in rural Africa and Asia is essentially a struggle between two trends of development---the non-capitalist and the capitalist course. The outcome of capitalist development is obvious: it involves remaining within the system of the world capitalist economy and basing the agrarian economy on small or very small semi-commodity and semi-consumer peasant farming, and that in conditions of unparalleled industrial

backwardness, low levels of accumulation, and dependence on foreign capital in respect of science, technology and personnel, and perhaps also in respect of foodstuffs---in other words, condemning the country to a perpetually unequal, neo-colonial status. Of course, the decisive elimination of all forms of pre-capitalist exploitation, and the redistribution of the land in favour of the working peasantry will lead to a temporary improvement in the conditions to which the latter is exposed. However, the prospect of ``freer'' capitalist development will inevitably lead to still greater ``de-peasantisation'', the peasantry being driven to abandon agricultural pursuits because of its inability to compete both on the home and the world market.

The alternative to this capitalist path is the non-- capitalist path of development for agriculture, a fundamentally new departure. Provided active assistance from the state is forthcoming, the non-capitalist path will protect small-scale peasant farming from ruin and hold back the pressure of private capitalism in town and country, establish control over its development and, what is of particular importance, will gradually encourage the working peasantry to strive after economic autonomy in various forms of voluntary cooperatives, including producer co-operatives free of exploiter elements. Among the tasks confronting any genuinely revolutionary-democratic state transforming the system of agriculture and landownership, particular importance attaches to a reasonable restriction of the activities of private capital, the opening up of new lands and the construction of irrigation systems, the granting of credits to working peasants and co-operatives, the extensive organisation of seed production, facilities for hiring out agricultural machinery and supplying peasant farms with fertilisers, and the implementation of the agrotechnical revolution in the interests of the peasant rank-and-file. Such are the landmarks along the path to non-capitalist development of agriculture.

That is why the workers' arid Communist parties in the Eastern countries developing along the capitalist path, and the ruling national-democratic parties in the non-capitalist states, as well as the Marxist-Leninist parties that cooperate with them, do not confine themselves to programme demands for a radical solution of the agrarian question,

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that is to say, for a fair redistribution of the land in favour of the peasantry. Bearing in mind that this will not automatically solve the question of the future of small-- commodity production or ensure the transition to large-scale and economically efficient commodity farming, they are working to bring about a gradual switch-over to co-operative principles on an anti-capitalist; basis. Prior to the emergence of the Soviet Union and then tff the world socialist system there did not exist any alternative to capitalist development in agriculture, any alternative based on the experience of tens and hundreds of millions of peasants. Today that alternative exists, namely the Leninist path of reorganising small-scale peasant farming on co-operative lines, as well as the development of new lands and water resources and the establishment of state and co-operative farms. All these goals are being advanced as a long-term programme by the progressive political forces in many Eastern countries. It is in the struggle for this kind of solution of the agrarian and peasant problem that the influence of the ideology of the working class, the ideological and political influence of scientific socialism, is making itself felt with ever greater force.

At the same time, past history shows us that, no matter how good and intelligible to the peasants the programmes advanced by revolutionary-democratic leaders and Communist and workers' parties in respect of urgent agrarian and peasant problems may be, their announcement is insufficient for the success of the transformations envisaged. What is needed is organisation of the peasantry and farm labourers in unions on a mass scale; the development of a powerful democratic movement for the implementation of agrarian reforms, liquidation of moneylending, curbing of trade capital, state take-overs of monopolies, establishment of peasant co-operatives and the development of new lands and water resources with the active assistance of the state. In a word, only organisation and a struggle side by side with the working class against common enemies, the defence of the day-to-day interests of the peasants, skilful leadership of the peasant masses by the revolutionary democrats can put an end to all the hardships of village life. All this, however, calls for years of hard work.

The agrarian-peasant question in Tropical Africa calls for special analysis. This is an area where communal ownership still predominates in land relations, though, of course, private ownership and property are developing and acquiring increasing social significance.

It is true that Central and East Africa (Kenya, Rhodesia, Zambia, Uganda and other countries) are already familiar with an acute land problem, for in these countries the best lands have been seized by European colonialists, who exploit the African peasants and agricultural labourers on the large plantations and grain farms. The local peasantry is up against not so much feudal lords or tribal chiefs as the unabashed land-grabbers---the white colonialists. That is why the struggle for land is marked by anti-imperialist, anti-racialist features, aimed as it is at doing away with the reservation system, the return of the land taken over by the colonialists to its rightful owners. In the areas where plantations are well-developed, progressive forces are waging a struggle not for the partitioning of the plantations among the peasants, but for their conversion into large-scale stateowned, co-operative or independently run farms.

Despite the predominance of communal ownership, the African peasantry is also familiar with the rapacious tendencies of tribal leaders, some of whom have long been indulging in feudal practices, others using capitalist methods, while still others have combined both methods of acquiring land, ruining the peasant communities and making their members subject to their own interests. However, such trends have not affected rural Africa as a whole and may be said not to have assumed a predominant position.

In view of the possible prospect of non-capitalist development, what will be the stand that the progressive forces of present-day Africa may or should take in respect of the African commune (tribal, household-based, villagetype)? Will it not be advisable to use communal ownership of land and the tradition of collective cultivation to restrict and oust capitalist and feudal trends and achieve a system of non-capitalist rural development? Marx and Engels foresaw the possibility of such development in their time. In the early 1890s Engels wrote: "It is not only possible but even indubitable that after the triumph of the proletariat and

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the transition of the means of production over to social ownership in the West European nations, those countries which have just taken the road of capitalist production and have still preserved tribal relations or their survivals will use these survivals of social ownership and the accompanying popular customs as a powerful means of considerably shortening the process of their development towards a socialist society, and avoid the greater part of the sufferings and the struggle through which we have to pave the way in Western Europe... . This applies ... to all countries that stand at the pre-capitalist stage of development."*

It may be said of the countries of West, Central and East Africa that they are no longer purely pre-capitalist but, of course, not yet capitalist. Some of them had embarked on the slow transition towards capitalism even before the Second World War under colonial rule, while others made rapid advance along that path after the war. However, the influence of capitalist trends has been held back by the national liberation struggle, which was gaining ground in most African countries by the mid-1960s, by the influence of the Soviet Union and the world socialist community, and by the appearance and development in Africa of progressive national-democratic forces of a basically antiimperialist and anti-capitalist type. That is why the further advance of the national-democratic revolution in a number of African countries may well gradually stem such trends, and then put a stop to them altogether.

Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo, Tanzania and Somalia may be considered examples of African countries where the building up of the national economy is being effected in the main on a non-capitalist basis. Zambia and certain other states are about to embark on the path of noncapitalist development. The courses that Mali and Ghana will take are not yet clear, for in the past coups in these countries have interrupted their non-capitalist development but not led to any considerable spread of capitalism. The return of these countries to the path of social progress is quite possible.

It cannot be excluded that, in dealing with the agrarianpeasant problems in those African countries where they have already arisen, as well as in coping with the problem of reorganising highly primitive farming (typical of the whole of Africa), the democratic forces are able to take advantage in certain measure of the following factors:

---the absence of an established rural bourgeoisie;

---since the peasants live and work together in communes, the urge to possess land as private property is foreign to them, for they still think in terms of collective forms of land-tenure;

---given the pursuit of a correct policy, the often corrupt, conservative tribal chiefs and elders, with their feudalistic and bourgeois aspirations, may well be isolated from the commune;

---there exists in the countryside a considerable stratum of poverty-stricken peasants and proletarians---seasonal and casual labourers working in the mines, on the plantations and at factories processing minerals, fuel and agricultural produce. These elements are capable of playing a revolutionary role in the reshaping of rural life;

---an important part in that restructuring may be played by the promotion of co-operatives, state and autonomous farms.

To evolve a scientific agrarian programme, it is essential that the political vanguard reach a correct appraisal of the current stage in the revolutionary process, and analyse the alignment of class forces. What is needed is precise knowledge of concrete conditions, the aspirations and the moods of the peasant masses, which may differ, not only in countries that are relatively similar in social structure but even within the framework of a single country.

The peasantry is a class that is poorly prepared for independent political activity and by the very nature of its economy is predisposed to seclusion in a circle of its personal day-to-day cares. The peasantry's backwardness often leads to political indifference, a failure to understand the links between the peasants' demands and the struggle for

* Correspondence of K. Marx and F. Engels with Russian Political Figures, Moscow, 1951, pp. 290-91 (in Russian).

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fundamental social and political change. The elimination of that backwardness is a priority issue. The political vanguard has set itself the target of educating, organising and correctly guiding the peasant masses, an aim that cannot be achieved without taking into account the current level of the peasants' political consciousness.

The peasant has an insufficient grasp of questions of socialism, major political problems, etc. He is interested in land, crops, fertilisers, seed, prices and rent. It is only through particular and sometimes petty problems of peasant life that he can be led to appreciate the anti-capitalist struggle and the ideas of socialism. Radical land demands often evoke bewilderment and mistrust on the part of the peasantry, who do not support them. That is why in their rural activities the progressive forces should direct their efforts towards a gradual encouragement of radicalism, keeping their finger on the pulse of the peasants' mood, and lead them, step by step, to advance from the struggle for their daily needs to campaigning for consistently general-- democratic, and even socialist objectives. The experience of all successful mass peasant and national liberation movements of our time testifies to the natural evolution of agrarian programmes in a more radical direction.

The strategical and tactical slogans of the nationalrevolutionary forces and proletarian parties on the agrarianpeasant question hinge on a number of important factors: the level of the economic, social and political development of the country in question, the period the national liberation and peasant movements are going through, the degree to which capitalism has developed, the agrarian structure, the degree to which pre-capitalist survivals still exist, the nature and specific features of the peasantry's social psychology and everyday life, and finally ethnic, national, cultural and many other factors.

The full confiscation, without any compensation, of all types and remnants of semi-feudal land-holdings, the existence of which provides a means of exploiting the peasantry and a source of livelihood for small, medium and large-scale landowners, and the transfer of all land to peasants with little or no land are still being pressed for everywhere, in the post-reform period as well, as the most

urgent task facing the peasant movement and those supervising agrarian reform.

At the present stage, land nationalisation is not yet being advocated, for the peasants' urge to possess land of their own is still very great. This is the age-old aspiration of the peasants in most Eastern countries, so that the transfer of the big estates to the peasants as private property is the aim of agrarian reform at the present moment.

Also being advanced are demands for the distribution among the landless peasants of state land fit for cultivation but not being used, as well as the development of new lands (waste and fallow land, plots cleared of jungle), the considerable extension of irrigation systems through the construction of dams, reservoirs, canals and wells. All these are new and constructive demands of great economic and political significance.

In their agrarian programmes a number of Communist Parties are giving special prominence to defence of the interests of the agricultural proletariat and its social organisation, for they consider this proletariat a source of firm support for consistent implementation of democratic change, and the future socialist orientation of rural development. Any practical success in this field is of tremendous importance.

Though the size of the middle peasantry has increased considerably in the post-reform period, this section does not yet form a majority. The bulk of the peasantry consists of the poor, owners of tiny plots of land, and landless sharecroppers. Throughout almost the whole of Asia and Africa these groups together comprise up to 65 per cent of the rural population.

Reforms, even if carried through very thoroughly, cannot raise the peasantry to the ``middle'' level. This will be impossible for a long time to come due to the insufficient area of unoccupied land suitable for cultivation, tremendous agrarian over-population and the parcelling of peasant holdings in Asia on a scale and with implications unprecedented in the West. The semi-proletarian and proletarian strata still make up the bulk of the rural population, who are up against the so-called rural elite---the new landowners, rich peasants, profiteers who buy up the peasants' crops at low

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prices, the traders, moneylenders, corrupt officials and a considerable number of old-time privileged landowners, though the latter have lost their former political power and aristocratic status.

x^

The Marxist-Leninist parties now attach more importance than ever to the establishment of a firm alliance between the working class and the peasantry. In recent years the Communist Parties of South Asia and the Middle East have been making a detailed analysis of the agrarian-- peasant question. A number of these parties are working out agrarian programmes, while others have conducted mass discussion of such programmes, which they have adopted at their congresses and published. All this is of great importance, for they were badly needed for many years and the lack of such documents held back the initiative of Communist Party bodies and made propaganda among the peasantry and the rural proletariat less effective. A well-defined agrarian programme opening up a clear-cut perspective for the future, providing a vital guiding-line in this complex field and setting the party concrete objectives, will greatly facilitate the task of activating a mass peasant movement in the new post-reform conditions, and the struggle to help the peasantry break free from the influence of the national bourgeoisie, the landowners and the rich peasants.

The experience of mass movements has shown that, in many cases, the best way to draw the backward peasant into the struggle for major political aims is not necessarily his immediate involvement in the organised anti-capitalist movement. A profound study of peasant psychology and persistent constructive work that does not put off the illiterate peasant with long-term political aims and slogans are proper and politically justified steps on the way to organising an agrarian-peasant movement. The closer the links between the advanced revolutionary-democratic forces and peasant life the more effectively the masses can be influenced. This demands that patriotic revolutionaries should work among the masses, in the closest possible contact with them. This is the path to mutual understanding, which the genuine supporters of the working peasants' just cause are pursuing.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROBLEMS OF THE NEWLY FREE COUNTRIES

In the late 1960s and early 1970s an important trend emerged in the development of the national liberation movement. The political struggle for consolidation of independence and social emancipation in Asia and Africa has been making itself more and more clearly felt in the economic sphere. The national liberation movement is becoming more and more complex, profound and acute. The emphasis on socio-economic development is the logical result of the current national liberation revolutions which have in the main been successful as far as the achievement of political independence is concerned. This reflects the objective fundamental tendencies outlined by Leonid Brezhnev in the CPSU Central Committee Report to the 24th CPSU Congress, revealing that "the struggle for national liberation in many countries has in practical terms begun to grow into a struggle against exploitative relations, both feudal and capitalist". Of course, it is still important to promote the political independence of the young nation states and to boost their role in the sphere of international relations. However the solution for this problem will now increasingly depend on constructive efforts in the economic field and work towards the establishment of a new, progressive social structure. The newly independent countries will attain these objectives, if they wage a resolute and consistent struggle against the imperialists in the world arena and against all exploiting elements at home.

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In appraising the prospects for economic progress in the young sovereign states of Asia and Africa, Western bourgeois leaders, as a rule, try to sow pessimism and hopelessness. They seek to represent the present and future of these states in extremely dark colours. This approach stems from the desire to justify the policy pursued by the neo-- colonialists and to instil in the peoples of the newly free countries the idea that it is impossible to overcome existing economic difficulties without the assistance and tutelage of the imperialist powers.

At the same time objective analysis reveals impressive changes and developments in the economy of many young states. However, it is obvious that this progress is being made with difficulty and its pace is slower than the peoples of these countries would wish. The socio-economic problems involved have turned out to be of a very complex nature. To solve them it is most important to undertake profound and comprehensive research of both a theoretical and practical variety. Differences of opinion have come to light in efforts to define the objectives of economic development, their order of priority, the means and stages for achieving these goals. These differences stem largely from the diversity of the levels of development, socio-economic structures and political systems found in the Afro-Asian countries.

In the national liberation movement taken as a whole a relatively small, though growing, group of countries with a socialist orientation has taken shape. Their strength lies in the fact that they have embarked on the path of social progress in the interests of the majority of the people. As for the Afro-Asian states that have chosen the capitalist path, they are beset by acute class struggle. The situation in these countries is shaped by serious deep-rooted processes which confront them with the need to carry put fundamental socio-political transformations and on this basis to ensure accelerated progress in the interests of the masses.

The current economic situation in Asia and Africa presents a somewhat hopeful picture. The overall volume of industrial output in the Afro-Asian developing countries showed a 50 per cent increase in the 1960s. It is worth noting that the average annual rate of growth, though not always stable, was 7 per cent in Asia and 5.4 per cent in Africa.

Countries that only recently were agrarian now put out quite a large range of modern manufactured goods and are gradually developing a diversified economy. This is clear from the development of India, Egypt and Algeria. Major changes are occurring in the economic structure of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and some other countries. What is characteristic of the national industries of some of the young states is the accelerated development of the extracting and manufacturing industries, the building up of big production capacities that have made it possible to decrease dependence on imports and to expand exports, and thus weaken the influence of the foreign monopolies.

The equipment of farms with agricultural machinery has been gradually improving too. This has helped expand not only the production of traditional types of export raw materials, but also that of food which is in desperately short supply in many Afro-Asian countries. More modern farming equipment is being introduced together with the use of chemical fertilisers. Irrigation networks are also being considerably expanded.

The economic and social infrastructure is taking shape and being modernised. Many countries have expanded their transport networks and reconstructed and improved existing communications systems. The network of elementary and secondary schools, establishments of higher learning, medical and cultural institutions is being expanded. As a result, it has been possible to secure marked progress in overcoming ageold cultural backwardness inherited from the period of colonial rule and feudalism. Efforts to control disease and epidemics have helped achieve a noticeable rise in life expectancy.

Considerable progress has been made in the field of foreign trade links, above all in the foreign trade of the young independent states. In the past decade the volume of exports from the African countries has been increasing at the rate of 9.2 per cent a year and that of the Asian countries at 7.7 per cent a year. The growth of imports has been 4.8 and 7.2 per cent a year respectively. The commodity structure of exports is improving too: the traditional export items, chiefly raw materials, are now found side by

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side with new commodities, including the output of the processing industries.

The number of countries with which the young nation states are trading has increased. In an effort to break out of the confines of the capitalist world market many of the developing countries have become active trading partners of the socialist states with whom they have established mutually advantageous economic relations. The economic ties between the Afro-Asian states that are searching for ways and forms of co-operation to promote their economies are growing stronger.

When studying the positive changes in the economic situation obtaining in the young Asian and African states it is logical to ask what has worked these changes and why they have become possible.

The initial factor favouring the changes was beyond doubt the liberation of these peoples from colonial oppression which stimulated the initiative of the liberated peoples and removed former insurmountable political barriers to economic progress. Another powerful factor is the world socialist system, which supports world peace and security and upholds the national liberation movement. At the same time the independent economic policies pursued by the newly liberated countries have proved effective, as have their steps to build up a new economic system and to reconstruct the former backward one.

In this connection a factor totally new to the Afro-Asian countries has acquired primary importance, namely, the organisational, technological, politico-economic, and cultural role of the sovereign nation state. In effect the state is the main force behind purposeful and long-term economic development and the reconstruction and modernisation of the social structure.

The socio-class nature of the path adopted by one or another newly free state determines the scope, forms and effectiveness of state regulation of the economy. Thus, the problems of economic and above all industrial development in socialist-oriented countries, such as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Somalia and Burma, are the province mainly or even exclusively of progressive government activity. At the same

time in Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco, Thailand, the Philippines, the Lebanon and other capitalistoriented countries priority has been given to private enterprise, foreign enterprise in particular. Parallel with the growth of private capital in India, including that of local monopolies, the state sector has acquired decisive importance in the basic industries, foreign trade, credit, banking and investment. Efforts to promote and consolidate the state sector have become a factor of national importance. All the democratic and progressive forces in the country are contributing to this effort.

Experience has shown that the establishment and consolidation of the state sector plays a key role among the various forms of state intervention in economic activity. If the state sector embraces all or the basic industries, transport services, communications, foreign trade and credit, it paves the way for promotion and reconstruction of the economy. Otherwise the economy becomes the object of unbridled capitalist anarchy.

The state sector is steadily gaining ground in the socialist-oriented countries. In addition to new state-owned factories, the state sector also includes the nationalised enterprises of local and, what is particularly important, foreign companies which play an important role. The state sector occupies a major position in India's economy. It has also been expanding in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and several other Afro-Asian countries. In these countries in addition to promoting state enterprise the state sector has played a key role in building the infrastructure and as creditor and middleman for local private capital in foreign trade relations.

Expansion and transformation of the economy call for well-organised development, concentration of resources and effort at key stages, both immediate and more remote, which are essential for progress. That is why both Asian and African countries have encouraged economic forecasting and planning. In most cases national development plans drawn up by the young states are designed to cover periods from three to five years.

The newly independent countries have learnt from their own experience that it is impossible to solve the vital prob-

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lems confronting them without sound long-term planning that caters for proportional economic development and more rational utilisation of material and manpower resources in such a way as to suit the socio-economic situation that has actually taken shape, i.e., the existing multi-structural economy. It is not fortuitous, therefore, that the liberated countries are attaching more and more importance to planned development of their economies. In this connection a key task of state economic policy is to combine effectively longterm goals with the solution of current economic problems. The building up of a new, highly efficient economy on the basis of modern technology, far from ruling out expansion of the traditional sectors and branches of production, makes their promotion imperative. However, the advance of the traditional sectors must be correctly calculated and balanced from the standpoint of the prospects for overall economic development. Only sound calculation of economic proportions will make it possible to set large-scale economic goals at each specific stage which correspond to the country's actual potential. Only this kind of approach will ensure the solution of increasingly complex problems as experience is gained and potential grows.

Active participation in economic construction on the part of trained local personnel is an essential condition for economic progress. Training of local personnel with due consideration for the requirements of modern science is a vital task for the young states. To this end they have set up institutes of technology and secondary technical schools, as well as centres for training qualified engineers, technicians researchers, managerial personnel and skilled workers. The employment of such personnel in the various sectors of the national economy is constantly on the increase.

As for external factors which promote the economic advance of the Asian and African countries, their co-- operation with the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries on principles of equality plays an important role.

The Soviet Union provides aid on easy terms, the interest on credit being kept down to a minimum---between 2 and 2.5 per cent a year. What is most important is that this aid is aimed at helping to solve the cardinal problems of expansion and modernisation of key economic sectors.

Thanks to Soviet aid several newly independent countries have been able to achieve vital steps towards the technical restructuring of their economies, industrialisation, consolidation of the state sector, reorganisation and expansion of farming and restructuring of foreign trade. With the USSR's assistance the young independent countries have built and put into operation more than 350 economically vital projects, including metallurgical and engineering plants, mines, oil refineries, hydro-engineering projects and power stations. More than 350 other projects are now under construction.

The notable progress achieved by the Afro-Asian countries in economic development has revealed beyond any doubt the tremendous difficulties, disproportions and contradictions involved in this development. In most of the young states agriculture is extremely backward and geared to the cultivation of a single product. Meanwhile industrial output is low. Their total share in world industrial output accounts for 7.7 per cent. However, despite quantitative growth the share of the Afro-Asian countries in world trade, particularly world exports, is shrinking. They are lagging behind the industrial capitalist countries more and more. In 1970 with respect to per capita industrial output this gap was 1:23, while as regards the rate of growth in labour productivity in the 1960s the gap was 1:2. The annual output per worker in the liberated countries averages only 8.7 per cent of that in the developed capitalist countries and in industry the equivalent figure is 14.3 per cent.

It should be stressed that now, 10 to 25 years after independence, most of the liberated countries are still confronted with burning social problems. The unemployment in towns is mounting together with relative over-population in rural areas. In some countries the wretched position of the masses, far from improving, is actually deteriorating. Hunger, malnutrition, misery and disease are the fate of several hundred million people living in these parts of the world.

Naturally, these phenomena can be traced back to the period of colonial rule, its grim aftermaths and to neocolonialist policies pursued by the imperialist powers. The foreign monopolists are doing their utmost to hold up inde-

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pendent industrial development. They resort to numerous manoeuvres that run counter to the national interests of the newly independent countries and obviously stake a great deal on the reactionary, conservative elements inside these countries.

Development, expansion and transformation of the national economies of most Afro-Asian countries are being held back and complicated by the exploiting role played by private capital---local and, still more so, foreign---which has entrenched itself in the key sectors of the economy. Conditions in the Afro-Asian countries being extremely backward, private capitalist development has assumed a variety of forms there, largely early capitalist forms, including primary accumulation of capital, capitalist manufactories and early stages of industrial production. As a result such development entails tremendous waste of resources. On the one hand, this is the outcome of parasitic consumption on the part of the ruling classes (the compradore and big national bourgeoisie, traders and moneylenders, landowners, tribal and caste aristocracy) and, on the other, of the export from the countries concerned of huge profits reaped by the foreign monopolists. Capitalist development leads to the sad growth of acute economic disproportion and holds back the formation of a diversified economy.

There are dark sides, of a different kind though, to the economies of the young socialist-oriented states. It is true that their growth rates are sometimes slower than need be. But this is by no means the outcome of anti-capitalist policy, as bourgeois ideologists claim. The source of the difficulties experienced by such states lies chiefly in the objective conditions inherited from the period of colonial rule---their extremely limited material and financial resources and the shortage of trained manpower. Another factor contributing to their difficulties is lack of experience in new management techniques at a time when the social structure is being fundamentally reorganised. It should also be borne in mind that the socialist-oriented countries are making considerable outlays for social schemes, for improving the living standards of the people, the system of public education and health services. It is no secret that the imperialists nurse violent hate for the socialist-oriented states; they have

launched military ventures against these states, plotted political intrigues, organised anti-popular conspiracies and provoked reactionary separatist and tribal unrest. The imperialists have resorted to measures of financial and economic blackmail.

In their efforts to keep the Third World under their sway and control the imperialists have sought to combine their aggressive militarist course (the United State's aggression in Indochina being a case in point) with more flexible and subtly disguised neo-colonialist methods of economic expansion and plunder of the developing countries under cover of ``aid'' and through trade on unequal terms. Whereas in the past the imperialist powers sought to secure their goals through external economic expansion, today they are trying rather to draw the Afro-Asian countries into the sphere of capitalist relations and to implant in them elements of capitalist development.

The predatory exploitation of natural resources, systematic export of ever greater profits from the developing countries, which by now exceed the sum of initial investments many times over, have, among other measures resorted to by the foreign monopolists, inflicted grave damage on the newly independent countries. The scope of the damage is growing with the increasing penetration of foreign monopolies---chiefly US, British, West German and Japanese concerns---in the economies of the developing countries.

Active penetration of imperialist monopolies in the economies of the young states is motivated by opportunities for rapid enrichment. Suffice it to say, for instance, that in India the big foreign companies have been reaping profits three times higher than those obtainable in their own countries. This phenomenon is common in most Afro-Asian countries. That is why the profit, dividends and interest exported from these countries by the foreign monopolists, in other words, the capital removed every year, considerably exceeds the net inflow of private investment. This specific form of monopolist activity in the post-war period has become the scourge of the developing countries.

Many of the developing countries still bear the heavy burden of debts imposed on them by the imperialist powers. Not counting the damage suffered by the Afro-Asian states

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as a result of non-equivalent exchange and deteriorating terms of trade, their losses from the overall outflow of capital amount to between six and seven thousand million dollars a year. All these factors together) with internal difficulties, such as miscalculations in planning, and an inefficient state apparatus, create serious obstacles for the economic progress of the young states, particularly those which are advancing along the capitalist path.

Owing to the fact that the socialist states co-operate with the developing countries on principles of mutual economic advantage, owing to the fact that the socialist states are helping them build up their national economies, the imperialist monopolies, without however sacrificing their basic economic interests, have been compelled to take into account to some extent the needs of industrial development in the young countries, particularly their need to develop the infrastructure and those branches of agriculture geared to exports, and also to train local personnel. However, the main goal of the foreign monopolists and of imperialist ``aid'' aimed at strengthening the position of the monopolies is neo-colonialism, i.e., the policy of economic expansion, militarist pressure and overt military gambles.

Two interconnected, though, from the historical point of view, overdue processes are now at work in the newly independent countries. One is industrialisation, i.e., the creation of large-scale industry, including processing industries of Department I (production of the means of production) and, secondly, accelerated growth of small-scale capitalist enterprise, including manufactories. These processes in a way all their own signify the inclusion of new economic sectors in the sphere of factory industries and together with this the inclusion of small-scale industries into the system of social reproduction, which is being built up with the active participation of the state.

It should be pointed out that in the early 1960s ideas were advanced for a simple solution of the problems confronting the Third World by building up a heavy industry within the framework of the state sector. However, in practice the weak points of this approach soon made themselves evident.

It was found that if the extremely limited resources available were concentrated on building up heavy industry, it would exist in isolation, so to speak, and would not help modernise small and medium-scale industries. Unless there is market exchange between the heavy and light industries, and also between them and farming and crafts, the sources of accumulation for financing industrialisation will dry up. As a result, industrialisation will have to be financed exclusively through taxation with all the inevitable negative consequences. That is why it is important to develop in the Asian and African countries small and medium-scale production, while giving preference to producer co-operatives and to utilise opportunities for accumulation in the small and medium industries for purposes of industrialisation, for the manufacture of improved tools for backward sectors of the economy, such as agriculture and handicrafts.

It is obvious that to cut down the time and expenditure necessary for the switch-over from a backward colonial and semi-colonial economy to a more advanced independent economy it will be necessary to mobilise and make rational use of all resources, including those invested in production and social distribution and those latent in the social system which has not yet been emancipated from the fetters of exploitation and archaic institutions. There is no real force other than a nation state adopting a socially progressive, anti-imperialist stand that would be capable of effectively directing the process of socio-economic development in a liberated country. As soon as such a state gets caught in the trap of neo-colonialism it will gradually lose its political independence. As a result, its role in the country's social and economic construction will be drastically diminished.

Experience has shown that with the consolidation of the state sector the state is in a much better position to influence the commodity market and the entire system of distribution, the process of accumulation and investment, credit and circulation of money. In short, it can influence the entire course of economic development. Concentration of large property in the hands of the state is necessary to withstand foreign monopolists and collaborationists from among the local bourgeoisie. In the long-term perspective the building up of an efficient state economy is extremely important as

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a condition for subsequent transition to higher social organisation of the productive forces---to a socialist, planned economy. That is why any desire to limit the scope of state property or transfer it to private hands is both politically and economically reactionary and extremely detrimental to national interests.

Marxist researchers have always maintained that a ``mixed'', multi-structural economy has to exist in the countries of the Third World over a relatively long period of time. The socio-economic functions of the state play a particularly important role in the effective development of such an economy. Therefore, the other extreme when in the early stages of independent statehood the private sector is prevented from contributing to economic development is also unjustified. In the early stages of independence neither material nor social conditions are as yet ripe for this, and besides there is no historical or economic need for such steps. The economic potential and scale of accumulation in the young Afro-Asian states are so limited that to promote industrial production and farming it is necessary to make use of all available levers, including private initiative, naturally under the control of the anti-imperialist democratic state.

An immutable principle for such control is to ensure that private initiative is compatible with national interests. In the event of conflict between the two, private enterprise should be subordinated to national interests. With the state holding the commanding heights in the economy and exercising effective control over the private sector in the young states, the private sector can play a major positive role in providing consumer commodities, expanding the sphere of services and accelerating the overall rate of economic development. However, even a combination of state enterprise, gradually coming to dominate the economy, with private enterprise, and socialisation of small-scale farming and crafts on a co-operative basis will still not produce the desired economic and socio-political effect, unless these factors are supported by flexible and realistic economic planning.

An analysis of the socio-economic progress made by the newly independent countries in the past 15 to 20 years has helped to establish with a great degree of accuracy the

essence and scope of the problems which the young AfroAsian countries will have to solve, and to clarify the aims and interests for which a hard and persistent struggle is being waged on the economic and cultural fronts.

This struggle is aimed at revitalising backward economies and securing genuine social progress which will pave the way to a new and better life for the popular masses and the building of a new society in the newly independent countries. This struggle is aimed at securing these goals while by-passing the capitalist stage of development or essentially reducing the period of such development. It is precisely these goals that the Marxist-Leninist and nationaldemocratic parties of the liberated countries are fighting for together with the international working-class movement and the socialist world. It is important to note today that it was practical needs that have brought these goals to the forefront of the social struggle. Among the things that depend on the achievement of these goals are the living conditions of the working masses, the very prospects for development of the national economies in the young states and for the struggle between the various political and social trends in these countries and the fate of the capitalist system as such in these, its ``peripheral'', but nevertheless highly important regions.

Bourgeois ideologists have propagated a deliberately misleading theory claiming that democratic policy of social progress in the developing countries excludes their economic growth at an accelerated rate. Contrary to the assertions of Western bourgeois ideologists who still have quite a few adherents in the developing countries, a consistent policy of social progress pursued in the interests of the popular masses does not in the least conflict with the objective of accelerated economic growth. In an effort to justify the already extremely uneven distribution of incomes against a background of mass misery and concentration of wealth in the hands of the capitalist and landowning minority, the advocates of such a system are eager to prove that any substantial limitation of incomes obtained by the exploiting classes will decrease the country's accumulation potential. In keeping with this ``theory'' the main burden of taxation should be borne by the broad mass of the people, the mass consumer. In such

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countries this burden is indeed shouldered by the mass of the people.

It is a fact, however, that the incomes of the propertied strata in the newly independent countries, particularly the traders, moneylenders, financial and banking bourgeoisie, feudal and semi-feudal landowners---approximately three to five per cent of the population accounting for nearly 25 to 30 per cent of the national income---are used for non-productive consumption. As a result of this, the accumulation fund is drastically reduced and an internal market structure takes shape, which is extremely unfavourable to economic progress. Costly luxury items imported to meet the requirements of the privileged classes have to be paid for with large sums of foreign currency which is in short supply. This expenditure is a heavy burden on the economy of the backward countries.

Another serious obstacle holding up development is the endeavour of the propertied sector to keep the living standards of the masses down at a low level. This phenomenon is typical of many newly independent states and aggravates the problem of the internal market to a considerable degree.

Given the small internal market a sizable portion of capital cannot be used for production purposes. As a result it is invested in speculation or withdrawn from circulation and hoarded. All this is a manifestation of one of the profound contradictions inherent in the capitalist path of development for the newly independent countries, for accumulation invariably comes into conflict with consumption and the mass market which in the final analysis is an important, if not decisive, factor in ensuring the productive utilisation of accumulated capital.

Therefore, the development of productive forces in the state sector on a more or less planned basis, achievement of social progress through improvement of the conditions of the toiling masses, on the one hand, and higher taxation of the incomes of the propertied classes, particularly the powerful exploiting groups, on the other, far from being an obstacle, are a vital condition for steady economic growth in the liberated countries.

Naturally, this approach to the question runs counter to the recommendations of bourgeois economists who oppose state intervention in the sphere of accumulation and the distribu-

tion of incomes, proceeding from the pretext that formal equality of "income opportunities" should be provided for all members of society; these economists maintain that even a policy of timid attempts to curtail inequality of incomes within the framework of a "liberal economy" is tantamount to an attack on the freedom of the individual.

Despite this several newly independent countries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, have become the scene of an increasingly persistent struggle for the removal of glaring differences in incomes. The aim of this struggle is to place the burden of expenditure for purposes of development first and foremost on the classes drawing the highest incomes. Progressive legislation ensuring maximum withdrawal by the state of funds from unearned and unproductive incomes to promote national development is in keeping with the principle of social justice. Such steps can by no means be regarded as expropriation of property in the form of productive capital. At the same time the demand to abolish the drastic differences in incomes of the various classes has nothing in common with the idea of ``levelling'' earnings, this idea being theoretically unsound and detrimental in practice.

Improved living conditions for the people, higher cultural standards and professional competence are a fundamental condition for steady economic growth in the developing countries. To achieve this the peoples anxious to break out of the grip of backwardness will have to work all-out and make sacrifices over a considerable period of time.

The questions as to how they should best break free from misery and backwardness and accelerate economic progress have been preoccupying the peoples of the Third World more and more.

The period of development now being experienced by the peoples of the newly independent countries is characterised by intensive struggle for consolidation of independence, for democracy and social progress in the genuine, really broad sense of the word, for expansion of the national productive forces, and for higher living and cultural standards of the working people. This period belongs to the pre-socialist, general-democratic stage of the revolutionary process. This does

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not, however, in the least imply that the class struggle both against imperialism and the local bourgeois-landowning classes is less intense. Objective scientific analysis demands that attention be paid to the internal laws governing the process of development in the newly independent countries, regardless of whether this process is occurring in industry or the villages which are slowly being emancipated from the fetters of despotic landowners, tribal and caste prejudice or archaic customs still holding sway over hundreds of millions of people. It is also necessary to make a careful study of the actual vehicles of this process---the classes, social strata, parties and organisations involved.

The revolutionary struggle of the peoples from the former colonies and dependent countries against imperialism, colonialism, racialism, for freedom and independence proceeds from the historically irresistible desire to abolish age-old backwardness, misery, nationality and racial inequality and social injustice. It is clear that misery and backwardness suffered by the peoples of the former colonies and semi-colonies cannot be abolished by political means alone.

Naturally, it is impossible to solve in the interest of the majority of the people the fundamental problems confronting the newly independent countries by pursuing a course of private capitalist development based on private appropriation. The main problems facing the Third World can be solved by extending the national liberation movement. To this end, while working towards the outstanding national-democratic objectives of the anti-imperialist revolution, it will be necessary at the same time to strip the exploiting classes and groups of their power. Several countries have been gradually embarking on this path at various junctures during the past two decades. They include Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Algeria, Tanzania, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the People's Republic of the Congo, Guinea and Burma. Several other countries of Asia and Africa are now adopting this course too.

Mass poverty, and economic and cultural backwardness in countries which have won their freedom from the imperialists should not be regarded as insurmountable as they are presented by bourgeois ideologists who persistently try to convince their peoples that there is only one course open to them:

gradual development towards capitalism in the form of a social and class compromise of feudal and capitalist interests under the neo-colonialist tutelage of the imperialist powers. No social revolution of fundamental social reforms in property relations to put an end once and for all to the antiquated political and socio-economic structure should even be contemplated. The most that could be hoped for would be halfhearted reforms in the most explosive areas of public life, so as to ensure that the course which the imperialists and local bourgeois politicians are trying to impose on the liberated peoples is adopted. Such are the solutions put forward by bourgeois ideologists.

Both Western neo-colonialists and the big national bourgeoisie in the East fear the radical elimination of pre-- capitalist survivals, antiquated traditional institutions and rotten social structures, because this cannot be done without the involvement of the people. Analysis of the socio-economic problems of the Third World gives reason to believe that the half-hearted and inconsistent attempts undertaken in this direction today are not designed to clear the way for capitalist development. The peoples of the Third World objectively stand to gain from by-passing or cutting short the capitalist stage of development, from interrupting such development at the earliest possible stage. More than that, they not only stand to gain from doing so, but are in a position to accomplish this step. The fundamental difference between the MarxistLeninist and bourgeois approaches to the transformation of society should be sought in the former's advocation of the adoption and consolidation of the non-capitalist path of development, not in the verbal recognition or rejection of numerous intermediate stages often proposed by bourgeois theoreticians for the countries of the Third World. These different approaches reflect real, though historically by no means equally important alternatives---the capitalist and the non-capitalist path of socio-economic development for the Asian and African countries.

The economic and social aspects of development are closely connected with each other. This makes social progress a most important motive force for economic growth. It is by no means a coincidence that precisely socio-economic problems and ultimately the choice of the path of development for the

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newly independent countries have precipitated extremely fierce political and class struggle and caused a deep split in society. The working masses in these countries do not want to live as before, to let the bourgeoisie, either foreign or local, live on the fruits of their labour.

Naturally, such processes manifest themselves in various social forms, different in degree and character, in the countries advancing along the path of non-capitalist development, on the one hand, and those advancing along the path of capitalist development, on the other. The living standards of the people are ultimately determined by the level and rate of expansion of the national economy, efficiency of production and labour productivity. Both Asian and African countries have many opportunities open to them for improving the conditions in which their peoples live. These include the implementation of radical agrarian reforms, that would emancipate the peasants from the yoke of the landowners, traders and moneylenders; the organisation and consolidation of various types of co-operatives which would be capable of protecting the interests of the common toiler, the small agricultural producer and artisan; the introduction of progressive labour legislation; the improvement of the education system, public health services and social security; the adoption of effective measures to increase employment, including the launching of national construction projects, and so on. The states which have embarked on the capitalist path of development have made virtually no use of such opportunities. A political system founded on the rule of capitalists and landowners holds up social progress. As to the socialist-oriented countries, they have been carrying out profound socio-- economic transformations in the interests of the popular masses.

Marxists-Leninists have always maintained that a policy of social progress is of vital importance in connection with the complex range of problems which, if solved, will help abolish economic backwardness and bring about economic independence. The need for this is a most convincing argument in favour of the non-capitalist path. It has been demonstrated by the entire history of capitalism and by the experience of the Third World countries over the last quarter of a century that the capitalist system owing to its very nature

is organically incapable of combining the economic and social purposes of development in the interests of the working people even to a minimum degree, let alone to the maximum possible extent. A correct grasp of the interdependence of these economic and social aspects clarifies the question as to where and how to find the necessary resources for this, as to which of the traditional social institutions should be eliminated and which new institutions should be set up and consolidated.

Bourgeois ideologists are making every effort to seize the initiative in the elaboration of theories concerning the future of the Third World. We have witnessed a most acute ideological struggle flare up over the destinies of nearly two thousand million people. Regardless of what the apologists of capitalism may say, it is a fact that only the advocates of scientific socialism have acquired, after more than a century's progress of Marxist economic theory and more than fifty years' socialist construction, a universally applicable theory of social reconstruction which has proved itself in practice a theory of social reconstruction for both backward pre-capitalist and modern capitalist society. This theory covers:

---political power of the working people and reorganisation on this basis of all the components of the social system subjected to reconstruction, from the productive forces, through the sum total of production relations characteristic of societies with a multi-structural economy, to all the institutions of the superstructure without exception;

---theoretical development and practical implementation of planned regulation of the economy and gradual socialisation of all existing economic forms and structures;

---social distribution of material and labour benefits aimed at promoting social progress in the interests of the people;

---state structure, foreign policy, armed forces, science, ideology and culture placed at the service of the people.

Enriched by the experience of class struggle both in the industrial capitalist countries and the countries now liberated from colonialist rule, enriched by the experience of triumphant socialist and communist construction, Marxism-- Leninism has demonstrated to all peoples, including those of Asia and Africa, the only right way to overcome age-old back-

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wardness and build up a new society. The theory and practice of scientific socialism alone offer a workable alternative to the peoples of the Third World in their hard struggle against the imperialists and capitalists, for a new society--- for socialism,

THE STATE SECTOR

The transfer to state property of enterprises, firms and whole branches of the economy, and above all the nationalisation of property belonging to foreign capital, as experience of the Soviet Union and all the countries of the socialist community has shown (and likewise that of Egypt and certain other countries of the East and of Latin America that have adopted a socialist orientation) are the most consistent, economically and politically advantageous means of creating the material-production basis of the state sector for the people. In the political respect the nationalisation of property belonging to foreign capital in the developing countries is, as a rule, the natural result of the national liberation revolution and the replacement of colonial power by that of an independent nation state resulting from that revolution. In the economic respect the nationalisation of property belonging to foreign capital provides the material foundation for an independent state economy. It undermines foreign influence on the internal life of the country and creates most favourable conditions for the subsequent extension of the state sector of the economy as the basis for reconstruction of the national economy.

The construction of enterprises by means of state capital investment is a long and complex way of setting up the state sector. It places a considerable and sometimes critical burden on the country's underdeveloped economy. The correlation between two methods for forming the state sector---the nationalisation of existing foreign or locally-owned enterprises

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4',)1

ism in economically less developed countries, that are advancing along a capitalist path, can be explained by factors more profound than merely the interests of the ruling classes. It is a result of the natural urge experienced by peoples, that have only recently freed themselves from the yoke of foreign oppression, to achieve economic independence---the decisive precondition for consolidating their state sovereignty and political independence. The ruling classes, although pursuing at the same time their own class interests---striving to preserve intact their political domination---are also interested in promoting state capitalism. The interests of the nation as a whole in pursuing such economic policy often clash with the interests of society's ruling strata, and in countries like India, with the interests of the long since established big and monopoly bourgeoisie. In so far as the popular masses resolutely defend and strive after consolidation of political and economic independence, they become more concerned that state capitalism should develop consistently. At certain stages of class struggle and in connection with a number of questions fundamental to economic policy representatives of the private-capitalist sector oppose the state sector and advocate the curtailment or reduction of state-capitalist schemes.

Practical experience has shown that the gradual liberation of the economies of the developing countries from dependence on foreign powers proceeds more successfully in those cases where the state-capitalist form of economic development is the leading or even predominant form and where the state as a whole adopts a resolutely anti-imperialist and anti-- colonialist stand.

Some economically less developed countries in the Middle East (such as Turkey) that achieved state sovereignty during the first stage of the general crisis of capitalism immediately after the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, during the 1920s and 1930s were successfully building up the state-capitalist sector in industry. However, in the course of time, in connection with the increase in internal social contradictions and also that in the influence of foreign capital on the internal and external policies of these states, statecapitalist enterprises have to a certain extent gone private, i.e., have been sold to private capital, which fact goes to illustrate a gradual departure from the principles of etatism

and the construction of new state enterprises---the emphasis of one of these rather than the other at various stages of the shaping of the state economy depends on many factors and above all on the alignment of class forces within the country and on its position in the international arena.

The collapse of the imperialist colonialist system, the consolidation of the might of the world socialist system, the deepening of contradictions between the imperialist powers and a number of other factors create (as has been demonstrated by the experience of nationalisation in all developing countries) objectively favourable conditions for the nationalisation of large-scale foreign property. Policies aimed at developing the state sector underlie the economic plans drawn up in India and some other countries. In a number of cases such policies do not provide for all-embracing nationalisation of private foreign concerns, banks and plantations, nor for the adoption of measures prohibiting the appropriation of enormous profits by foreign capital. This is not difficult to see in such countries as India, Pakistan, Indonesia (after 1965), Iran and Turkey. The uneasiness that has gripped progressive circles in India and various other countries is all the more understandable in view of the fact that in the last ten years the influx of West European and US capital has shown a marked increase and a number of concessions have been made by certain developing countries to attract such capital.

The construction of state-capitalist enterprises is now under way in such developing countries, where no industrial bourgeoisie has yet taken shape and industrial development is still at an embryonic stage (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Cambodia, etc.). This means that the policy aimed at developing state capitalism is not always embarked upon after an industrial bourgeoisie has taken shape in sovereign, but economically less developed states, or when a relatively high level of concentration of production and centralisation of capital has been achieved. In those countries where there is not yet any industrial bourgeoisie, the urge to pursue such a policy often comes from the commercial bourgeoisie that is hand in glove with the landowners and moneylenders and sometimes from the landowners who are gradually being bourgeoisified.

In present-day conditions the development of state capital-

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in economic development. Yet even now in those countries those enterprises and branches of the economy which have remained in the hands of the state can objectively counteract the penetration of the economy by foreign capital, and the construction of new enterprises still more so.

In economically weak countries the bourgeoisie, despite acute economic clashes with foreign capital, is not always in a position to consistently withstand imperialist pressure. This can be explained by its specific social features: the presence in that milieu of considerable compradore and semi-- compradore elements, its participation in the semi-feudal exploitation of the peasantry (through private landownership, trading and moneylending practices) and finally its long subjection to foreign capital and the close economic ties it has with the latter. The less stable circles among the national bourgeoisie, and therefore those more inclined to compromise, yielding to the pressure of foreign capital, exert influence on the state in an endeavour to undermine its efforts to set up a state-capitalist sector. This phenomenon is observable in some measure or other in almost all the developing countries.

Over the last twenty years in Pakistan patterns have established themselves for the state-financed construction of various enterprises which, after being put into operation, are then sold to private, commonly big, capitalists. Thus, state industrial construction assumes the role of mentor or patron of private economic enterprise. Such an approach to tasks of industrial development reflects an attempt to apply the Japanese method of over a hundred years' standing, for encouraging private local capital to invest in industry. It is quite clear that this approach has not enabled Pakistan as yet to set up a strong state sector in industry.

In India the state is pursuing an active economic policy in conditions, where monopoly circles of the bourgeoisie that had taken shape and developed even before the dawn of independence were unable to assert their undivided political power in the country. Monopoly associations of the big Indian bourgeoisie effectively make use of certain links in the state apparatus to enrich themselves at the expense of the popular masses, intensify their exploitation of the working people, attempt to impose on the state reactionary policies, to alter the country's foreign policy course and

make every effort to bring about the collapse of the state sector. However, at the present period they are still recovering from a major defeat and, despite the support of feudal - compradore elements, have not been able to make India reject its policy of peace, non-participation in aggressive military blocs and the construction of a wide-scale state economy. Pressure from the popular masses and progressive circles, anxious to pursue a course of neutralist foreign policy, to cooperate with the socialist countries while making the most of contradictions within the imperialist camp, to create and consolidate a state sector as the foundation for economic independence, has proved more effective than the demands put forward by the monopoly bourgeoisie.

National capitalism in India and other developing countries is still ``young'' as regards its pace and extent of accumulation. It is relatively backward in its structure, and inexperienced in so far as it is petty-bourgeois forms of property that predominate. This national capitalism hopes for rapid development in the epoch when capitalism as a whole, the world capitalist system, is on the way out and the forces of socialism are growing and striking ever firmer root throughout the world.

If we take India, the course adopted by the Indian state to achieve accelerated development of productive forces by setting up a heavy industry in a relatively short period should do away with the constant threat that the imperialists might make the most of India's economic backwardness to reassert their dominant influence in that country, pave the way for a remodelling of the country's whole industry and a boosting of agriculture, thus providing infinitely more work for the population which includes fifty million under- and unemployed. This economic course undoubtedly corresponds to the national interest. However, this by no means implies that the class struggle is abating against the background of this policy for the promotion of state-capitalist development. On the contrary, it assumes a wider scale than ever although not infrequently it is found in less blatant forms than in the past. Big local capital wants the state to help towards its enrichment and make small and medium enterprise dependent on it. The working class and the broad popular masses actively support those schemes introduced by the state in order

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to tighten control over the monopolies, raise taxes on their profits and superprofits and thwart attempts on the part of the monopolies to seize power. These objectives serve to consolidate the united front of democratic forces directed against the monopolies, both foreign and local.

This was clear from the results of the elections in 1971 when Right reactionaries representing the class interests of the monopoly bourgeoisie and its semi-feudal allies suffered a crushing defeat.

The question as to the scope, direction and effectiveness of state intervention in the development of the private-- capitalist sector of the economy has long since become one of the basic questions of class relations in the developing countries in general, and India in particular.

their independent country. These differences in their views are fundamental both with regard to questions of incomes policy and the implementation of agrarian reform and also with regard to the question as to the stand to be adopted in relation to foreign capital, local monopolies, tax policy, the utilisation of bourgeois profits and the revenue of other propertied classes for purposes of economic development. Nevertheless the goals of national economic reconstruction in the light of the struggle against colonialism and to strengthen state independence and to further peace between the peoples, create a definite foundation in society for nation-wide antiimperialist unity. This does not exclude the possibility of increasing class contradictions inherent in any bourgeois society, particularly in a society whose anti-imperialist and anti-feudal objectives have not as yet been achieved.

After wresting free of the colonialist system, India, like other countries with similar enormous natural and manpower resources, remained within the system of the world capitalist economy and naturally found herself exposed to the impact of the laws of that system's development. The colonialists who had formerly exercised political power in such countries as India regarded their colonies as agrarian and raw material appendages to the ``mother'' country and deliberately held back the development of their productive forces and made sure pre-capitalist survivals remained prominent in these countries' agriculture. Nowadays these countries are trying gradually to break off old colonial ties with the metropolitan countries. This, however, gives rise to considerable difficulties that have long since been overcome by the socialist countries, since the latter at one and the same time attained their national independence and broke free from the world capitalist economy.

The difficulties encountered by India and other developing countries in the sphere of economic development are a result of the operation of the general patterns of development peculiar to national capitalism, and its dependence on the world capitalist economy. In countries that attained their independence and replaced the old order by people's democracy, initially extended reproduction of the capitalist economy was virtually ruled out and later even its simple reproduction. At a specific stage of development in these countries capital-

After India attained independence it was vital that she should overcome her technical and economic backwardness as quickly as possible. In 1947 India's population was approximately 335 million---close on 15 per cent of the population of the capitalist world, while her share in the total industrial production of the capitalist countries was only 0.75 per cent. Industrialisation is the only way to close this gap. This much is clear to all classes of Indian society.

The development of India's industry and agriculture---a prerequisite for the consolidation of her independence---as was also the case with many other countries of a non-socialist orientation, took a capitalist course. This was in accordance with the interests of the national bourgeoisie, which as regards the defence and consolidation of political independence and the attainment of economic independence, generally coincided with those of the people as a whole. The most consistent champions of national independence, of economic progress, which should free the newly independent country from the grim consequences of colonial domination and the threat of colonialism in its new guises, are the working masses, as they defend their class interests in the course of the drive for national reconstruction.

The working masses and the national bourgeoisie have different conceptions of the paths their nation should follow in order to ensure industrial and agricultural progress for

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ist and pre-capitalist relations develop into socialist ones. In the developing countries that have adopted the capitalist path (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc.) economic development is accompanied by the spread of national capitalism in private and state forms. The exploitation of the people and the natural wealth of the developing countries by the monopolies of the foreign powers complicates their economic development to a considerable degree.

With reference once more to the case of India, this country began to overcome its economic backwardness, struggling persistently the while to assert its economic independence. During the last twenty years India's industry has made considerable strides forward. With the help and active co-operation of the socialist countries independent India has made considerable efforts to change the inner structure of its economy by setting up its own heavy industry (production of the means of production and instruments of labour---machines, equipment, metals, etc.). On this basis India has then proceeded to reconstruct her relations within the world market and cease to provide a source of farm produce and raw materials for the capitalist countries. These features together constitute one of the basic characteristics of economic development in India, a country which succeeded earlier than the other developing countries in embarking on major industrialisation. Foreign capital to a large extent lost its former monopoly both in India's internal market and also in the sphere of India's trade relations with the world market, particularly with regard to its role as supplier of industrial equipment, technical knowhow and training for engineers and technical and scientific personnel.

a nation-wide scale (state property both of the nationalised variety and also that set up by the state from scratch) is able to accelerate the pace of socio-economic development to a considerable extent, thus by-passing earlier forms of capitalist property; a similar path has also been followed by other newly independent countries. Such a course is objectively advantageous for the whole process of historical development and for the acceleration of the creation in these countries of the material prerequisites for socialism. Naturally, the big and monopoly national bourgeoisie and the representatives of foreign capital try to incite the local petty and middle bourgeoisie against state capitalism which they present to them as the very opposite of "free enterprise''.

While in the economic respect this policy aimed at expanding the state sector serves to accelerate the process of capitalist industrialisation, in the socio-political respect it makes it possible for ruling circles to put before the popular masses the idea of building a "society on the socialist model", as has been the case in India and a number of other countries.

The British imperialists in India, the French in Algeria and the Dutch in Indonesia had set up colonial state-- capitalist monopolies embracing large branches of the economy (the railways, war industries, banks, foreign trade, irrigation, insurance, etc.). This was basically a continuation of the domination in the colonies concerned of the metropolitan countries' state-monopoly capital. The transfer of these branches of the economy into the hands of the new independent state and the subsequent nationalisation by the sovereign state of part of the property belonging to foreign capital stripped such property of its colonial characteristics inherent in it in the past.

The monopolist strata of the national bourgeoisie in India, the big bourgeoisie in Algeria and a number of other countries in the Arab East did not succeed in making the bourgeois state and its property the instrument of monopoly domination. However great their significance may have been these strata were unable to ignore the new conditions of development and the intensity of the democratic and anticapitalist moods of the masses. At a certain period the economic and political implications of the struggle waged by the working class and all democratic elements in society consist

In India, as in the other developing countries, where productive forces lag far behind the level that has been attained by the leading industrial countries, the transition on a relatively wide scale to a state economy of the most mature type ---namely the form of bourgeois property---provides favourable opportunities for the accelerated development of productive forces. The state in India seeing no imperative need to follow patterns of individual-capitalist or monopolistic property and making use of forms of bourgeois property on

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above all in the defence of anti-imperialist and anti-monopoly state capitalism as the most progressive course of bourgeois development. Even national-democratic revolutions do not do away with the need for a mixed economy (viz. in such countries as Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo and Somalia).

In connection with the problems of the subsequent development of the newly free countries which, like India, are pursuing a capitalist course of development, three basic tendencies are emerging more and more clearly which serve to pin down the content of the political struggle going on in these countries.

1) The working class and closely allied social strata are waging a struggle for a non-capitalist, socialist course of development diametrically opposed to any forms of capitalist development.

2) Growing nation-wide forces (among which the working class and closely allied strata play the most active role) demand nationalisation of property belonging to foreign capital, restrictions on the activity of local monopolies and consistent agrarian reform. Under pressure from these forces ruling circles in a number of developing countries carry out progressive transformations in the economic sphere. At the same time the national bourgeoisie attempts to accomplish the technical and economic reconstruction of their country via certain compromises both in relation to foreign capital and the landowners.

3) Resistance from Right elements is growing---namely from the big bourgeoisie and the reactionary landowners anxious by any means possible not to let through any internal transformations that are progressive in a socio-economic sense or at least to undermine their effectiveness, and also to make sure that the state changes its foreign policy course in a pro-imperialist direction.

This means that the question of the character and course of subsequent economic development has become the main problem of nation-wide importance, pivotal to the class struggle in all developing countries.

In India's case where big monopoly capital has already established itself this question is the central issue in relation to intra-class contradictions within the bourgeoisie itself,

which has been gradually assuming ever larger proportions ever since independence.

The struggle for democracy in all economically weak countries---as has been borne out by many years' experience ---is above all a struggle for nationalisation of foreign capital, for the restriction of the economic power enjoyed by the big capitalists and monopolies and for the consolidation of the state sector. This struggle serves to impede the monopolies in their efforts to gain sweeping control over the country's economic and political affairs. One of the methods used in this struggle is the development of the state sector. Progressive forces in the developing countries justly regard the development of this sector as the most democratic path of bourgeois development. The working masses have good grounds for their belief that in certain conditions this sector can facilitate the transition to socialism.

Let us now turn to some basic economic problems, confronting India in recent years, analysing them in the light of the development of state capitalism.

In the course of the development of the state sector, which more than all else has served to reflect the nation's aspirations to overcome backwardness, especially when that development takes the form of industrialisation, the country concerned is usually faced by a drastic shortage of internal and external resources for financing development plans. The forced increase in state expenditure on capital construction both through increased taxation of the masses and by way of increasing loans and inflation proves insufficient to ensure high levels of employment and safeguard against development crises, as had always been hoped by certain economists basing their calculations on Keynes and his followers. In India's case 1956 and in particular 1957/1958 and 1965-1967 were periods that showed that Indian economists had obviously not taken into account the impact of the anarchic market situation. Precisely this formidable force brought to light the acute contradictions in the movement of capitalist reproduction in that country, demonstrating that behind the optimistic screen of expanding construction projects and industrial production were concealed profound stagnation in agriculture, a food crisis, and market speculation in nationwide proportions that served to redistribute the national

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income in the interests of flourishing monopoly capital. Many economists could not but admit that Keynes' economic theory was inadequately equipped to explain the nature of the crisis of internal resources in the country. Professor Mahalanobis, prominent Indian economist, notes that this theory has failed to promote economic development in India and other developing countries; on the contrary, it has slowed it down. It has become quite obvious that it is impossible to override the general laws of capitalist development and that system's internal contradictions by effecting only state-capitalist schemes involving limited planning peculiar to state-capitalist development and the superficial but by no means real departure beyond the bounds of capitalism.

Indian, and not only Indian, bourgeois economists do not analyse the patterns of development found in the state economy on the basis of any study of the class nature of bourgeois society and state. Manifestations of the state economy such as the absence of private capital in state-run production, the high degree of socialised production, enormous state investment, the planning of capital investment and production in the state sector, the exclusion from the state sector of private local and foreign capital are presented by bourgeois economists as indications of changes in the inner essence of capitalism.

State enterprise is undoubtedly one of the basic factors in the economic boom in a number of developing countries. Enormous state investment in production creates favourable conditions for economic development. A short summary of the development of the state sector in Indian industry presents the following picture.

1) Starting out with five enterprises with a total capital of 290 million rupees in 1951/1952 (the First Five-Year Plan), by the end of the Third Five-Year Plan (March 2, 1966) the state sector accounted for 74 major industrial enterprises in which 24,150 million rupees had been invested. By March 31, 1970, the number of industrial complexes within the state sector had risen to 85, with a total capital investment of 45,000 million rupees. This figure was equal to almost half the total investment in the country's censused industry and exceeded the investment in the 75 leading local monopolies taken together.

2) State industrial complexes were producing (1966-1970) 77 per cent of mineral fertilisers, 48 per cent of plant and machinery, 62 per cent of pig iron, 55 per cent of steel, 68 per cent of zinc and 52 per cent of crude oil.

It is thus quite clear that given the establishment of a major state sector in industry in the process of reproduction a good deal depends on the level of state investment, on government orders, the proportion of production accounted for by the state sector, particularly with regard to the production of the means of production.

At the same time the growth of the state-capitalist sector ---at the initial stage more significant in the sphere of capital construction and later in the sphere of industrial production--- does not and indeed cannot revoke the economic laws peculiar to capitalism. Unfavourable consequences for the development of productive forces resulting from these laws make themselves clearly felt despite every effort on the part of state planners.

A major feature of Indian economic development is the constant and gradually increasing accumulation of new fixed capital and the replacement with it of old fixed capital in industry, power engineering, transport and to a certain extent, although on a much lower scale, in agriculture. The elimination of imperialism's colonial monopoly and the emergence of an independent nation state, that has embarked on a course of industrialisation and progressive bourgeois reforms, provide the main political and economic base for the profound process of renewal of fixed capital and the extension of the domestic market.

The scale of state and private capital investment in new projects is constantly on the increase in India; large amortisation sums are spent on re-equipping old factories and extending these or building new ones. This has meant that production capacities, particularly in Department II, and to some extent in Department I as well, have grown considerably faster than the volume of actual production, which as a result of slower and more limited expansion of the domestic market has lagged behind. This explains energetic attempts to find external markets for the output of Department II, and recently of Department I as well, in the countries of Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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The elimination of the British imperialists' colonial monopoly in India made it possible to introduce drastic changes in the distribution of capital investments in favour of Department I in social production and the proportioning of these investments; the share devoted to new equipment was increased to 65 per cent and sometimes to as much as 75-80 per cent. This move was in response to the country's urgent need for new industries which were as yet lacking or at an embryonic stage of development. The precondition for a transition to broader technical and economic reconstruction was the development of such branches of production as the construction of railway engines and cars, ship-building, electrical engineering and machine-tool making, light engineering, the construction of hydro-engineering complexes and power stations, production of chemical fertilisers and organic acids, the manufacture of artificial fibre, pharmaceutical products and armaments. A top-priority need was that for all-round development of the iron and steel industry, heavy engineering, expansion of the country's fuel and power facilities and its own oil extracting and refining industries.

More rapid writing-off of fixed capital to amortisation funds also contributed to the intensification of investment activity on the part of private capital in so far as it made possible artificial understatement of profits or freeing the latter from taxation. All this gave rise to a situation in which a rapidly developing industry which was overtaking the expansion of the domestic market was under-using its capacities by 15-20 and sometimes by as much as 25-30 per cent.

This meant that the considerable non-utilisation of production capacities was not only indication of the onset of decay in already obsolete capitalism in the industrial capitalist countries, but also a consequence of the anarchic destructive nature of capitalism in those countries where capitalism was still in its early stages, despite state regulation of their economy. Excessive accumulation of fixed capital in relation to existing capacity of the domestic market points to an intensification of the anarchic aspect of capitalist production during the process of industrialisation, to the impossibility of establishing effective controls over capitalist accumulation. Events themselves, on the one hand, refute the existence of any "popular nature" of capitalism, which bour-

geois economists in the developing countries often go out of their way to extol, and, on the other, they point to the blatant inadequacy, half-heartedness and unreliability of the "principles of planning" advocated by the bourgeois state vis-a-vis private capital which of course works for its .own benefit and not for that of the nation.

The narrow potential of the domestic market and the increasing anarchy rife in private-capitalist investment lead to the appearance of inactive surplus fixed capital. Capitalists make every effort to reproduce it in production costs, in final consumer prices. The contradictory nature of so-called mixed economy, in which principles of private-capitalist and statecapitalist industrialisation exist side by side, comes to the fore particularly clearly when mixed and poorly planned economies of this sort begin to narrow down the market created by new investments against a background of price formation, market rivalry and the drive for profits. This situation in its turn opens up opportunities for crisis phenomena stemming from industrial over-production.

Another contradiction which holds back the development of the internal market and which is also connected with the anarchic character of investment and the incomplete utilisation of fixed capital stems from the persistent efforts on the part of the capitalists to raise production without making any significant increases in the size of the labour force and, where possible, without increasing the nominal wage fund or keeping any increases in the latter down to a minimum. This tendency objectively inherent in capitalism acts as a brake on the purchasing power of the internal market, obstructs increases in employment opportunities, leads to a certain instability in industry and exacerbates contradictions between production and consumption, between social production and private appropriation.

The bourgeoisie unfailingly counteracts the objective process of the crystallisation of a new, historically superior value of hired manpower corresponding to the new conditions of struggle and the existence of a working class in the independent developing countries. Making use of opportunities of state regulation the bourgeoisie goes out of its way to preserve intact for as long as possible those factors affecting the value of labour power, which constitute a legacy from

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the colonial past and still in many respects are responsible for present low levels of wages. This state of affairs serves to hold back the completion of the basic tasks of industrialisation which demands higher levels of education and technical qualifications from the working class, which in their turn depend on the material security of the workers. The bourgeoisie assumes that precisely the preservation of low living standards for the working class together with intensification of labour will provide it with the vital opportunities for making its young industry more competitive in the internal and particularly in the foreign market. The struggle of the proletariat to achieve improved wages has nothing of a temporary measure about it---it is a matter of principle, a struggle for recognition by the ruling class and the bourgeois state of the historical need for a new, higher value to be attached to labour power in view of the new position of the proletariat in a country that has recently freed itself from colonial oppression. Progressive forces are waging a struggle to achieve a restructuring of the national economy of the developing countries of a kind that could lead to a steady improvement in the living standards of the masses. Monopoly groups within the bourgeoisie and the big capitalists are aspiring after quite different goals bound by their own narrow class interests. They are going out of their way to consolidate themselves as a political force so as to be in a position openly to confront the popular masses.

could not and indeed did not lead to the formation of national state-monopoly capitalism in colonial India. In that period India was not a sovereign national state, and big national capital grew up in conditions of foreign domination.

The liberation of India from colonial oppression and the formation of a sovereign nation state did not immediately give rise to conditions favourable for the merger of the apparatus of the young bourgeois anti-colonialist^ anti-- imperialist state with big local capital. On the foundation of popular anti-imperialist unity in India a mass nationalrevolutionary movement had grown up which made possible the elimination of British domination. The artificial partition of India served to disrupt many traditional economic ties. A long period of economic dislocation, famine, failure to solve outstanding agrarian problems, the emergent threat of agrarian revolution, and the activation of the workers' movement were all prominent features of the internal situation at that time. Conditions on the international scene were determined to a large extent by the increasing role of the world socialist system and the national liberation wars that were in progress in some of the neighbouring Asian countries. In these complex conditions Indian monopoly capital was not in a position to assert its control over the apparatus of the young nation state.

By the end of the first decade of India's independence further development of these state-monopoly trends was to be observed. With reference to the first period (up to 1952- 1953) the influence of big capital on state policy served to paralyse domestic economic policy, deprived as it was of scope actively to strive after attainment of the basic economic objectives of national significance. The state had not yet come into its own as a major force in the organisation of the state sector of the economy and the policy of industrialisation had not yet been officially announced. For the basic trend of development private-capitalist enterprise had been selected, with the wide participation of foreign private capital.

The gradual change in the alignment of world forces to the advantage of socialism, the increased danger of war, the threat of the restoration of colonialism in one form or another and the gradual relinquishment of national independence, and at home the increased disproportion of economic devel-

India is the only one of the developing countries where big capital has already established itself and is rapidly developing along monopoly lines. Relatively rapid concentration of production and centralisation of national capital during and after the First World War, during and after the world economic crisis of 1929-1933 and, in particular, during the Second World War made possible the emergence and subsequently the intensification of monopoly tendencies in this country's economy. This process clearly points to the common features of the objective laws of capitalist development to be found in oppressed and oppressor countries, in colonies and metropolitan countries. However, the process of concentration of production and centralisation of capital

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opment (particularly as regarded the production of the means of production and food supplies), the high level of underemployment, the rapid growth of industrial unemployment, the intensification of class contradictions made it imperative to review certain aspects of India's domestic policy. An abrupt switch to a course of industrialisation, active effort to set up a state sector, certain restrictions on the activities of foreign private capital in key branches of industry, the tightening of state economic control over private local capital, the announcement of the construction of a so-called "society on the socialist model" as a national goal---all signified a departure from the ineffective economic policy of the initial post-independence period. In the sphere of foreign policy the Indian Government started actively to support the principles of peaceful coexistence, to condemn the cold war and military-political blocs, and to reject any aid that might involve the siting of foreign military bases on its territory. It came out in favour of consolidating relations with the countries of the socialist community. All this went to show that the attempts of the monopoly capitalists to subordinate to their own interests the Indian bourgeois state, its policies and apparatus had failed.

In the years that followed, when the successes scored by India's domestic and foreign policy became clear for all to see, Right political groups started stepping up their efforts to encourage the government to review its foreign and domestic policies and launched a wide propaganda campaign in defence of free enterprise, etc. However, the progressive aspects of National Congress policy, and the course pursued by Jawaharlal Nehru were supported by the popular masses who rallied to the Left-Centrist wing of the ruling party and the parties of the Left democratic opposition which were coming out against Right-wing reaction.

It is now clear that the working masses in a young bourgeois nation state are in a position in the course of the class struggle, if not to override, at least partly to paralyse the political influence of big capital, resist its claims and work to consolidate and extend bourgeois democracy, although they are not yet able to establish genuinely democratic control over the economy, the state sector and the activities of monopoly and foreign capital. At the same time it has also

transpired that the monopoly bourgeoisie was not going to be able as easily as it had assumed to dictate its wishes to the state apparatus, assert its control over all the country's economic affairs and substitute reactionary policies for existing progressive ones. It can safely be said that between 1953 and 1955 a new period of the class struggle for the Indian working people began, which involved efforts to avert attempts by monopoly elements among the national bourgeoisie to ally themselves more closely with foreign capital and the imperialist camp and to reconsider India's internal economic and foreign policies.

The state sector in the Indian economy is developing in difficult conditions. The working masses strive to direct the spearhead of state-capitalist policy against foreign and local monopolies. However, the Indian state, while stepping up its control in the economic sphere mainly by setting up and developing large-scale state enterprise with the help of the people's means, only in recent years has dared to embark on wide-scale nationalisation of foreign monopoly property. This not only illustrates the class character of this state economic control but also the certain degree of influence enjoyed by monopoly associations which have succeeded in holding back the nationalisation policy originally announced by the Indian National Congress as far back as the 1930s.

The consolidation of the state-capitalist sector has made it clear to the Indian monopolies that at the given period it is impossible to count on any open transfer of state enterprises to private hands. This compels them actively to adapt themselves to the new conditions in an attempt to turn the state's internal economic situation to their own interests. Certain basic trends are to be observed in this adaptation process.

In view of the fact that the enterprises of the Indian monopolies have attained a relatively low level of development, when it comes to technical equipment and labour productivity, these enterprises attempt to enhance their role in the economy of the country and make themselves more competitive with the help of large state credits and advantageous orders. The monopolies in Department I have succeeded in having prices on ferrous metals and the major items produced from such metals raised. Technical re-equipment and inten-

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sification of labour are carried out by the monopolies on the basis of the official government policy of industrial peace, which, however, does not rule out the suppression of the workers' strike struggle. This helps to ensure a high level of accumulation. The state up until the last few years used to oblige the monopolies in such matters.

In so far as the rapid growth of large-scale private-- capitalist industry requires the expansion of imports of equipment and certain types of raw materials, the monopolies strive to increase their share in the import of these commodities and hence to redistribute the desperately short supply of foreign currency. As a rule, they achieve their goal even if this involves detriment to the national interest. This was made easier by the so-called "import liberalisation" policy pursued by the proteges of the monopolies in the Finance Ministry.

Official circles made known their approval of the collaboration of big local and foreign monopoly capital for joint enterprise allowing not only 49 per cent of the shares to be placed at the disposal of foreign capital (as had been the case earlier) but even 51 per cent. Encouragement for the financing of large-scale Indian enterprises by foreign private and international finance organisations (mainly American) was widespread and payments on such loans made to the monopolies were guaranteed by the state.

Despite the state policy of control and limitation of privatecapitalist enterprise in the key branches of industry, large private firms were penetrating such branches as metallurgy, ship-building, aluminium extraction and mechanical engineering to a far wider extent than officially permitted.

In recent years (1969) foreign companies have succeeded in penetrating those branches of industry which were formerly out of bounds for them, and what is more, this often takes place with the knowledge of the official bodies.

Big capital succeeds in concealing from the taxation authorities large sums of its continually growing profits and thus depriving the state budget of important revenue which by law it is obliged to hand over to the state. The monopolies have set up a black market which operates in violation of the rules of government control; no effective measures to combat this phenomenon have been introduced.

Representatives of monopoly capital endeavour to utilise state investment in their own interests. To this end from time to time they advocate the quotation and sale of shares issued by state enterprises at the stock exchanges hoping that by buying these up they will be in a position to penetrate state enterprises and gradually to transfer state property to private hands. So far they have not had any success in this line. Big capital demands that large numbers of businessmen should be taken on to manage state enterprises, hoping in this way to place the state sector under its control. Representatives of big capital press for funds from the state budget to be spent above all on building power systems, railways, motor roads, communications facilities, ports, irrigation systems and developing other service or so-called infrastructure branches of the economy, as opposed to expanding state-owned industry by building more factories: all this effort is aimed at providing big capital with state orders, while at the same time opening up new possibilities for its own industrial expansion.

The monopolist upper crust within the bourgeoisie is making every effort to bring about a change in India's foreign policy calling for closer ties with the imperialist powers. Indian monopolists are endeavouring on this basis to secure a permanent and large inflow of aid from the capitalist states. They are in favour of curtailing the main plan targets, particularly in relation to the construction of stateowned factories so as in this way to enlarge the scope for their own activities in industry and those of foreign investors. At the same time the monopolists demand that the government should abandon all agrarian transformations and replace any reform policy by simply increasing agricultural production by setting up large farms run on capitalist lines. Representatives of monopoly capital also advocate a reduction in economic ties with the countries of the socialist community and press instead for an extension of such ties with the imperialist states. For example, the programme of the Right-wing reactionary Swatantra party is directed against the basic interests of the Indian people and, as the 1971 election campaign was to show, is unacceptable to the patriotic non-monopolist strata of the bourgeoisie.

Persistently pursuing these policies the monopoly bour-

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geoisie is obliged to take into account the fact that opposition to state plans that enjoy the support of progressive forces is a difficult undertaking fraught with risks. This leads the monopoly bourgeoisie deliberately to exaggerate the difficulties connected with implementation of these plans so as to facilitate the propaganda of their own anti-popular economic policy. Representatives of this bourgeoisie try to prove that not they, but the progressive forces (including the Communist Party) are impeding the carrying out of state plans. It is not by chance that while attacking the policy of speeded up construction of state industry the monopoly bourgeoisie demands at the same time that measures be introduced to restrict the activities of the Communist Party.

Thus, the Indian monopoly bourgeoisie makes every effort to lend state capitalism in that country, which at the present time is carrying out progressive and to a certain extent national functions, reactionary, anti-popular traits, turning it into a means of intensifying exploitation of the working people, a means by which the bourgeoisie can exercise its control over medium- and small-scale private-capitalist enterprise, and hence into one of its sources of increased accumulation. It is with this end in mind that the monopoly bourgeoisie energetically aspires to winning over to its side the prominent members of the government apparatus known to entertain reactionary sympathies, to create a stratum of privileged bureaucrats loyal to its cause and make use of Rightwing socialists and disillusioned politicians so as through them to penetrate parliament, the ministries and state governments.

When assessing the large monopoly groups within the Indian bourgeoisie and the fierce struggle going on between them it should not be forgotten that within that bourgeoisie, national and caste differences still make themselves very clearly felt and likewise the acute contradictions stemming from these which come to the fore whenever any particular group, or a number of same, try to achieve a dominant position in some sphere of capitalist dealings, to obtain privileges in access to currency, raw material or finance resources, etc.

State capitalism in India has not smoothed over the contradictions inherent in capitalism as such, but rather served

to intensify them. On an enormous scale and within a short period state capitalism has advanced the process of capitalist socialisation of production. Large-scale inter-branch disproportions have grown up, the unevenness of economic development in the various states has become more marked and also that between various strata of private-capitalist entrepreneurs. Throughout the country monopolistic tendencies in the economy have grown more marked and reached a dangerous level. Their development, accompanied as it is by the gradual increase of ties between the monopolies and state capitalism, and the monopolies and the state apparatus and foreign capital, to which the parties of the Left have drawn attention, naturally goad on the masses to intensify their struggle against these tendencies on the basis of a broad coalition of the anti-monopoly forces.

The young independent states that are advancing along the capitalist path, despite assertions by bourgeois economists and sociologists to this effect, are not supra-class states. They do not come forward in the capacity of some entrepreneur or other acting in the interests of the people as a whole regardless of the interests of the ruling class. The production and economic functions which the state is obliged to take upon itself of course neither serve to make it a "welfare state". The state tries to control and regulate the country's economy above all in tune with the interests of the national bourgeoisie that is anxious to consolidate its domination. Even when the state is carrying out tasks of nation-wide significance, it remains a state representing the class in power, reproducing the political and economic domination of the bourgeoisie and performing the functions of a collective industrial capitalist. As the state is called upon to expand and intensify its economic activities and set up new branches of large-scale industry in an economically underdeveloped country, it starts to figure as an official representative of capitalist society obliged to take upon itself the supervision of production.

The nature of bourgeois property in India or in any other capitalist developing country is not altered by the fact that the state subjects to its control, by means of socialisation or

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new capital investment, a considerable part of the country's industrial production. However, when considering the socialisation of production in this or that particular state it is essential to make a detailed analysis of the concrete conditions in which this process takes place, the aims to which it aspires and the character of the given state. In their capacity of collective capitalist standing over against the working class, the various forms of state capitalism are very much the same, they do not differ from each other as far as their basic nature is concerned. The differences between them at the present time are shaped by differences in the forms and methods of the policies pursued by the various bourgeois states. Only a detailed historical analysis makes it possible to arrive at a correct understanding of the character of the present-day anti-imperialist state capitalism in some of the developing countries and the way in which it differs from imperialist state-monopoly capitalism to be found in the United States or the countries of Western Europe. An analysis of this kind differs radically from the erroneous evaluation of state capitalism in economically weak countries reached on the basis of inviting historical analogies with Japan after the Meiji revolution, pre-Bismarck Germany, tsarist Russia and even with etatism in Kemal Turkey. Detailed historical analysis of modern state capitalism in the countries of the East should be based on considerations of the forms, conditions and objectives of state-capitalist development and, most important of all, it should take into account the differences in these countries' attitudes towards imperialism.

The attitude to the imperialists, as experience has shown, provides an important and reliable criterion for defining how progressive state capitalism is in the developing countries. The fact that this state capitalism serves to develop productive forces is not the decisive criterion of its progressive nature. The question that must be asked is whether state capitalism develops these productive forces on a national anti-- imperialist, anti-colonialist basis, thus consolidating the country's national independence, or whether the development of state capitalism proceeds not so much on a national as on a proimperialist basis: that is precisely the way to define the most important criterion for the progressive nature of state capitalism in any of the developing countries.

It is not enough to see the main contradiction in the modern developing countries as nothing more than the contradiction between their technical and economic backwardness on the one hand and the requirements in industrial and agricultural development on the other. It is clear that not every type of development of the productive forces in these countries should be regarded as progressive regardless of how it is introduced and its possible consequences. One of the major contradictions in the developing countries remains that between these countries and imperialism, foreign capital which continues to represent the main force interested in preserving the economic backwardness of these countries, or in permanently holding back the surmounting of this backwardness. As a result, the extent to which state capitalism can be regarded as progressive or not in these countries depends not merely on the fact that it develops the countries' productive forces but also on whether or not it does this on national basis, thus reducing economic dependence on foreign capital, on imperialism.

State capitalism in India (as in the other countries advancing alongside her) at the present period can be regarded as state capitalism of a special kind. Its specific nature consists in the following:

1. State capitalism is developing in economically less developed agrarian countries at a period when the world socialist system already exists and is going from strength to strength, after the collapse of imperialism's colonial system, and when the balance of power between imperialism and socialism has changed decisively in favour of socialism. The growth of progressive forces throughout the whole world, the exacerbation of the class struggle as regards the choice of paths of development clearly rule out the possibility that this sort of state capitalism might follow the path which state capitalism took when it appeared in the 19th century in Japan, Germany, Russia and other countries.

2. State capitalism has inherited material means of production that earlier belonged to an imperialist state and were then transferred to new independent states as a result of the victory of the national liberation movement. Now its production basis is expanding mainly thanks to the state's capital construction and partly thanks to the nationalisation of

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private-capitalist enterprises in certain branches of the economy.

3. State capitalism in India and similar countries at the present period bears an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist character and is aimed at defending and consolidating political independence and attaining economic independence by means of industrialisation on a national basis. (This factor is the most important of all.)

4. State capitalism grew up in response to the need for accelerated elimination of technical and economic backwardness in those countries which in the recent past were colonies.

5. Since state capitalism neither in the past when it came into being nor at the present time resembles state-monopoly capitalism of the American or West European variety, at the present stage of development it is more or less successfully accomplishing a number of state, nation-wide tasks.

6. Anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist states promoting state-capitalist development are pursuing a peace-loving foreign policy and as a rule are not members of any aggressive military-political blocs.

7. In the light of recent changes in the alignment of class and political forces, the assumption of power by national democrats in a number of developing countries, who have opted for a socialist course and are thus following the noncapitalist path of development (Syria, Somalia, Algeria, Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo, Burma, etc.), the anti-imperialist state sector is coming to provide a vital springboard for a qualitatively new stage of development, it is evolving as an anti-capitalist state sector.

Such are the features of state capitalism in the developing countries and the prospects for its future evolution.

Western economists display keen interest in state enterprise in the developing countries. This can be explained by the fact that state enterprise in certain of these countries that are pursuing a consistent anti-imperialist policy provides conditions for economic independence. In a number of countries considerable progress has been achieved in the development of state-run industry. This disturbs the foreign monopolies. For perfectly understandable reasons they ``defend'' private

enterprise, reckoning that in these countries it will provide a powerful source of support for capitalist development as the only possible path of economic development in general.

For example, the American economist Wilfred Mallenbaum declared that government programmes in the less developed countries must concentrate their attention on the less important tasks and "discourage to some extent the popular emphasis upon the traditional symbols of industrialisation" (i.e., renounce attempts to build up heavy industry).* The prominent British Keynesian economist A. H. Hanson maintains in connection with the role of the state in economically less developed countries that "although, in the early stages government may have to take very strong and wide-ranging initiatives" in industrial development, later in the course of that development "it will progressively withdraw from direct participation in one field after another as private enterprise becomes more and more capable of taking the strain".** Hanson considers that once the state has decided to interfere in various branches of industrial enterprise this interference should be confined to the narrowest limits possible and so as to make sure that its activities prove favourable for the private sector. Another British economist A. J. Youngson in his book Possibilities of Economic Progress*** advises that the governments of such countries should not become carried away with the construction of large industrial projects and of course not go in for any concrete planning, but simply create the best possible conditions to attract local and foreign private investment.

At many forums for industrialists and economists that have been held in India and other countries in recent years lively debate usually takes place in connection with problems of management of those state enterprises that have already been built and put into operation. Material recording such debate shows that in Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and other

* Wilfred Mallenbaum, "The Asian Economic Potential", Asia and Future World Leadership. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1958, Vol. 318, p. 24.

** A. H. Hanson, Public Enterprise and Economic Development, London, 1959, p. 14.

*** A. J. Youngson, Possibilities of Economic Progress, Cambridge University Press, 1959, pp. 308-21.

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countries a policy of selling state enterprises to private capital is now being pursued, under the pretext that the enterprises are not profitable enough or even temporarily working at a loss. Phenomena of this kind are not observed in India, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Burma, Iraq and several other countries. The state sector here at the present stage continues to gain ground. This serves to reflect one particular aspect of the class struggle.

The working class and progressive forces support the development of state enterprise, for it really does serve to curtail the sphere of private-capitalist enterprise, both of the local and foreign variety. It reduces these countries' economic dependence on foreign capital, rules out or narrows down opportunities for its penetration in the all-important industries in Department I. The working people, patriotic and democratic circles come out in favour of the development of state enterprise, because it, more than any other, is made subject to state control, inspection and guidance through the institutions of bourgeois democracy. The working class upholds the development of the state sector for it is interested in promoting the setting up of large-scale, concentrated industry. The development of state enterprise is better suited than all other methods within the framework of bourgeois development to create the material prerequisites of socialism. The state sector is viewed as equally vital by the urban petty bourgeoisie, urban and rural artisans. These strata have need of credit facilities provided by the state for the promotion of small-scale production, of government orders, of cooperative transactions on a joint basis with state enterprise and finally maximum growth of employment provided by government construction projects and state enterprise. The growth of big private capital particularly in the industries of Department II often ruins the petty producer, who in his turn is more often than not active in precisely this category of industry. Big private capital not only fails to improve levels of employment for the petty-bourgeois strata in town or country, but on the contrary its very existence promotes their impoverishment.

The middle industrial bourgeoisie---the largest section of the national bourgeoisie---serves as the vehicle for the idea of free enterprise. Constantly aware of the threat from foreign

monopolies, and in a number of countries that stemming from local monopolies as well, it naturally regards these monopolies as its enemies, in so far as it is unable, however hard it might try, to raise itself up to the level of big capital that threatens to ruin and absorb it. For this reason the middle bourgeoisie is not opposed to the state sector. At the same time, fearing possible loss of its independence, it sometimes expresses grave dissatisfaction with strict state regulation and interference in the activities of the private-capitalist sector. However wide the vacillations of the middle industrial bourgeoisie may be, at the present period it tends to support the development of state enterprise rather than local and foreign private monopolies. True to the nationalistic and patriotic traditions of its class and at the same time wary of the proletariat which supports state enterprise, the middle industrial bourgeoisie, in this respect as well, is prone to twofaced behaviour and vacillations typical of the class of which it forms the nucleus. However, its vacillations are to a certain extent held in check by the policy of state control over foreign and local monopolies.

Foreign monopolies are rabid enemies of state enterprise in industry, although they usually attempt to conceal this. They persistently demand that the state should only concern itself with building up the infrastructure. The local monopolies strive to turn the state sector into their own stronghold, a means of monopoly exploitation of the people by wresting the state sector from under the control of bourgeoisdemocratic institutions and gradually, by various subtle means, subordinating it to their own ends making wide use for this purpose of corruption tactics which in many countries have come to represent a major threat to national interests. During the first stages of the struggle to gain control of the state sector local monopolies sometimes do not demand that state enterprises should be sold, but merely insist that businessmen should be taken on to run these enterprises or that some of the shares of these state enterprises be quoted at stock exchanges so as initially to turn them into mixed companies. Then the monopolies' demands increase, till they end up by calling for the complete transfer of state enterprises to private hands. Without adopting the unpopular stance of complete rejection of the need to develop state enterprise

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the local monopolies, supported in this by their foreign counterparts, try to cultivate within the milieu of the national bourgeoisie reactionary, anti-national tendencies and, together with the foreign monopolies, demand that state initiative should be limited to the sphere of the infrastructure. This policy plays into the hands of foreign capital in that it serves to undermine the national bourgeoisie as a whole.

The consistent development of state capitalism, including the nationalisation of foreign property, creates an economic basis for the emergence and consolidation of the independent national bourgeois state.

PLANNING

Economic planning is a subject that attracts wide attention. The urge to make use of experience in planning and the practical aspects of economic construction amassed in the USSR and other socialist countries so as to overcome old, inequitable economic ties that trammel the economy, and to free the newly independent countries from the grim heritage of the past is highly progressive.

In India's First Five-Year Plan (1950/51-1955/56) industrialisation did not figure as the decisive element in the state's economic policy. This was indeed a severe limitation and meant that pride of place inevitably went to private industrial investment. Some Indian economists (P. Wadia, K. Merchant, K. Vakil, M. Saha) criticised this First FiveYear Plan in rather sharp terms for being too limited. Some of their criticism was of a highly radical nature, and their demands for planning based on higher rates of economic development (increased investment, improved living standards for the masses, etc.) undoubtedly reflected what were then objectively the country's most vital economic requirements. Nevertheless, their criticism was frequently based on the unrealistic assumption that comprehensive centralised state economic planning was possible side by side with a virtual preservation of the leading role of private capital in industry.

Criticism of this kind would seem to stem from the Keynesian concept of ``controlled'' and ``planned'' capitalism, of an opportunity for setting up in India and other developing

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countries embarking on industrialisation ``popular'' or ``democratic'' capitalism free from all evils. Tn fact such an opportunity did not arise in those very places where this and similar theories were first put forward.

Of course, the adoption of the principle of emphasis on the development of heavy industry during the period covered by India's Second Five-Year Plan and its subsequent implementation in the five-year plans that followed were highly progressive developments. This is a vital condition for the consolidation of the economic independence of a large, densely populated country with a big internal market. Soviet economists can derive tremendous satisfaction from the fact that this principle prevailed in India's economic policy and was generally accepted by the economists of the developing countries. This reflects the influence of the experience in economic development gleaned by the socialist countries and represents a major triumph for it, a triumph whose significance extends far beyond considerations of a purely economic nature. The fact that the experience of socialist planning in the USSR and other socialist countries has constantly indicated, and provided historical confirmation for, the need for India and the countries recently liberated from colonialism to rely on state capitalism, rather than private capitalism, for industrialisation also testifies to recognition of the advantages peculiar to the state sector and centralised planning.

That such recognition is widespread is borne out by the fact that all genuinely patriotic forces, ranging from democratic opposition parties to ruling parties, support the development of the state sector in India and the majority of the developing countries, despite considerable differences in their basic stands and views with regard to methods for achieving industrialisation, and the targets which it should be geared towards.

Another fact worth noting is that the majority of economists now subscribe to the principle of planning all basic indices not only in terms of value, but---and this is extremely important---in terms of physical dimensions making use of the balance of payments method to the fullest extent possible. This places the whole system of planning on a more stable footing. It is no exaggeration to say that fundamentally new

elements in these five-year plans were a result of the influence of the impressive experience in socialist economic development amassed in the USSR and other socialist countries. Remaining within the system of the capitalist economy, India and similar countries were of course unable to take over the most important thing of all from the socialist countries, namely, experience in the creation and utilisation of material sources of industrial development and industrialisation in their class aspect, since these are the result of a socialist revolution in property relations and therefore unacceptable to the national bourgeoisie.

Some economists in their polemics with Marxists try to deny the leading role of the nation state in a country's economic progress. Yet it is common knowledge that in every independent country in the East the state is gradually coming to play an ever increasing role in economic life in view of the objective need to consolidate national political and economic independence. The considerable role of the state and, in particular, of its expenditure (current and capital) in the gross product of the developing countries is clear from the following figures"" relating to 1969 (in percentages):

Developed capitalist countries

Developing and non

-capitalist countries

Britain .

. .32

Libya .

. .37

Zambia

. .25

Malaysia . .

.35

FRG . .

. .32

Egypt

. .30

Zaire .

. .25

Sri Lanka .

.32

USA .

. .30

Iran . .

. .30

Senegal

. .20

India . . .

.28

France .

. .29

Morocco

. .29

Ghana

. .15

Pakistan

. 20.5

Italy . .

. . 25

Tunisia

. .25

Nigeria

. .14

Burma . .

.20

Japan

. .16

Algeria

. .23

Indonesia .

. 12.5

Syria .

. .20

Thailand .

. 17

Sudan .

. . 19

Philippines

. 12

As early as the end of the last century Lenin wrote: "The state is by no means something inert; it always acts, and acts very energetically, always actively and never passively." The

* Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodniye otnosheniya (World Economics and International Relations), Nos. 11, 12, 1970.

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PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

crux of the matter lies in which direction it acts as it combats economic backwardness---towards making the economy independent or gradually subordinating it to foreign capital. It would be wrong to call this or that country progressive on the grounds that its economic policy is aimed at creating new productive forces and nothing more. That would not be enough. It is clearly essential to determine whether this economic policy will involve at the same time a gradual elimination of the country's dependence on foreign capital, in other words, whether the state's economic policy is anticolonialist, anti-imperialist or not. There is no doubt that the assimilation of the experience of planning in the socialist countries serves to strengthen those forces in the developing countries which are fighting to achieve the implementation of precisely such a policy.

By introducing economic planning into the state economy and exercising control over the private sector, the state (the political organisation of the ruling class) is in a position to curtail the harmful processes that stem from the anarchic conditions of capitalist production and the machinations of foreign capital in the country's economy and foreign trade. Of course, every state within the framework of the world capitalist system is capable of avoiding neither the crises nor the fundamental contradictions peculiar to the capitalist mode of production. Nor is it able to tackle economic planning as a single economic complex. However, experience shows that when it comes to remodelling a backward economy on an independent state basis, the state can successfully accelerate this process and in a variety of ways promote it. It can also put a brake on the colonialist tendencies of foreign capital.

Bourgeois economists in India and other developing countries refer to their state as "the welfare state", maintaining that it shows concern for the nation as a whole and promotes the interests of all citizens on an equal basis. Assessing on their merits the tremendous and really progressive efforts directed against economic backwardness and economic dependence on foreign capital, it is, however, impossible to ignore the limitations and vacillations typical of bourgeois economists in the implementation of industrialisation policy on a national and primarily state basis.

A certain category of economists are wont to borrow elements from the socialist countries' experience in economic planning while endeavouring to utilise modern bourgeois, especially Keynesian, theories in their economic research and practice. Keynes' assertion that sufficiently wide socialisation of investment is the only way of securing an approximation to full employment, although this ought not to exclude all kinds of compromises and forms of collaboration between the state and private enterprise, has been widely deliberated in the developing countries. The main factor which attracts bourgeois economists to Keynesian economics is the illusion that the application of this theory in an economically underdeveloped state provides a basis for the fight for full employment. Marxism, they contend, provides no recipes for avoiding chronic unemployment. They succumb to the temptation to explain (in a way that at first glance appears simple and intelligible) the most painful social problem in these countries---the colossal under-employment among the rural population and the growing unemployment in the towns---by insufficient market demand which in its turn stems from insufficient personal spending and investment on the part of private citizens and the state. The colonial past appears to bear out this conclusion, for it really did go hand in hand with the colonialists' plunder and export of the country's national resources.

According to the Keynesian view, in order to produce fuller employment it is sufficient to increase state investment, even at the cost of tremendous increases in indirect taxation and also by way of loans and inflation, the assumption being that this will provide new revenue and hence new demand. The backward economy suffers from a chronic lack of investments---not those from which the revenue is exported or squandered in parasitic consumption, and which ultimately tend to impoverish the country, but those, the revenue from which remains in the country, stimulates popular consumption and by giving rise to new demand increases employment. From the Keynesian point of view a rise in employment at any price---even if it involves increasing investment by intensifying capitalist and semi-feudal exploitation of the masses, reducing their real consumption and their share in the social product---is always the main factor in the state's economic

R. ULYANOVSKY

PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

policy. It is not difficult to explain this set of views. Bourgeois economists themselves argue that employment is the precondition of class peace and therefore all classes have a vested interest in keeping employment up. They maintain that only employment can bring about a "welfare state''.

Among some economists, in India for instance, Keynes' ideas enjoy special popularity for the reason that they insist on the need to solve the problem of employment by introducing hand looms and spinning-wheels throughout the country. The living standards of the popular masses are of little interest to these economists and still less so, of course, is the question of redistribution of ownership of the means of production. For them the contradictions of economic development are easily overcome, since in a country with a population of 500 million even a small increase in per capita consumption creates what at first glance appear to be limitless prospects for market expansion and effective demand. They consider that herein lies the opportunity for crisis-free economic development through practical implementation of Keynes' theories. These people choose to totally ignore the basic social contradictions.

Finally, some economists see Keynesian theory as a new revelation in that its cornerstone is constant government intervention in the investment process and it objectively corresponds to the demands of the present period of industrialisation in the majority of the developing countries pursuing a bourgeois course.

``Radical" Keynesian theory, involving criticism of the contradictions inherent in capitalism, recognition of the shortcomings of classical 19th-century private capitalism, a reformist demand for its revitalisation in the spirit of `` progressive'' or ``popular'' capitalism allegedly striving after peace, and illusions of ``welfare'', is perfectly acceptable to local big business and its monopoly or semi-monopoly associations. The aim of big capital is to establish its hold over state enterprise and Keynes' economic theories promote the attainment of this goal. According to these theories, the most reliable state-capitalist methods for solving problems of accumulation essential for the setting up of Department I industry, i.e., production of producer goods, are financing by way of loans and colossal, constantly mounting indirect

taxation. This method of accumulation is used, for example, in India---an enormous, economically weak country, where the share of industry is not great, while the local bourgeoisie, let alone the owners of foreign capital, are highly reluctant to let their accumulation be frozen over long periods in the construction of ``non-profitable'' branches of heavy industry. Its application is possible here because the country is not yet dominated by finance capital and the attendant state-- militarist policy---the main devourer of funds provided by loans. Yet in the conditions obtaining in India and many other developing countries this method is gradually becoming an object of class contradictions. Thus, as they follow in Keynes' footsteps, bourgeois economists assume that the financing of industrial development and industrialisation can be carried out by maximum tightening of the taxation screws and systematic floating of loans. In their opinion this provides a constant stimulus for investment and leads to a rise in employment.

Hundreds of articles in economic journals are devoted to Keynes' ``multiplier'' theory, expressing the dependence of growth in employment on growth in investment. It is not difficult to understand the popularity Keynes' theories enjoy in India, for example, where, owing to backward productive forces, the total or partial lack of employment for over sixty million people was and remains the most serious social problem facing the country.

The interests shown by the national bourgeoisie in Keynesian theory can be explained by various other factors. First, it creates the illusion of socialist transformations on the basis of so-called ``limited'', ``democratic'' capitalism, of a "planned mixed" economy; secondly, it confers a decisive voice in economic transformations on the bourgeois state, presenting it in the capacity of an economic leader and servant of society; thirdly, despite the growth of state capitalism it secures firm positions in the economy for private capital and local monopolies.

Bourgeois economics exerts a considerable influence upon economic practice. For this reason the implications of this question extend far beyond the confines of pure theory.

Soviet economists make a careful study of the works put out by the economists of the developing countries. They note

R. ULYANOVSKY

with satisfaction that a number of leading economists (viz. Professor P. C. Mahalanobis, Professor V. B. Singh and the recently deceased chief of India's Planning Commission Professor Gadgil) arrive at a negative assessment of the role of Keynesian economic theory in the solution of problems of industrialisation facing India and the other developing countries.

Marxist economists appreciate that socialist experience in solving the question of sources of accumulation through complete elimination of the private-capitalist and semi-feudal parasitic appropriation of the social product is unacceptable to bourgeois economists both as regards its methods and its very essence. Yet at the same time it is undeniable that when it comes to concrete technical and economic norms for the development of industry, transport, communications and agriculture, when it comes to proportional planning of several branches of the economy and the use of the balance method, ensuring the most effective capital investment and the practical aspects of socialisation, planning experts, economists and programmers in India and other developing countries can glean from the experience of socialist construction amassed in the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist system a wealth of theoretical and practical knowledge such as they cannot find in any Western country.

There is no doubt that practical experience in the construction of an independent national economy will show on many further occasions the depth, viability, advantage and enormous cognitive value of the experience in planning and economic development in the socialist countries and thus demonstrate the superiority of that experience over all ``ultra-modern'' bourgeois economic theories.

ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE: PRIORITY GOAL OF THE LIBERATION MOVEMENT

The present world situation is characterised by the emergence and development of a large number of young sovereign states that have broken away from the imperialist colonial system but not become part of the world socialist system. The majority of these countries have not yet broken free from the world capitalist economy, although occupying a rather special position within it. All of them have an underdeveloped industry, are economically dependent on the foreign monopolies, suffer from a one-sided economy; they possess a multiple socio-economic structure, with a predominantly small-commodity, partly natural peasant economy, semi-feudal or capitalist-landowner patterns of landownership persisting more or less intact.

The developing countries, by virtue of the diversity of their economic and political development, history and national features, do not present a uniform picture. They can be divided into three main groups according to the degree to which they have succeeded in breaking free from the imperialist system. First, there are the countries following a capitalist path of development but which are not members of aggressive military-political blocs, sovereign states which have won and are now consolidating their political independence and are striving to assert their economic independence (India, Sri Lanka, etc.). Second come states that are nominally independent but associated with aggressive military blocs and thus have limited scope for pursuing an independent foreign and internal policy (Thailand, South Vietnam, South

R. ULYANOVSKY

PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

529

broad bloc of the petty urban bourgepisie, the intelligentsia, the peasantry, the semi-proletariat and the working class. The national democrats have adopted a course which involves a gradual breakaway from capitalism and re-- orientation in the direction of socialism. The progressive forces in these countries are fighting to expand the social support for the democratic regimes, intensify socio-economic change and ensure that a consistent anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist course is followed. The Communist Parties while retaining their organisational and ideological independence, support the progressive policies of the national-democratic regimes.

The essential feature that distinguishes the first and second groups of countries is their endeavour to achieve economic independence. The proletariat and the Marxist-Leninist parties regard economic independence as the most vital prerequisite for preserving national independence in the period when these countries are exposed to constant attempts on the part of the imperialist and anti-democratic forces to establish regimes that are politically dependent on imperialism, in a neo-colonialist form. The neo-colonialism practised by the imperialist powers is the main danger now facing the newly liberated countries in the efforts to achieve complete independence.

Korea, etc.), states with anti-democratic reactionary regimes. The third group consists of approximately fifteen Asian and African countries that have opted for socialism and are pursuing a consistent anti-imperialist policy and introducing radical socio-economic changes in the interest of the people.

In the countries of the first group the national liberation movement was headed by the national bourgeoisie. However, the proletariat in these countries is developing apace. Along with the growth in numbers it takes on the features of an experienced industrial proletariat and is coming more and more to represent an independent revolutionary force. The working class and peasantry are waging a struggle to ensure that bourgeois-democratic reforms are carried to completion. The proletariat, being the most consistent revolutionary force in these countries, supports the national bourgeoisie when it tackles progressive tasks of national importance. At the same time it opposes the national bourgeoisie's tendency to collaborate with and make concessions to foreign capital and the landowners, and all attempts to violate and restrict democratic freedoms. Upholding and supporting the ideology of proletarian internationalism, the progressive strata within the working class in these countries oppose bourgeois ideology, knowing all too well that in the final analysis the national bourgeoisie will be pursuing its own class goals that differ radically from those of the working people.

In the states of the second group the proletariat is comparatively weak. Nor is there as yet any strong national bourgeoisie. The ruling circles, consisting in the main of representatives of the commercial or compradore bourgeoisie, are closely associated with the feudal-landowning elements and as a rule follow in the footsteps of their imperialist allies. The progressive forces in these countries are pressing for a complete break with the aggressive military-political blocs, for driving out the imperialists and removing their henchmen from government bodies and the army, for rejection of the aid "with strings" provided by the imperialists, elimination of oppression at the hands of the landowners and the granting of democratic freedoms.

In the states of the third group the bourgeoisie has no monopoly of state power, which instead is exercised by national-democratic regimes representing a dictatorship of a

The socio-economic development of the young sovereign states is subject to a far greater degree than was the case in 19th-century Europe to the influence of the power of the state, in whose hands large economic resources are now concentrated. The new nation states found themselves in command of these economic resources after the successful completion of the anti-imperialist revolutions and as a result of the subsequent building up of a state sector in the economy. The ideologists of the national bourgeoisie, bearing in mind the anti-capitalist sympathies of the popular masses, advocate a ``third'' path, mid-way between capitalism and socialism. They maintain that capitalism is not suited to their country's conditions, but naturally balk at opting for genuine socialism. Many bourgeois leaders in the young nation states would like to find some sort of symbiosis of "national capitalism

31---919

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PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

and national socialism," taking the form of a "co-operative community" type of society, for instance.

Policies aimed at foisting private-capitalist enterprise on these countries as the main foundation for economic development find comparatively few supporters among the working masses. Even ideologists from the Western capitalist world are obliged to recognise this. Professor Walter Z. Laqueur, well known among British Orientalists for his double-dyed anti-communism, made the following interesting admission: "Capitalism in the Middle East is a synonym of exploitation and imperialism. It has never been really tried, and the prospects for private enterprise as a basis of economic development in the Middle East are far from ideal. Public opinion in the Middle East agrees that the initiative should come from the state, that a planned economy and some form of socialist regime are needed."*

Many democratic and liberal leaders support this emphasis on the development of state economic initiative and cooperation, pointing out with good reason that private capitalism is not equipped to put an end to the technical and economic backwardness found in these countries.

Emphasis on the expansion of state ownership of the means of production side by side with an increase in privatecapitalist ownership, while the propertied classes retain their hold on the reins of power, and support for a "class peace" between labour and capital are most common recommendations put forward by bourgeois economists. As a result the bourgeoisie and the landowners in the first and second groups of countries themselves advance along a path of capitalist development and attempt to lead their peoples in their wake. However, the very fact that the more far-sighted representatives of the ruling circles recognise the unpopularity and danger inherent in capitalist development shows that the prospects for the capitalist economy in Asia and Africa cause the ruling circles in many of the young independent states considerable alarm.

The question as to the course of development to be followed is an issue of not merely theoretical but also practical

importance. The independent nation states of Asia and Africa cannot ignore the colossal experience in socialist construction amassed by a good number of both European and Asian peoples. They try to adopt some of their methods and technical and economic achievements to some extent, taking into account the fundamental differences between the political and economic structure of capitalist and socialist societies and specific national features. In order to create an independent national economy and raise the living standards of their peoples, these countries, although not part of the world socialist system, can make use of some of the latter's achievements.

In a number of developing countries belonging to the first and third groups foreign, and more recently local, capitalist ownership in the means of production has been subjected to nationalisation on a wide scale. The effectiveness and political expediency of this measure on a nation-wide scale requires little demonstration. In order to eliminate contradictions between the peasantry and the landowners parasitic feudal landownership is being restricted and in some parts of these countries ruled out altogether. Given the revolutionary mood of the popular masses and the growing demands put forward by the peasantry it is most probable that further more far-reaching agrarian reforms will be introduced.

The setting up of state factories, extractive industries, transport services, power and irrigation networks and the restriction and regulation of private-capitalist enterprise so as to boost an independent economy, efforts to hem in and even drive out foreign capital from vitally important branches of the economy and introduce elements of planning in the running of the state economy, the centralisation of accumulated funds in the hands of the state and their redistribution with a view to consolidating economic independence, the development of co-operation in agriculture and crafts, etc.--- all these measures are being adopted to varying degrees in many countries of the first group. There is no doubt that taken together they still do not signify an option for the socialist path of development, for private property still predominates in these countries and power is still in the hands of the exploiting classes. The above-mentioned

* Walter Z. Laqueur, The Soviet Union and the Middle East, London, 1959, p. 278.

34»

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PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

economic measures are only the material lead-in to socialism in so far as state capitalism is an historical precursor of socialist development. The progressive implications of these measures lie not only in their economic aspects but also in the fact that they serve to promote the consolidation of anti-imperialist and democratic forces.

As for measures of this kind, or still more sweeping ones, which are introduced in countries of the third group, since they are not governed by the national bourgeoisie, they are advancing in a socialist direction, along a non-capitalist path of development.

Naturally, the implementation of measures of this type arouses fierce opposition on the part of the reactionary classes and strata of society. For this reason the success of all new departures depends on whether the working class and peasantry are involved in their implementation or whether they remain measures introduced from above without the participation of the masses, and sometimes against their interests. In the latter case such measures tend to be ineffective and sometimes do not even achieve the most modest targets.

In the final analysis the question of paths of development always boils down to a question of power and is thus decided by the outcome of the class struggle in a country. The establishment of the widest possible coalition of class forces, based on an alliance between the working class and peasantry and incorporating a significant section of the national middle bourgeoisie, able to come to grips with outstanding tasks of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal revolution, is a sure means of achieving profound socio-economic changes. This is being appreciated more and more by the broad popular masses. It also explains why in several countries of Asia and Africa a period of critical reappraisal of bourgeois ideological values is now under way, such as the theory advocating the establishment of a "welfare state" or the "co-operative community". This progressive process is making particularly successful headway in those countries where a broad range of class forces is participating in it.

Some bourgeois economists and politicians consider that the existence of a "mixed economy", i.e., a combination of private and state enterprise, makes it possible gradually to

develop "socialist elements" in the economy, which, they would have us believe, will in the final analysis shape the "third path" of development. It is clear that this theory holds little water: its advocates approach the problem of paths of socioeconomic development without taking into account class relations, the class nature of power and the state. A "mixed economy" in the developing states cannot on its own, in conditions of haphazard development, without the assumption of power by the national-democratic bloc that is opting for a non-capitalist path of development, automatically pave the way to socialist construction. In many developing countries there exist favourable conditions for a peaceful assumption of power by the working people, but whether or not these opportunities are taken depends not only on the working class and the strength of its alliance with the peasantry, the strength and influence of its Marxist-Leninist vanguard, but also on the behaviour of the bourgeoisie.

The fundamentally new alignment of forces in the international arena that is favourable to the socialist community also exerts a considerable influence on the paths of development chosen by the developing countries. The emergence of the world system of socialist states has radically altered the situation in foreign trade and international relations central to development prospects of the countries that have newly broken free from the bonds of colonial dependence. The allembracing economic monopoly of foreign capital both inside these countries and, in particular, in their foreign trade has been undermined. Co-operation with the socialist countries has done a good deal to strengthen the position of the developing countries in the struggle to consolidate their political independence through progressive reconstruction of the national economy.

Various classes and parties put forward their recommendations as to the choice of paths for socio-economic development. Marxist-Leninist parties hold that the class struggle of the proletariat, the gradual rallying together of the peasantry and other patriotic forces, the rapidly growing popularity of socialist ideas and the exposure of capitalist ideals are all paving the way for the emergence in the countries of Asia and Africa of national-democratic states. This was the forecast made at the International Meeting of Communist

R. ULYANOVSKY

PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in 1960. Since then this forecast has been borne out on a number of occasions. The activities of these states have demonstrated that the noncapitalist path leads to a break with backwardness, poverty and economic dependence.

In the developing countries some renovation of the economy and production relations is under way. It is being effected by national capital on an antagonistic class foundation, which is why the class struggle is becoming more intense in these countries. Since independence, in the countries of the first and second groups productive forces have been growing at a rate much quicker than before, although involving great hardships for the popular masses, and capitalist production relations corresponding to these enlarged productive forces are asserting themselves.

In the young independent states two groups developing side by side can be distinguished within the bourgeoisie. First there is the bourgeoisie that is working hand in glove with the other reactionary classes---the feudal elements still to be found in political and economic circles, compradore and monopoly elements, and foreign capital. Then there is the national bourgeoisie of patriotic mould which comes more and more consistently to oppose colonialism and feudalism. The Right wing of the bourgeoisie allies itself with the big landowners, is closely bound up with foreign capital and frequently supports not only the policies of the former imperialist masters but also of the neo-colonialists, in particular the United States. Its influence brings particular hardship to the working people and endangers the cause of industrialisation and national independence. The bourgeoisie of the second group consists in the main of small and medium-scale entrepreneurs. The material bulwark of this group is not only the enterprises it owns but also the statecapitalist sector that at the present stage possesses a clearly defined anti-imperialist orientation.

The second group supports the efforts of the progressive forces to make the state sector the dominant factor in the country's economy, although objectively this leads to further socialisation of production, an intensification of the strug-

gle for political democracy and profound social change and reform. The bourgeoisie of the first group advocates the unchallenged sway of private capitalism, the sale of state enterprises and the gradual liquidation of the state sector or its reduction to the point where it is little more than an appendix of private capital. The position adopted by the second group is progressive and that of the first reactionary. The question of development prospects for the state sector in the majority of the developing countries and also in the countries following a course of non-capitalist development has already become a prominent issue in the political and class struggle.

The development of anti-imperialist state capitalism in the young sovereign states creates conditions favouring the struggle for democratic reforms and economic independence. Where the bourgeoisie retains its monopoly of power, there is no fundamental change in the nature of the existing social structure, but instead a number of new, significant features are introduced in the movement of the popular masses against foreign capital, the local monopolies, the feudal and semifeudal elements. Back in 1960 Marxists forecast that the state sector in some of the major developing countries, given the emergence in the latter of a favourable political situation, might in the near future become the decisive economic factor. This was pointed out in the Statement issued at the end of the Meeting of Representatives of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow.

The key factor in securing firm independence from the imperialists is the establishment of national state control over the economy and resources. This control is the prime and universally applicable condition for the advance of the struggle for economic independence. As a rule, it is only possible to set up national control over the resources and the economy after the colonialists have been driven out. However, in many countries the ruling circles have been unable to set up effective state control over the economy in view of the endless concessions made to foreign capital. Nevertheless, the class struggle to make sure this step is being waged everywhere.

In the non-socialist countries of Asia and Africa the consequences of new fprm§ of colonial policy are now making

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PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

themselves more and more clearly felt. The experience of the post-war years, during which many of the former colonies gained their political independence, shows that political independence alone is not enough to even partially stem the disastrous impact of the predatory relations existing within the world capitalist economic system. To this end the attainment of economic independence is absolutely vital.

When developing countries remain within the framework of the capitalist system, it is possible for them to reduce the effects of colonialism and resist its new forms provided the following steps are taken: the introduction of wide-scale measures to promote industrialisation; social reforms of profound progressive implications; large state capital investment sufficient gradually to make the state sector the dominant one, and extensive economic ties with the socialist community.

There is no need for the developing countries embarking on industrial development or industrialisation to follow the classic path charted in the bourgeois countries. Now given the help of the socialist countries, and to a certain extent through making use of the rivalry between the imperialist powers encouraged and fanned by the very existence of socialist aid, the young states are able to overcome the onesided nature of their economic structure, develop a largescale state economy, cut short the stage of primary accumulation, restrict and regulate the activities of private capital and forge ahead with setting up an infrastructure and with industrialisation on the basis of the state sector. The emergence of these new opportunities is a major achievement of the liberation movement.

Various new trends have emerged in the position of the developing countries in world industrial production over the last years. If we take all the non-socialist developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in two distinct periods 1950-1960 and 1960-1968, then the index for industrial production points to somewhat higher growth rates than those found in other parts of the capitalist world.

The annual average growth rates of total industrial output are as follows (in percentages) *:

* Yearbook of National Accounts Statistics, 1969, UN, Vol. II, pp. 130-48.

1950-1960

1960-1968

The whole capitalist world ... ............

4.4

6.2

Developed market economies United States . .....

4.1 2.6

6.2 6.1

Western Europe ... .....

5.8

5.4

Developing market economies East and Southeast Asia* Africa** Caribbean and Latin America

6.9 6.4 7.6 7.0

6.4 7.0 5.4 5.8

The lead in growth rates enjoyed by the developing countries has slacked off considerably in the sixties. While in the fifties annual growth rates for industrial production in the developing countries were 2.8 per cent higher than in the developed countries, in the sixties this gap had closed to a mere 0.2 per cent and even this level was confined to Asia. The annual growth rate for industrial production in the developing countries of Africa was lower than in the developed countries by 0.8 per cent, and in Latin America by 0.4 per cent. It is possible that this lead formerly enjoyed by the developing countries, usually bound up with the initial stages of industrial development, will be lost altogether in the seventies.

Despite undeniable initial successes, economic development in the majority of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa is proceeding at a very slow pace. The material position of the popular masses in these countries still represents a grim picture, while their riches are still pouring into the coffers of foreign banks and corporations. When it comes to per capita production not only do the young independent states come nowhere near the leading capitalist states but they are lagging further and further behind them. Average annual rates of growth of real gross domestic product were as follows (in percentages)"""'*:

* Excluding Japan.

** Excluding the Republic of South Africa.

*** Yearbook of National Accounts Statistics, 1969, UN, Vol. II, pp. 130-48,

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Countries

National Income*

Accumulation*

Developed capitalist

nations

USA

3,303

Britain

1,560

France

1,738

FRG

1,512

Italy

1,020

Japan

1,122

Developing countries

South and Southeast Asia

India

Burma

Indonesia

5.5

Cambodia

Pakistan

Malaysia

Singapore

Thailand

Sri Lanka

Philippines

Arab East

Algeria

Libya

Egypt

Sudan

Morocco

Tunisia

Syria

Iraq

Africa

Ghana

Zambia

Zaire

Nigeria

Senegal

Region and Countries

Gross Domestic Product

1950-1960

1960-1968

The capitalist world ...........

4.0 3.9 2.9 4.6

4.8 4.0 5.5 4.9

5.2

5.3 5.1 4.6 4.7 4.4 4.9 4.2

Developed market economies ......

United States • • .... . .

Western Europe ........ * .....

Developing market economies ........

Asia* . - .........

Latin America ..............

Africa** .................

This table shows that during the sixties the developing countries lost their lead in growth rates of real gross domestic product. During the fifties this advantage was almost 1 per cent a year, and in the sixties their growth rates were lagging behind those of the developed countries by 0.6 per cent (by 0.9 per cent in Asia and 1.1 per cent in Africa). The per capita national income and accumulation in the developed capitalist countries and the developing countries of Asia and Africa were as follows by the end of the sixties""^^5^^'"'':

In order to put an end to this gap in economic levels, i.e., in per capita income, between the developing and industrial countries within the capitalist system, annual growth rates in the developing countries would need to exceed those of the industrial capitalist countries many times over. Then not only would they increase their relative share in world economic circulation, as is already the case, but absolute per capita levels of production and accumulation would also start to even out. However, growth rates of this type are clearly ruled out while these countries are pursuing a capitalist path of development.

* Excluding Japan.

** Excluding the Republic of South Africa. *** Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodniye otnosheniya Economics and International Relations), Nos, 11, 12, 1970.

(World

~^^1^^ In US dollars.

PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE

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This can be illustrated by a comparison of figures for India and the United States. The gap between these two countries emerges even from a summary index such as average per capita income, which of course does not reflect class differentiation: annual per capita income in the United States is approximately 3,303 dollars and in India the equivalent figure is 77, or 43 times lower. Given that the growth rate for per capita national income in the United States is 1.5 per cent and in India 3 per cent, i.e., twice as much, absolute growth in annual per capita income in the USA will be 49 dollars and in India 2.2 dollars or about 4.5 per cent of that in the USA. For India to catch up the United States would require growth rates almost 20 times the present ones and that is quite impossible. But with growth rates two or three times higher than the present ones and provided that US growth rates remained stable, it would be so long before the gap in growth rates closed, that the historically obsolete capitalist system which has no future would by that time have long ceased to exist---so tremendous is the way behind one of the largest and most advanced of the developing countries finds herself, so grave is the legacy of two hundred years of colonial rule and so ineffective are the capitalist methods for overcoming the age-old backwardness of this great country.

Thus, there is little prospect of closing this gap between absolute levels of economic development in the developing and industrial capitalist countries (i.e., of overcoming age-old technical and economic backwardness which leaves the former so far behind the latter) by capitalist methods. It is quite natural in the light of this situation that the progressive forces in the young independent states are searching for a solution to this dilemma by advocating a non-capitalist as opposed to a capitalist path of development.

Terms of trade with the imperialist states remain highly disadvantageous for the developing countries. The fact that the developing countries of Asia import conspicuously more than they export means that they are obliged to cover this trade deficit by turning to foreign states for loans, attracting foreign capital, i.e., by considerably increasing their foreign debts. This policy has a detrimental effect on their economies.

The creation of a diversified national economy, and gradual elimination of the one-sided nature of underdeveloped economies, extended reproduction of consumer and producer goods, and restriction of the scope of action for foreign capital are all measures which can help to improve this inequitable exchange. The role of the world socialist system in accelerating this process is of tremendous importance.

Inequitable exchange stems from two causes. First of all there is the difference in levels of development of productive forces and in the social productivity of labour, a factor which will take a long time to eliminate. Complete elimination of the inequitable exchange resulting from this requires industrialisation, high levels of technology in all branches and catching up with levels of development in the advanced capitalist countries. The developing countries would only be able to do away with these factors underlying inequitable exchange if they embarked on socialist construction.

However, inequitable exchange also results from the high monopoly prices for manufactured goods and low monopoly prices for raw materials imposed on the developing countries as a result of the predatory policies of the imperialist monopolies. The fight to curtail inequitable exchange resulting from this second factor has already begun and is gaining momentum. The world socialist system is undermining the imperialists' market monopoly and thus making it more difficult for them to exploit their former colonies in the trade context. Another important development in this direction is the gradual rallying together of the developing countries themselves in a co-ordinated front in external markets so as better to withstand the domination of the monopolies.

These recent developments are a cause for extreme alarm for the economists in the imperialist countries. Dr. T. Balog, for instance, when assessing prospects for the imperialist countries' inequitable exchange with the developing states, comments that if Russia begins to use her highly developed productive capacities to exchange manufactures for raw materials and foodstuffs, the terms of trade for countries producing primary raw materials will rapidly change in their favour, and these countries will greatly benefit from their trade with Russia. In the meantime, Russia will benefit too, the author continues. That is an extremely dangerous per-

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spective, he adds. This concern is quite understandable in view of the fact that trade between the socialist states and the developing countries has grown several times over in the last few years and continues to grow.

The time is approaching when the socialist system will account for half of total world production and this undoubtedly will result in a considerable curtailment of inequitable exchange much sooner than would have been possible if the economically weak countries had had to work towards this end merely through efforts to bring the level of their organic capital up to that in the Western capitalist countries. Therefore when considering the question of the young states' achievement of economic independence it becomes quite clear that the fight to curtail inequitable exchange has already begun. It finds expression in the gradual disappearance of the former one-sided structure of the economies of the developing countries thanks to the united efforts of the newly liberated countries of Asia and Africa and the countries of the socialist community. The time is also approaching when the second factor giving rise to inequitable exchange will be surmounted as well. The establishment of close economic ties between the developing countries and the world socialist system is gradually bringing about a change in their position in the world social division of labour and creating favourable conditions for the developing countries to wrest free of imperialist exploitation and become economically independent.

policies are progressive. The basic condition for the completion of tasks of national importance is a consistent struggle against imperialism. The struggle to attain economic independence is a task of national importance: its successful outcome will serve to consolidate the position of all genuinely progressive forces in a country.

'The attainment of economic independence by the developing countries should not automatically be identified with elimination of the gap between their level of economic development and the level of development of the industrially advanced countries. It would be wrong to assume that a developing country will achieve economic independence only when it has caught up with the level of development already attained by a more developed capitalist country, such as Italy or France, for example.

The problem of how to attain this economic independence should be considered in connection with economic growth rates, successes already scored in efforts to surmount onesidedness of the economy, the elimination of feudal survivals in rural areas, the gradual curtailment of inequitable exchange, the reduction of the role of foreign capital, the increase in the developing countries' share in the world economy, the extent of their economic ties with the socialist community and finally with the implementation of farreaching socio-economic changes, without which success in the struggle to achieve economic independence is not feasible.

Economic independence should be understood as including: first, the creation of a relatively developed, diversified economy capable of ensuring on an independent basis extended reproduction of the means of production and consumption essential for the country in question and bearing in mind the specific character of its people, natural resources and other features; second, the gradual but conspicuous reduction of the influence of inequitable exchange as one of the basic forms of imperialist exploitation at the present time; third, the consolidation on this basis and with the help of the world socialist system of a fundamentally new status for the country in question in the world division of labour. Therefore we are concerned here with relative economic independence of a developing country in the specific conditions pertaining to the struggle between the two world systems.

Bourgeois economists maintain that the developing countries were poor and will remain so, that they were and will remain economically dependent on the West. However, this assertion is quite unfounded. The economic impact of the collapse of the colonial system and the prize that the countries that broke free from that system have won find expression in the fact that some of the basic preconditions for the development of the struggle for their economic independence have arisen. Now the most important and decisive factor in the struggle to set up a firm and independent national economy depends first and foremost on the developing countries themselves, on the degree to which their domestic and foreign

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The attainment of economic independence is primarily a question of the struggle of all progressive forces both within the country concerned and in the international arena. Economic independence is an objective necessity for the working people and also for the national bourgeoisie, which stands to gain from it as well, although for political reasons it often tends to behave inconsistently. The national bourgeoisie in the former colonial and dependent countries, when it is not closely bound up with imperialist circles, objectively stands to gain from implementing the basic tasks of the anti-- imperialist and anti-feudal revolution, one of which is the attainment of economic independence.

Clearly, the struggle for economic independence should not only be associated with the stand taken by the national bourgeoisie. The ruling classes cannot ignore the fact that the popular masses are pressing for a consistent struggle to achieve this independence. The attainment of economic independence is not so much an economic as a political problem. In this respect the historic experience amassed by the national-democratic countries and the transition to the noncapitalist path of development open up wide new opportunities for the peoples of the Third World.

Thus, the attainment of economic independence is coming more and more to be the focus of the struggle of the peoples of the developing countries against imperialism. At the same time economic independence is becoming one of the key issues in the class struggle within the newly liberated countries, in the course of which the objective prerequisites are being created for the transition from the present stage of the national liberation struggle to another, higher stage, which could well, among other things, lead to the formation of a national-democratic state and the adoption of a socialist course.

The policy of peaceful coexistence and economic competition between the two systems includes the idea of the socialist system's consistent struggle against imperialism to secure success for the developing countries aspiring to economic independence. This means that the issue of economic independence for the developing countries must be considered in the wider context of the struggle of all progressive forces throughout the world for democracy, peace and socialism. In

developing its national economy every sovereign state is now able to derive support from the achievements and the ever growing economic might of the socialist system, from its cooperation with the socialist system and from the political and economic solidarity uniting the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the final analysis, all this will lead to a definite rise in the degree of the developing countries' economic independence of the world capitalist economy.

The most important feature of the present stage of the general crisis of capitalism consists in the fact that in the major developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America the economic and political position formerly enjoyed by the imperialist powers has begun to weaken and is continuing to be eroded. A powerful motive force behind this course of events in the developing countries is the growing contradiction between their political sovereignty and their present economic dependence on imperialism, between their technical and economic backwardness, which the imperialists endeavour to preserve, and the demand of their productive forces for independent development, between the aspirations of the popular masses for a better life and the narrow selfish class-based policy of the local conciliatory neo-- colonialist bourgeoisie (this applies, in particular, to the big bourgeoisie), which allows the imperialist powers to plunder their countries.

This means that the qualitative changes in the process of the collapse of the colonial system can be summed up as follows: the political elimination of colonial regimes in those countries where the colonial yoke has not been cast aside has entered its final phase, and the forces of the national liberation movement, organised in the independent states, have advanced to a new stage---namely, the struggle for economic independence, for the elimination of all forms of dependence on imperialism---and these states are now in a position to embark on the path of national democracy, non-capitalist development and social progress. This path alone can bring their peoples true prosperity and happiness.

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character of the decisions adopted at the Paris Conference on Vietnam is similarly clear-cut. Essentially, these decisions range far beyond the Vietnam problem. They categorically condemn any form of aggression and interference and provide the international-legal basis for ruling out developments of this kind from the life of the peoples of Indochina and for giving them the possibility for full self-determination in keeping with the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-interference in internal affairs. These elements were noted by Leonid Brezhnev in a speech televised in the USA. "The improvement in Soviet-US relations," he said, "undoubtedly played a part also in the sense of contributing towards the termination of the long war in Vietnam. Now that the agreement on ending the Vietnam war has come into force and both our countries, together with other states, have signed the document of the Paris Conference on Vietnam, it seems to us that it is of particularly great importance to consolidate the progress achieved and enable all the peoples of Indochina to live in peace."*

The peace in Vietnam is only one of the examples of how the new international situation is influencing the national liberation movement and the life of the young Third World states. The Vietnam peace was followed by the delineation of a settlement of the Laotian and Cambodian problems.

The tangible relaxation of international tension is not a spontaneous process. It springs from the conscious and planned influence exercised by the USSR and other socialist countries on international relations and from their consistent policy of peace. It is the outcome of the overall strengthening of socialism's positions, of its economic, cultural and scientific achievements and of the growing defence capability of the socialist countries, which have broadened the latter's possibilities of influencing the situation throughout the world. The spread of socialism's principles of peace, peaceful labour and co-operation to international relations is benefiting world politics.

The Soviet people and all other peace-loving nations can see for themselves that the Peace Programme adopted at the 24th Congress of the CPSU is being successfully put into

The years that have passed since the 24th Congress of the CPSU (March 1971) were marked by an unremitting struggle of the forces of socialism, the national liberation movement, and peace and progress against reaction and imperialism. They witnessed a further consolidation of the world socialist community, the growth of its might and political influence, the establishment of closer and more durable links with the Third World countries and major victories of the national liberation movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The agreement on the termination of the war in Vietnam, signed in the period, is further evidence of the futility of imperialist aggression and the invincibility of the national liberation movement when it has the support of the socialist countries and the international working-class movement. The long and valiant struggle waged by the Vietnamese people culminated in recognition of their sovereign right to independence and to choose their own way of life. The Paris Agreements on Vietnam attest to the bankruptcy of the policy of flagrant interference in the affairs of other countries. They show the hopelessness of the tactics of "local wars" aiming at "rolling back" and ``containing'' the revolutionary aspiration of peoples for national freedom and social progress.

The new climate in the world, resulting from the international detente, helped to end the war in Vietnam. The link between the political victory of the Vietnamese people after long years of heroic resistance to the aggressor with the new spirit in international politics, with the peace offensive of the USSR and its allies is quite apparent. The principled

* Pravda, June 25, 1973.

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effect. It has led to a gradual improvement of the situation in Europe, scene of two world wars that were a tragedy to almost the entire population of our planet. The treaties signed by the USSR, Poland and Czechoslovakia with the FRG, the treaty between the two German states and the normalisation of the situation in West Berlin on the basis of bilateral and multilateral agreements have resolved the European problems left over by the war and are making it possible for the European states that have put an end to the cold war to establish broad and lasting relations of peace. It would be hard to overestimate the lofty aim of consolidating and fostering the aspiration of all nations for peace, broadening and stimulating the rising trend towards co-operation in all continents and making this trend a permanent feature of international life.

The principles of relations signed by the Soviet Union with France and the USA are of key significance in fostering the turn towards co-operation and peaceful coexistence of states with different socio-political systems. Special note must be made of the series of accords concluded by the USSR and the USA in 1972 and 1973, chiefly of the agreement on the prevention of nuclear war. Leonid Brezhnev characterised these agreements as the "first concrete steps towards bridling the international arms race and reducing the formidable threat of a world thermonuclear war that has been hanging over mankind during the past decades".""

The peace policy pursued by the USSR and other socialist countries has led to important positive changes in international relations. "We," Leonid Brezhnev said, "are all eyewitnesses of how the fundamental foreign policy guidelines worked out by the socialist countries and the international communist movement in recent years, including the Peace Programme approved by the 24th Congress of the CPSU, are being translated into practical deeds. The quarter-century period of the cold war is giving way to a period of a steady consolidation of the principles of peaceful coexistence in the relations between states with different social systems."**

The Soviet Union and other socialist countries do not

regard peaceful coexistence and the easing of international tension as a transient phenomenon. These are the standing objectives of their foreign policy, for they create favourable external conditions for the building of socialism and communism. At its plenary meeting in April 1973 the CPSU Central Committee called for a continuation of the efforts to translate the Peace Programme into life so that the positive changes in the international situation become irreversible.

Needless to say, the normalisation of international relations concerns not only the participating countries. It creates a new atmosphere in the world and profoundly influences the life of all peoples and states, big and small, in all parts of the world. The CPSU and the Soviet Government are vigorously pursuing a peace policy in the conviction that it is consistent with the national interests of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries and the interests of all mankind, of all countries and peoples without exception. Against the background of nuclear arsenals no aim is more noble and no need more vital than that of removing the threat of a world war, which would be catastrophic to the whole world, and consequently of achieving such a relaxation of tension in international relations as would exclude armed conflicts between states with different social systems. What does the easing of international tension hold out for the developing states? Before examining the implications it must be noted that the Soviet peace policy, which has led to the detente, has not only the support and understanding of the vast majority of peoples and states. It has enemies in imperialist circles, who doggedly cling to outworn tenets, and among some circles in the Asian and African countries who go so far as to style themselves Communists but display an inability to rise above a narrow, mercenary viewpoint and sacrifice the true interests of national liberation and socialism, the vital interests of all peoples to hegemonistic, nationalist ambitions or egoistic and, in the long run, unrealistic plans of remaining on the side-lines and gaining something from a clash between the strongest powers representing different social systems.

The adversaries of peaceful coexistence display a touching unity despite their dissimilar motives, whether they belong to the imperialist monopolies most closely linked with the

Pravda, July 27, 1973. Ibid.

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arms race, to the leaders of the imperialist blocs who fear that the change in the international climate will undermine their position in the competitive struggle, or to the CPC leadership who have set their chauvinistic ambitions above the interests of international socialism. The latter assert that peaceful coexistence spells out a conspiracy between the world's biggest powers, notably between the USSR and the USA, that it represents a renunciation of the struggle between capitalism and socialism and mirrors the aspiration of the ``superpowers'' to achieve their aims at the expense of other, chiefly small and developing, states.

The attempts to depict the policy of peaceful coexistence pursued by the USSR and other socialist countries as a departure from the class struggle with capitalism on the international scene is a gross distortion of reality. The socialist policy of peace has nothing in common with the bourgeois theory of convergence, maintaining that socialism and capitalism are fusing, that the contradictions between them are fading, and hence the greater tolerance in international relations.

For Marxists-Leninists, for all sincere peace proponents the line towards peaceful coexistence is not the result of any relaxation of the main contradiction of the epoch---the contradiction between socialism and capitalism---but the objective need of all mankind and the consequence of the historical successes won by socialism in the system of international relations and the class and national liberation struggle. Socialism has now achieved a position of strength where an armed conflict provoked by world imperialism cannot promise the latter a happy outcome. This is what induces the more far-sighted politicians of the capitalist states to accept the alternative of peaceful coexistence, that has been propounded by the Communists ever since the world's first socialist state came into being. Fifty, 30 and even 25 years ago international imperialism could not resist the temptation to crush socialism by force. These methods cannot be successful today and this is realised by influential spokesmen of imperialist policy. This induces them to accept the principle of peaceful coexistence with socialist states.

For countries where socialism, labour and peace prevail and exploitation of man by man has been abolished peaceful

coexistence is the most natural and desirable means of competition and struggle.

Marxists-Leninists have never absolutised the role and significance of armed force and they do not regard armaments as the principal means of establishing socialism. They are, as they have always been, categorically opposed to the "export of revolution" doctrine. In each country the socialist revolution breaks out as a result of the internal class contradictions intrinsic to exploiting society. There is no need whatever for the Marxists-Leninists to impose their ideas by force of arms. Economics, politics, ideology and culture comprise the unbounded areas in which they continue, as they have always done and will do in future, to wage the struggle with capitalism, while peaceful coexistence, the principles of which the international bourgeoisie has had to accept, creates the most propitious conditions for co-ordinating the efforts of all socialist and other peace-loving countries precisely in these areas. Far from burying the international class struggle in oblivion, as is asserted by its adversaries, the consistent peace policy of the USSR and other socialist countries vitalises that struggle in politics, economics, ideology and culture and aims to rule out a world war, i.e., that form of the international class struggle that brings incalculable destruction and jeopardises mankind's physical survival.

Peaceful coexistence does not mean peace at any price or an unprincipled agreement justifying any concessions and compromises. Its objective is to improve the international atmosphere and build up relations among all countries on the basis of equality, justice, sovereignty and international law.

Hence, under conditions of world peace and security no country will lose out and no nation's interests will be sacrificed. It is under peaceful coexistence and not in a world gripped by war that the fighters for freedom, independence and social progress, in fact all the democratic movements, have the broadest possibilities for active participation in international intercourse, for upholding their legitimate interests and fighting exploitation, colonialism, racism, unjustice and lawlessness.

Peaceful coexistence concerns not only the Great Powers, although their crucial role in this matter is self-evident if only because hostile relations between them were the main-

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spring of the cold war and of tension fraught with the danger of armed conflicts. Leonid Brezhnev noted that "under conditions of the improving international climate tens of states, big, medium and small, are activating their policies in order to contribute to the cause of consolidating peace. There are many examples of this in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America." "It is hardly necessary to prove," he added, "that a constructive contribution from any country merits similar respect and an attentive and well-wishing approach. To endeavour to contrapose the `great' or even `superpowers' (as some people call them) against the medium and small countries is utterly untenable, uncalled for and even

harmful."*

It is unquestionable that the success of the cause of world peace and security facilitates the further consolidation of the links between socialist and liberated countries, between socialism and the national liberation movement, and enhances their role in the struggle against imperialism, colonialism, racism and reaction.

The easing of international tension is not limited to the normalisation and improvement of relations between capitalist and socialist countries. It does not mean that the Soviet Union and the socialist community as a whole have turned away from their traditional friendship and co-- operation with the developing states in favour of capitalism or, as the adversaries of peaceful coexistence assert, have consigned to oblivion the basic common interests of socialism and the national liberation movement in the struggle against imperialism and colonialism. "We are well aware and always bear in mind," Leonid Brezhnev said, "that along with the peoples of the socialist countries the peoples of the Asian, African and Latin American states comprise a major element, so to say, of the standing army of peace in the sphere of international relations. Together we have achieved very much. And we are convinced that in future, too, our ways will not part. As regards the Soviet Union, it is prepared to take all the steps needed to strengthen and foster our cooperation."""*

One guideline of the Soviet Peace Programme is the utmost strengthening of the time-tested friendship between the socialist countries and the states that have won liberation from colonial dependence. In speaking of the successes of the Soviet peace policy Leonid Brezhnev did not confine himself to mentioning the agreements that had been reached at the talks with the capitalist countries of Europe and with the USA. "The other documents of recent years," he noted, "attest to the fruitful development of the Soviet Union's relations with the progressive independent states of Africa and Asia. These include the treaties of friendship and co-- operation with Egypt, India and Iraq, treaties which we highly value and to which we attach immense significance in terms of principle and practice.""''

Together with all the other peoples, the peoples of the Third World are benefiting by the consolidation of the principles of peace, security and co-operation in international affairs. This has always been clear to the more far-sighted representatives of the developing states. For example, the Charter of National Action of the Arab Republic of Egypt, drawn up under the guidance and with the participation of Gamal Abdel Nasser, proclaims peace as one of the cardinal foreign policy objectives, for it is only in an atmosphere of peace that national progress can be safeguarded.

With tension slacking, the Third World countries are able to make increasingly effective use of the growing possibilities for world trade, co-operation and economic assistance from the industrialised states. International normalisation has always fostered economic activity and the influx of funds to the Asian and African countries. What significant increase of resources, allocated for the development of these regions by international organisations and individual countries, can be expected if the cold war recedes entirely into the past and relaxation becomes a permanent factor of in< ternational relations, if the arms race is limited and then arrested and at least part of the huge funds expended on it is switched for constructive purposes?

Peaceful coexistence creates the possibility of achieving a just settlement of the acute political conflicts worrying the

* Pravda, July 27, 1973. •••"'< Ibid.

* Ibid. 36---919

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Third World. In a situation of peace and international cooperation, mutual respect, inviolate sovereignty and territorial integrity any manifestation of aggression, exploitation and suppression of the national liberation movement becomes doubly intolerable and holds the attention of the whole world. Peaceful coexistence is by no means a call to the peoples fighting colonialism and racism to cease or relax their efforts. On the contrary, the new international situation vitalises the anti-imperialist struggle, which receives the whole-hearted support of the socialist countries, world progressive opinion and international law.

Following the cessation of hostilities in Vietnam, other surviving manifestations of aggression and exploitation came to the forefront. First and foremost, there is the Middle East crisis, which must be settled with the aggressor withdrawing his forces from the territories seized by him and with the abolition of the consequences of the Israeli aggression. The guideline of Soviet policy in that region is that lasting peace can be established by restoring the rights of the Arab peoples, rights that have been flouted by the aggressor, and by respecting the sovereignty of all the states of that area and strengthening the position of the progressive states aspiring to pursue a socialist-oriented policy under difficult conditions. Only malignant enemies of socialism and the Arab peoples, only the instigators of another war can assert that for the sake of normalising its relations with the USA the Soviet Union has withdrawn its support for the liberation movement of the Arab peoples. An incisive rebuff to slanderous allegations of this kind, regardless of their source, was given by Leonid Brezhnev, who declared that "in line with its Peace Programme the Soviet Union attaches fundamental significance to the abolition of the flashpoint in the Middle East on the basis of respect for the legitimate rights of the states and peoples that have been subjected to aggression. The withdrawal of the Israeli forces from all the occupied Arab territories is the foundation for a just settlement of the Middle East problem."*

Reaffirmation of the principles of international law, including the right to self-determination and the creation of

national states, provides a situation of universal intolerance and condemnation of the flagrant acts of lawlessness, genocide and aggression in Africa by the Portuguese colonialists and the racists of Rhodesia and the Republic of South Africa. The racists and colonialists should remember that international law completely excludes them from the system of normal political relations of international co-operation and trade as required by the many UN decisions. The struggle of the African peoples is receiving a further stimulus and continued support from the progressive forces, and their inevitable victory will draw closer in the new situation.

The change taking place in the international atmosphere under the impact of the socialist countries' peace initiative is opening up further prospects for co-operation between the forces of socialism and the fighters for national liberation, and it is strengthening the positions of the world-wide antiimperialist front, the positions of socialism, peace, social progress and democracy.

But the new situation is making heightened demands on the policies and practical actions of all the liberated countries vitally interested in uniting all the forces of peace and social progress. The favourable possibilities that the new international climate is opening up for the further consolidation of friendship between the socialist community and the liberated countries and their growing unity on a consistently anti-imperialist basis will undoubtedly strengthen peace and security for the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is the condition for ensuring the true independence of the liberated countries, for the enforcement of progressive social reforms and for strengthening the progressive political forces in these countries.

The adversaries of peace, the instigators of war in both the bourgeois and the Maoist camp are slanderously alleging that the ``superpowers'' are making a deal at the expense of the Third World states. These rabid enemies of world peace, the Soviet Union and international socialism have set themselves the objective of proving something that cannot be proved, namely that the Third World states desire an "aggravation of the relations between the two superpowers", the continuation and deepening of the cold war between them and the fanning of the cold war into a world conflagra-

* Pravda, July 12, 1973.

36*

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tion. This attitude of the imperialist and Maoist hawks expresses the interests of the most bellicose elements in international adventurist circles who are endeavouring to deceive world public opinion and the peoples of the liberated countries and push the foreign policy of these countries into a clash with the Soviet Union and the socialist community as a whole.

The ultimate doom of this policy of military adventures, anti-communism and anti-Sovietism is beyond doubt. The Soviet Union and the entire socialist community have been, are and will remain loyal friends and allies of all the liberated countries and of all the peoples fighting for national liberation.

In steadfastly implementing the Peace Programme on the international scene, the CPSU Central Committee and the Soviet Government attach considerable significance to the consolidation of peace and the creation of a reliable system of security in Asia. This policy is based not on situation considerations but on profoundly principled motivations and on the Soviet Union's experience of struggle for security in Asia.

Two-thirds of the territory of the USSR is in Asia. " Geographically, economically and historically," Lenin wrote, "Russia belongs not only to Europe, but also to Asia.""" For that reason ever since its establishment the Soviet state has given the closest attention to Asian problems.

As distinct from other regions of the world, in Asia there has been a tense, explosive situation ever since the end of the Second World War. Hotbeds of war and tension have emerged and there have been conflicts and clashes in various parts of that huge region. These included the US aggression in Korea, and the Indo-Pakistani and Indo-Chinese armed conflicts. For many years US imperialism waged a war of aggression against the gallant Vietnamese people and the patriots of Laos and Cambodia fighting for freedom and independence.

At various times many Asian countries have been drawn into the orbit of military and political blocs (SEATO,

CENTO, ASPAC, ANZUS), which represent a means of disuniting the Asian countries and are an obstacle to their independent development. For many decades Asia had been the objective of aggression and neo-colonialism and this intensified the threat of war, of the outbreak of conflicts and clashes, and hampered the independent development of the countries of that continent.

After the Second World War the Soviet Union has time and again declared that the closed military groups should be replaced with a reliable system of security. The idea of collective defence of peace in Asia did not gain currency at the time on account of the opposition of the imperialist states. During the past 10-15 years the efforts to strengthen peace and security in Asia have been impeded largely by the attitude of China's leaders, who have adopted a policy of chauvinism and splitting the socialist community.

Lately, under the impact of the overall change of the balance of strength in the world, the conditions have begun to take shape in the Asian continent making it possible to effect a turn towards a general normalisation of the situation in that area and set up a durable system of peace and security. Enhanced prestige and influence has been won by the independent Asian states that have shaken off the yoke of colonialism and received the possibility of deciding their own destiny and policies. The Asian countries that are strengthening their political and economic independence are aware that their advancement is inconceivable without a lasting peace in Asia. In these countries there is a mounting aspiration to look for new approaches to the solution of urgent issues and secure a fundamental turn towards lasting peace.

Here an important role is played by the peace policy of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, which steadfastly advocate peace, urge friendly relations with the Asian states and help the progressive forces against imperialism and reaction.

In 1969 the new alignment of forces in the world as a whole and in Asia in particular gave the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev grounds for suggesting the creation of a system of collective security in Asia. Speaking at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in Moscow, he said: "The burning

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 251.

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problems of the current international situation do not conceal from our view longer-term tasks, namely, the creation of a system of collective security in areas of concentrated danger of another world war, of armed conflicts. Such a system is the best replacement for the existing military-political groups.... We are of the opinion that the course of events is also putting on the agenda the task of creating a system of collective security in Asia."*

This idea was enlarged on by the Soviet leaders. At the 15th Congress of the Soviet Trade Unions in 1972 Leonid Brezhnev specified the substance of the Soviet proposal, saying that "in our opinion, collective security in Asia must rest on principles such as renunciation of the use of force in the relations between states, respect for sovereignty and for the inviolability of frontiers, non-interference in internal affairs and broad development of economic and other cooperation on the basis of complete equality and mutual benefit. We have urged and shall continue to urge for such collective security in Asia and are prepared to co-operate with all countries with the aim of translating this idea into life.''

The principled approach on which the Soviet proposal for security in Asia is founded calls for a collective system and for equal participation in it of all the Asian countries regardless of their size or social system. China's participation in the solution of this cardinal problem would strengthen peace and security in Asia.

Renunciation of the use or the threat of use of force in the relations between countries is the underlying principle of security in Asia and throughout the world. Without the enforcement of this principle it would be impossible to prevent acts of aggression and eliminate war as a means of settling disputes and conflicts. This principle is recorded in the bilateral treaties of some Asian countries. The time has come to secure its acceptance by all Asian states.

The principal objective of collective security in Asia would be to safeguard the Asian states not only against the threat of war and aggression but also against infringements on their

sovereignty and territorial integrity and to prevent interference in their internal affairs. The strict observance of the principle of non-interference is indivisibly linked with ensuring the free development of states and peoples.

Today the struggle for security in Asia is inseparable from the struggle for the scrupulous fulfilment of the agreements on Vietnam and on other problems of Indochina. It is inseparable from the struggle to abolish the consequences of the Israeli aggression against Arab states and achieve a political settlement of the Middle East conflict on the basis of the UN decisions.

To achieve lasting peace and a durable system of security in Asia there must be economic and other equal and mutually beneficial co-operation between the Asian states. Broad co-operation, particularly in the economic sphere, would enable the Asian states to make fuller use of the advantages of the international division of labour in Asia and the world as a whole. The Asian continent needs peace so that instead of wasting their resources and efforts on conflicts its peoples could direct them entirely into economic and social progress, and thereby raise their standard of living.

By uniting their efforts towards peace and security, the Asian peoples would have the possibility of more actively unfolding the struggle against imperialism's neo-colonialist policies, for the independent development of their national states, for the triumph of peace, democracy and social progress in Asia.

Good-neighbourly relations on a bilateral and regional basis are of immense importance in this context. Such relations create the conditions for concerted efforts in strengthening peace and are consonant with the interests of every Asian country. These relations are fostered by the treaties signed between the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in Asia and also by the recent treaties concluded by the USSR with India, Egypt and Iraq, treaties that are not directed against third countries. The Soviet-Indian, SovietEgyptian and Soviet-Iraqi treaties of peace, friendship and co-operation create a sound legal basis for the further development of co-operation between the Soviet Union and these countries and are an active factor strengthening peace in Asia and throughout the world.

* International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, Moscow 1969, Prague, 1969, p. 171.

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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE THIRD WORLD

The Soviet proposal for setting up a reliable system of collective security in Asia thus lays the foundation for a new system of inter-state relations based on understanding and trust, a system that will in the long run lead to the triumph of peaceful coexistence in turbulent Asia.

The Soviet initiative is evoking an eager response and growing support in the Asian countries. The striving to build up inter-state relations on new principles, namely, on respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, on the renunciation of the use of force in the settlement of outstanding issues, on non-interference in internal affairs, on recognition of the principle of peaceful coexistence and on understanding and trust, is today displayed not only by the socialist and non-aligned states and by the Communist and other progressive parties and organisations in the Asian countries, but also by countries belonging to military-political blocs.

The Indian Foreign Minister Swaran Singh has declared his country's support for all initiatives aimed at strengthening peace and security and easing international tension. Leonid Brezhnev's proposal for collective security in Asia, made in June 1969, comes under that category.

The Soviet proposal is eliciting growing interest in Japan. The Asian press has reported that the idea of collective security has caught on in many countries where parliaments and public organisations are considering the ways and means of putting it into effect.

Asian security is the subject of keen discussion in Malaysia, Singapore and other Asian states. Even in countries belonging to military blocs, for instance, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines, there is growing understanding of the importance of security on a non-bloc basis. For example, in Thailand there is a widening body of opinion that instead of clinging to the idea of military groups a new approach to the creation of a system of security in Asia should be studied.

Facts indicate that in Asia efforts are being stepped up to find both general and partial solutions of the problem of security. Various ideas for ensuring regional security have been propounded. The Lusaka conference of non-aligned countries (1970) urged turning the Indian Ocean into a peace zone. In 1971 the members of the Association of Southeast

Asian Nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines) adopted a declaration on the neutralisation of Southeast Asia. Speaking of this declaration, the Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik noted that it had many points in common with the Soviet proposal for collective security in Asia.

Other proposals are being made that in one way or another dovetail with the idea of collective security. It is useful to consider all the ideas and proposals put forward by individual Asian countries for ensuring peace and security in Asia.

The idea of creating a reliable system of peace and security is making headway despite the present difficult situation caused in Asia by the intrigues of the imperialists and the contradictions between different Asian countries. The significance of this progress is accentuated by the fact that the idea of Asian security is opposed by the forces of external reaction and by chauvinist and militarist circles in individual Asian states. Their ``argument'', carried by some newspapers in the West and in Asian countries, is that the Soviet proposal for strengthening security in Asia is nothing but an attempt by the USSR to "fill the vacuum" allegedly formed by the ``withdrawal'' from Asia of the USA, Britain and other powers. This utterly spurious ``argument'' represents an attempt to bracket the Soviet Union, which consistently supports the national liberation anti-imperialist struggle of the Asian peoples, with the colonial powers that have tyrannised the Asian peoples for long centuries and today pursue a neo-colonialist policy.

The opponents of Asian security are endeavouring to distort the substance of the Soviet proposal, asserting that it is evidence of the USSR's aim of forming blocs and of its hostility to some Asian countries, notably China. This slander has been most zealously spread by Peking propaganda. The Maoists are particularly eager to have the Asian peoples forget that formerly the Chinese leadership had supported the Soviet stand in the question of collective security in Asia. For instance, in a Soviet-Chinese statement signed on January 18, 1957 it was noted: "The two countries consider that all closed military groups should be replaced with a system of collective peace and collective security." In the period 1955

R. ULYANOVSKY

through 1960 the Government of China had time and again proposed a peace pact among the countries of Asia and the Pacific basin, including the USA. But the present hegemonistic ambitions of the Maoists are bringing them into conflict with the interests of all peoples, including the Chinese people.

The Soviet Union has made it plain that its proposal for collective security in Asia is not directed against any country. It calls for the participation of all the Asian countries in a system of security, whose objective is to turn Asia into a continent of peace and co-operation.

The Soviet proposal for strengthening peace and security in Asia has already played a useful role as an alternative to the Guam doctrine of Asians fighting Asians, the Vietnamisation doctrine, and the ``vacuum'' doctrine. It will unquestionably help to remove the claims of the Maoists and their ilk to a dominant role in Asia and in the Third World generally.

The creation of a reliable system of security in Asia requires time and the combined efforts of the Asian countries. Although this is a difficult task it is realistic and attainable, for the vast majority of the Asian countries and peoples want a turn towards a normalisation of the situation in that continent.

The change of the world balance of power in favour of socialism, the broad international recognition of peaceful coexistence, which is one of the basic principles of the Soviet Union's Leninist foreign policy, the progress that has been achieved in ensuring security in Europe, the trend towards relaxation throughout the world, and the growing solidarity of the forces of world socialism, the national liberation movement and all proponents of peace and security create the favourable conditions for further efforts to achieve peace and collective security in Asia.

The creation of a system of collective security in Asia is one of the cardinal problems of present-day international politics. On its solution depends the future of the world's largest and most densely populated continent.

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