Problems of Peace and Socialism

by Robin MacGregor

Revolutionary Democracy :Volume Two, No. 2 (New Series) October 2023 
£5 plus £2.50 P&P from NCP Lit. PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ

 Another issue of the Indian Marxist journal has arrived on these shores. It maintains now familiar format of articles on Indian affairs past and present, article from parties belonging to the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (ICMLPO, plus materials from Soviet archives. This time there are slightly fewer, but longer articles than hitherto. 
With regard to contemporary Indian the issue opens with two short articles on violent attacks on tribal peoples in Manipur state and the increasing number of anti-Muslim pogroms which increasingly common features of Indian life under the BJP government. 
There follows two longer articles on India. The first offers a detailed critique of the latest national budget for India. The author found that beneath the predictable fine words, there are ill thought out programmes and discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. An interesting study of India: Broken Legacies of the Land and Forest Rights Movement provides an account of the subject from pre-colonial times through the British Raj to the present day, noting that things did not improve very much after independence. 
  The centre-piece of this issue, occupying almost a quarter of the space is the Asiatic Mode of Production in South Asia: An Empirical Study by Tripta Wahi. The concept of the “Asiatic Mode of Production” is a much debated one in Marxist thought. It was invented by Marx, but was not developed by him to any great extant. It refers to societies where government power and prosperity depends on large scale irrigation systems which had to be maintained by peasants. Some critics (both Marxist and non-Marxist) say the concept is unnecessary and what it describes is simply a variant of feudalism common in Europe. The present article covers what was British Punjab in pre and colonial times. 
  An Interview of Qemal Cicollari, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Albania with a Brazilian journalist defends the reputation of Enver Hoxha and blames the fall of socialism in Albania on his successor Ramiz Alaia. Unfortunately parts of his comments about other present day “communist” parties in Albania tends to resemble Private Eye’s Dave Spart.  
A transcript of an August 1946 "Record of the Meeting Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, I.V. Stalin, and Members of the Delegation of the Labour Party of Great Britain” reports a two hour meeting in Moscow. The exchange of views was a polite one, so we should not read too much into Stalin’s comments including one to the effect: “That the Soviet Union advances towards socialism via its own, Russian way, which is the shorter one, while the British advance towards socialism by a longer roundabout, way, both of these ways being appropriate”. Interestingly Stalin had a more realistic view about the possibility of a return to power by Churchill than his visitors. This reviewer is happy to identify the delegates as party chairman Harold Laski, General Secretary Morgan Walter Phillips, Harold Clay, Assistant General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers Union, and Alice Bacon, the new MP for Leeds North-East. Hopes for better relations between the two wartime allies were destroyed by Labour Prime Minister Attlee who secretly authorised the production of British atomic weapons less than six months after the meeting.
  The issue concludes with two sets of historical documents. The first is Materials for the Draft Programme of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks drawn up in 1947 with comments by Stalin. This is given a helpful introduction by the journal’s editor Vijay Singh. While it has been published in Russian, this is the first English publication. Finally we have a reprint of a 1951 Communist Party of India pamphlet containing comments from various party branches  making Suggestions and Criticisms on the Draft Programme and Policy Statement of the CPI, 1951. This is followed by an internal Soviet Party document about it which was sent to Stalin’s for information before publication in Pravda. 
All in all another worthwhile issue. Occasionally a few concessions to non-Indian readers would be helpful, particularly for those of us who tend to forget that a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10 million.