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Important among the factors responsible for the rise of the Left in India was the exploitative character of colonial British rule, which impacted adversity upon the Indian economy and the various socio economic sections of Society. The land-based system had led to unfair treatment of agricultural labour and resulted in the emergence of the Kisan Sabha movement. The rise of modern industries, based on capitalistic ideology, and exploitation of factory workers, only added fuel to the fire. The financial burden on account of the World War-I, rising prices, famine conditions, manipulative practices by businessmen, the romantic appeal of Marxist ideas, the formation of the new regime in the USSR and its success, showing the triumph of the power and struggle of the people, were the last straw.

Jawaharlal Nehru paid his first ever visit to Russia, the land of socialism in 1961. He studied the works of Marx and Lenin, and was greatly influenced by their ideologies. He then applied his knowledge to the ongoing struggle for achieving equitable growth and sustainable development, of India.

Around the second decade of the twentieth century, India began to be influenced by the Gandhian philosophy of peaceful confrontation as a means of securing freedom from the colonial rulers. The Marxist ideology of the working class overthrowing the propertied exploiter by sheer force, struck a chord deep within the hearts of the agitators of nationalism. The Russian revolution, however, set in a new course in the trajectory of nationalist struggle. People began looking for an alternative idea to the Gandhian constructive programme which caused disillusionment.

Many leaders such as M N Roy, (the founder of the Communist Party of India - CPI), who was personally mentored by Lenin in Russia to prepare Indian soil for revolution against the foreign colonisers), S C Bose, Bipin Chandra Pal and Nehru developed Leftist persuasions.

Student and youth associations were organised all over the country from 1927 onwards. Hundreds of youth conferences were organised during 1928 and 1929, with speakers advocating radical solutions for the political, economic and social ills from which the country was suffering from. Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose toured the country, making speeches attacking imperialism, capitalism, and landlordism and preaching the ideology of socialism.

These developments also had a desirable impact on women's movements. Various legislations and decisions of those times can be credited to Socialist workers' agitations; such as the Unions Act, the Fundamental Rights and Economic Programme at Karachi Session, and the National Economic Policy in Faizapur session. Socialist ideas began to spread rapidly especially because many young persons who had participated actively in the non-cooperation movement were unhappy with its outcome.

There was also broad acceptance of socialist principles and adoption of the Socialist outlook by INC, post-independence; the reason why the (erstwhile) Planning Commission was often called a Soviet era hangover. Still, the Communists have always had a love hate relationship with the Congress.

Bhagat Singh, the celebrated revolutionary, was noted to have studied in detail the life of Lenin and the Communist Manifesto during his time in jail. Periyar, who started the 'self-respect movement' and also the Dravida Kazhagham, is known to have drawn inspiration from the Russian Communist method of bringing social justice, which he thought was best applicable to the plight of the lower castes in India.

The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) the oldest trade union federation in India, is associated with the CPI. It was created originally by moderates associated with the INC. Founded on 31 October 1920, it had Lala Lajpat Rai as its first President.

During its initial days, the CPI focused on mobilising peasants and workers towards a revolutionary cause, while at the same time influencing the Congress in developing a sturdy Left leaning ideology. Trouble arose when, in the 1940s, Gandhi launched the Quit India movement against the British almost at the same time when the Soviet Union urged the CPI to back the British war efforts in the fight against Fascism. In their efforts to please the Russians, they alienated themselves from the nationalist struggle.

Post-Independence, the Party sprung back to form, leading armed struggles in several principalities where the princely rulers were reluctant to give up power. Most noteworthy among these was the rebellion against the Nizam of Hyderabad. In Manipur and Bihar too, the Party made its ideological impact felt strong. Having been successful in garnering enough support among some sections of the Indian population, it soon emerged as the first leading opposition Party that the Congress faced. The Party experienced its first-ever electoral success in the state of Kerala in the 1957 Legislative Assembly elections. Two decades later the Party gained a footing in West Bengal and soon after in Tripura.

By the early 1960s, however, international conditions affecting Communism had altered again, the ripples of which were felt strongly in the Left politics of India. The Soviet Union and China (two most important Communist powers of the world) at that time, were at daggers drawn over ideological implications of Left politics. The Chinese, led by Mao Zedong, denounced the Russians for leaning towards the West as a diplomatic means of spreading Communism, rather than leading to an armed struggle. The ideological conflict between the two countries had its immediate effect on the CPI, drawing sturdy lines between those who leaned towards a Soviet philosophy and those who supported the Chinese. The Indo-China border war in 1962 affected the politics within the Party with one section backing Nehru, while the other radical section opposed what they believed was an unqualified aggression towards China.

Another drawback of the Party was that it mostly looked outside India for political guidance. The internal politics within the CPI soon manifested themselves in the famous split of 1964, when the radical section leaning towards China walked out of a meeting held in Delhi, calling themselves the 'real Communist Party'. Soon after they formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), which eventually overshadowed the CPI.

Cultural tradition and ideological positioning of a certain community can never decide the fate of a party in electoral politics especially given the Indian ethos. This was why the Left suffered a drastic loss of power in West Bengal in 2011 to the All India Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee, an experience that was to repeat itself in succeeding elections.

(The writer is former Chief Secretary, Government of Andhra Pradesh)

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The influence of Communism in India - The Hans India

Grandma and grandpa communists, the lucky ones in the Netherlands. (Sison and wife)

AND I mean both: as a failed revolutionary organization and in terms of its leaders. The party is 52 years old, nearly four decades more than the average 15 years it took successful revolutionary organizations elsewhere to grab state power.

The party's founder Jose Ma. Sison is 82 his life obviously extended by the comforts and health services of the Netherlands. Only Sison is left among the original dozen or so central committee members, all of whom but two Kumander Dante and former party chairman Rodolfo Salas - died violently in their youth or of old age. Its core of idealistic young people, who built it up in 1970, are all now past 70 years old.

Its last known chairman, Julius Giron, who was killed last year, was 69 years old. He had replaced the captured Benito Tiamzon, 68 years. From a party of young idealistic students barely out of their teens, the party is now a party of septuagenarians.

As happened in failed revolutions, there is no capable second generation of leaders that has emerged. Those who would have had the intellect to lead the revolution, have instead chosen to be party-list representatives reveling in public attention and enjoying taxpayers' money as "congressmen."

The party has become pathetic, as the baby boomers that led it are apparently unaware, they are in the twilight of their lives, and there is no proletarian heaven where they can be with Lenin and Mao. Many are unable to live with their grown-up children who detest them for having abandoned them to their grandparents, or fear being involved with a fugitive from the law.

Those who have become useless to the party because of old age and sickness find themselves without "retirement" pay, and of course no savings, as the organization's sources of funding from loggers and miners in the 1970s ad telecom firms have dried up. There are no homes for the elderly for retired cadres.

While I detest this organization for the crimes it has and continues to commit against the nation, I still felt a tinge of sadness reading recently of the death of three communist leaders I had met when I was still with the organization.

Antonio Cabanatan and his wife Florenda Yap were killed back in November although it was only announced as no relatives claimed his body and of his wife in March when the military found out who he was. "Tonycab" was 74, his wife 65. The police claimed they were killed by burglars. The party claimed they were tortured and killed by the military, and they had "retired" from the organization in 2017. Cabanatan was nearly legendary in Central Visayas in the 1970s. He was a hunchback five feet tall, yet was an agile NPA commander.

The other day the military announced the killing - also in the Visayas, which appears to be the dwindling epicenter of the communist insurgency - of Rey Bocala and former priest Rustico Tan, known to have been ranking communist leaders but which the party claimed had already retired; Bocala was 75, Tan, 80 years.

Revolutionary organizations are living organisms, having their periods of youth and adulthood. After that, they either die if they lose to the government, or if they win, they transform into a different entity, the core of governments.

Lenin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1901: in 17 years, he was in power. The Chinese Communist Party fought for 22 years to win power in 1949. Fidel Castro's guerrillas toppled the Batista regime in six years. The Vietnamese Workers Party fought for 16 years, even against the most powerful nation on earth, the US, and won in 1975. The longest running Marxist revolutionary organization has been the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia which emerged in 1964. It entered into a peace agreement with the government only in 2013, and in 2017 ceased to be an armed group.

Sison's Communist Party has been organizing and killing Filipinos for 52 years. Can't these communists find some sanity left in their brains to realize they are defeated, and have become a zombie organization, surviving because the past four administrations had given it hope? Aren't the 50,000 Filipinos they slaughtered on the altar of the failed god communism enough?

If Sison were to find in his heart a shred of patriotism and morality or in his mind an ember of reason, he should call for the disbandment of the party, or at least the total cessation of its armed struggle. The old 1950s leaders of the old pro-Soviet Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas did.

Spare the lives of young people who you know will only die in some godforsaken jungle or in prisons while you enjoy the affluence of Utrech, Mr. Sison.

Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com

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The Communist Party is dying of old age - The Manila Times

In a square in front of a Communist Party memorial hall at Xibaipo in northern China, row upon row of party members stood, raised their fists and chanted the party oath in unison.

"I will never betray the party," they called out, facing statues of the People's Republic of China founder Mao Zedong and other revolutionary leaders before moving on, to be quickly replaced by another group.

Xibaipo was an important Communist Party base during China's civil war, which ended in 1949 with the victorious communists sweeping to power.

Earlier this month, it was a stop on a four-day government-organised media tour to some of the party's most important historical sites to mark the 100th anniversary of its founding on July 1.

Thirteen delegates, including Mao, attended the first congress in Shanghai in 1921 to set up the party.

Party researchers and officials told Reuters the large numbers of visitors at Xibaipo reflects a national push to get people, especially party members and cadres, to get involved with the upcoming anniversary.

Schools are also taking part. At Xibaipo, in Hebei province, a large group of students was lined up, given small national flags and told to recite their Communist Youth League oaths, just as the senior party members were doing.

"I feel I'm taking on a responsibility to strive for the realisation of communism," said Mao Weijia, 17, a high school pupil from Hebei. "As a young person entering adulthood, I carry the future of our motherland."

The idea of the motherland also featured in Yanan, the city in northwest China mythologised in party history as the birthplace of the revolution where Mao cemented his authority as party leader. Students were seen being asked to recite the patriotic song "Ode to the Motherland" by a tour guide.

The guide, who only gave his last name as Gao, said students are brought to such sites so they understand at an early age "our proletarian forefathers' spirit of hard work and struggle".

Among the adult visitors, many, such as Zhang Zhaoyang from Hunan province, said they were in Yanan as part of a "red tourism" or party-building trip organised by their party unit or employer.

Visitors are seen in front of a giant emblem of the Communist Party of China, ahead of the 100th founding anniversary of the party, during a government-organised tour at Nanniwan, a former revolutionary base of the party, in Yanan, Shaanxi province, China May 11, 2021. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

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"We take party-building activities very seriously. It is the leadership of the Communist Party that gives us happiness," Zhang, 50, said.

'UNMATCHED CORE'

The push to study the party's history this year is a boon to tourism in red tourist hot spots like Yanan and Xibaipo, say officials. But the trend is not new.

Before the pandemic, tourism in Yanan grew consistently, officials said, from 40.25 million visitors in 2016 to 73.08 million in 2019.

Nationwide, the drive to step up patriotic sentiment in part through party study has been a theme since Xi Jinping became China's leader nearly a decade ago, said Xu Jia, a researcher at the CPC Central Committee's Institute of Party History and Literature.

The push is aimed "to increase cohesion in the country", at a time when China faces challenges such as the recent trade war with the United States, Xu said.

At Yanan's China Executive Leadership Academy, one of several across the country where senior officials study the party and its history, academy Vice Director Li Guoxi explained the chief aim of their courses.

"In our cadres' education and training, we emphasise loyalty, honesty, and responsibility, but loyalty is the No.1 requirement, the priority," Li said.

Many here expressed confidence for the future of the party, which includes roughly 90 million members among China's population of 1.4 billion.

"For the next 100 years, I don't believe the Chinese people will change to another party," said Feng Jianmei, who teaches at the academy.

"It won't happen because the Chinese Communist Party has proven to the world and especially the Chinese people with 100 years of magnificent achievements that it provides an unmatched core of leadership."

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Chinese visit 'red' sites ahead of 100th Communist Party anniversary - Reuters

Dubbed a polyphonic novel, Secondhand Time by Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich is a literary monument to post-war and post-Soviet history. Critical yet warm, the book consists of in-depth interviews with the Russian winners and losers of the transition to capitalism, ranging from gulag survivors and persecuted enemies of the state, to Stalin apologists and Communist Party officials.

I am a great fan of all of Alexievichs works, but Im particularly attached to Secondhand Time. It enabled me to see elements from the backdrop of my childhood in the 90s, such as the ubiquitous second-hand shops in my home city of Chiinu; symbols of the Western dreams and disappointingly low budgets that defined the transition to capitalism for so many people in Eastern Europe. As one of the interviewees aptly says, the discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb.

As a Moldovan, the book also helped me understand but not justify the Russian imperialism that continued decades after the dissolution of the USSR. Why didnt anyone ask us? wonders one older woman in the book, contemplating the economic collapse that followed the USSRs dissolution. It is a question I empathise with, especially in the context of the wild privatisations that benefited a small elite of profiteers throughout the 90s. When the same interviewee says she spent her life building a great nation, I get what she is saying, but still feel somewhat sick: I wish governments across the world and Russian politicians in particular focused on creating states that truly serve their citizens, rather than selling megalomaniac, messianic delusions of grandeur.

This article is part of Calvert Reads, a new series revisiting great works of literature across the ages.

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Svetlana Alexievich's Second Hand Time X-rays the transition from communism to capitalism | Calvert Reads - The Calvert Journal

Before you laugh and say what a crazy story this is, consider this quote from the late founder of the Soviet Union a.k.a. Lenin.

"Socialism leads to Communism."

So when you look at what happened last year with lockdowns, big tech censorship, Covid cover-ups, and now the complete loss of a working media, communism may not be as far off as you think.

Was 2020 actually a preview of Communism here in the U.S.?

In a piece for PJ Media, Kevin Downey Jr. gave 5 reasons to believe that Communism might be coming to America. They are, 1) Agree or be silenced, 2) Violence for we, but not for thee, 3) Papers, please, 4) Guns, and 5) It's already begun.

Basically, what starts out as a guise of justice, turns into the eventual loss of individual rights, liberty, and freedom.

Marion Smith, President of the Common Sense Society told KTRH, "The end goal of socialism is communism, and that would be in keeping with Marxist thinking. It is a system with a proven track record of failure, death, and destruction."

Smith also pointed out how democracy and socialism cannot co-exist, and he credits our founding fathers for looking at human nature, and developing a form of government that fits human nature, rather than re-make man to fit an ideology. And if you really want to cut to the chase? An ideology without God. The government plays god, and makes man in it's image. It's really that simple.

So how would communism look today in America in 2021? We mentioned the lockdowns, censorship, propaganda instead of media, lack of truth.

Another example would be the BLM movement which Smith says "the organization itself has espoused Marxist ideology, and that should cause some concern."

It also completely contradicts and goes against the beliefs and teachings of the late Martin Luther King Jr. "He did consider whether or not Marxist ideas were the best platform for him to base his civil rights ideas on" Smith said, "he considered it and then ultimately he rejected it, and he appealed to the American declaration, and our Constitution."

Smith concludes that in communist systems, individual rights are not a principle, collective justice is the priority. The party comes first.

Sound familiar?

The rest is here:
The Five Reasons To Believe Communism Is Coming To America | NewsRadio 740 KTRH - NewsRadio 740 KTRH