The Indian

scene is to witness a sub-continent of 450 million people in convulsion and agony.

This is a dreary panorama of food shortage and general starvation. It is a crisis created neither by the infertility of the soil, nor by the sprinkling of grain hoarders, and certainly not by the density of the population.

This is a crisis of Indian capitalist society caused by the frenzied force of the profit motive and the subsequent reigning anarchy in production.

The result is an increasing reduction of workers' and peasants' working conditions and living standards to an abject, sub-human level.

In the course of the anti-colonialist struggle, the masses of the peasantry rally behind the emerging urban middle class.

The driving force behind the attempted class unity between the peasantry and the national bourgeoisie is the intensity of feudal landlord exploitation.

Imperialist social relations, emerging from highly developed (technique and extensive character of the productive forces, imposes great strain on the national bourgeoisie to control its own home market and carry capitalist relations into the countryside.

Therefore, the old feudal form of production and social relations become a fetter upon emerging capitalist relations of production.

On this significant point, Frederick Engels, the cofounder of Communism states ('On Social Relations in Russia'):

'In Western Europe, including Poland and Little Russia, at a certain stage in the social development this communal ownership becomes a fetter, a brake on agricultural production, and was more and more eliminated.' The process of eliminating, in the Indian context, the old feudal forms of exploitation and introducing capitalist land ownership in the countryside, is the backbone of the present Indian food crisis. This manifests itself in diverse forms.

In England, Oliver Cromwell, the military arm of the emerging national bourgeoisie, sought to slay feudalism by fire and sword. In India, the weapons of struggle have been determined by the historical process of colonialism, by the British bourgeoisie. That weapon is the parliament, an Indian creation on the British pattern.

The Land Holdings Act of the ruling Congress Party was an attempt to break up the larger estates and so determined the maximum acreage a single person could hold.

Adjustment

Following from this, the Indian bourgeoisie was determined to appropriate a great part of the surplus produced by the small peasant holders; to help • anti-feudal landlords to develop into capitalist landlords and create a rich stratum of peasants acting as usurers, blood-sucking the agricultural labourer and the small peasant holder.

So the struggle for independence by the middle class in the economically backward areas of world imperialism has been a political act of adjustment, a change in a reactionary direction of developing the productive forces to be easily assimiliated by the world imperialist economy.

Mr. Morarjee Desai, the extreme right-wing spokesman in the ruling party, champion of this trend to speedily merge Indian business interests with other monopoly and banking interests of world imperialism. In spite of him, this process would develop in that direction.

Only by seeing the granting of political independence to the colonies manoeuvre of imperialism to adjust itself to the 'wind of change'; by seeing this as a stage of development characteristic of imperialist exploitation in the present period; by seeing this as an essential stage of the national bourgeoisie to develop into a violently reactionary monopoly capitalist class; by seeing, finally, the need to extend the 'national democratic revolution into a socialist revolution on the basis of proletarian - peasant unity, can we determine the nature of Trotsky's Permanent Revolution', and the In India recently, whilst thousands starved, Prime Minister Shastri announced an 'Untouchability Week' during which the masses were expected to let the 'spiritual message' of Ghandi fill their distended stomachs. In this article P. DESAI analyses the tremendous food shortage in India against the background of the drive for profit by world imperialism.

all paramount nature of the complex connection between the metropolitan imperialist countries and the toilers of the colonies and neo-colonies (actually the economically backward sectors of imperialism.

In a few words, the backward areas must pull up their socks, merge speedily with the apparatus of world imperialism by creating suitable material levels, and prepare against the impending tide of world proletarian revolution.

Let us view the Indian food crisis against this background.

Big landlords have circumvented the law calling for the breaking up of large estates and ceiling land holdings by distributing plots to their relatives. The plots have been rented to small peasant-holders who are tied to the prices imposed by the wholesalers' and retailers' associations stretching across the country.

The fate of the small peasant holder and his family lies in the decisions of the stock markets and the grain centres, nationally and internationally.

True to the laws of capitalism, sections of the Indian agriculture are developed according to the rate of profit they fetch. Therefore, most of the monopoly and petty-bourgeois enterprises rely on the production of non-food crops and the country relies on the import of grain.

Patching up

The growing crisis has brought forth many plans and useless attempts to stave off social revolution. Latest manoeuvres of the Indian bourgeoisie are a reflection of their attempts to patch up capitalism and accelerate its tortoise tempo.

According to the 'Hindu' newspaper of August 30, the resolution of the Congress Working Committee demanded the structure of food prices be fixed at the producers' , wholesalers' and retailers' levels, allowing for a limited margin of profit. Better less profit, than social revolution!

The ruling Congress Party leaders have managed to cook up some bright excuses for the crisis, The problem is caused by the soil, they say. Resolution after resolution is passed.

Facilities must be provided to increase food production, and efficient distribution.

There must be a distribution of fertilizer to small peasants. Give concessions on water rates.

In a few words, the food cnisis results in a further drive for profit. • The state becomes an 'honest broker' negotiating between the peasantry on, the one hand, and the giant fertilizer monopolies, merchant interests and landowners on the other.

On dealing with the question of fertilizer distribution, we note that the Indo-U.S. Corporation (with €500,000.000 investment) is to set up five large fertilizer factories.

Alliance

The news was dramatically broken to the Indian public on September 17, by a certain General Clay, a senior partner of Messrs. Lehman Bros.

General L. Clay, we believe, was once a military titan of the Pentagon. He was in charge of American troops in West Berlin and at one time threatened to crash the Berlin Wall with tanks.

The fibres of connection between the Indian capitalist class and the American business interests are strengthened by General Clay. Big business and the military often stand together to tame militant workers.

Another mild attempt to dampen the workers' militancy comes from the State of Punjab. The ruling class intends to grant remission on land to families owning less than five acres, provided three acres devoted to grain production.

Though this would mean a loss of 50,000,000 rupees to the State Exchequer, it would benefit 40 per cent landowners.

Concurrently 33 per cent of the landowners having plots between five to ten acres would also benefit.

Capitalist boom brings in its shadow the depreciating curve of crisis. The result is an attack on workers' conditions, greater rigours of poverty and unemployment.

The major notable result in the Indian context is the wave of rebellion on the part of workers and peasants.

On September 27 strikes were called by left-wing organisations against food scarcity. Police opened fire at Tutangange, Bengal. In Calcutta bus and tram services were crippled by a strike.

In Andra Pradesh workers were shot.

Police violence reached THERE would be no reason to select this book for review on the grounds of any quality whatsoever, since it is badly written, petty and unconvincing.

However, Brian Behan was once a member of the Socialist Labour League, before that on the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, and during all that time a well-known militant on building sites in the London area. Some explanation is therefore required of the rubbish he has now spilled out in this book.

In this review we shall mostly confine ourselves to the political content of the book. Behan's attack is against any independent political organisation for the working class, and particularly against revolutionary Marxist leadership.

His attack on Trotskyism is deliberately written in caricature terms. By making the whole chapter semifictional in character he is able to introduce fabrications about 'violence' and conspiratorial methods, without having the responsibility of substantiating these innuendoes, and without ever describing the real political differences and subsequent breaches of discipline which led to his expulsion from the Socialist Labour League in 1960.

When he left the Com.

munist Party it was without an organised political fight against the leadership. Behan describes his own individual protest against the Edith Bone case on the Communist Party Executive and gives a confused account of his own hopeless twists and turns on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

He describes, with dates and names, the discussions on some of the questions in the Communist Party Executive.

The reader gets the impression that whereas Behan roamed about in the Communist Party criticising as he pleased for a time in 1956-57, he was summarily ejected from the Socialist Labour League without a hearing.

Indeed, he repeats the old reformist slander, In fact.

they (the Trotskyists) possessed all the vices of the Communist Party and none of its virtues.' In point of fact the Communist Party allows no crisis national limits. The impulse to raid grain centres passed through cities like Patna. As the workers flocked in their thousands into business centres, the capitalist class summoned their police force to clear up the scene.

In Patna, 10 people were killed in baton charges by the police.

Unrest

This could not stop the wave of unrest and general cry for food. The increasing price of food and the quest for higher profits acted as a generator lo electrify the mass movement which discharged its revolutionary militancy.

Nebulous leftist organisations exploited the situation • calling for more strikes, but failed to achieve concrete results and led the working class into further emptiness and despair.

The political trauma and BOOK REVIEW by Cliff Slaughter Behan crosses organised opposition opinion to be expressed and its rules specifically ban the organisation of factions.

Behan never went beyond individual protest. In the Socialist Labour League, Behan, then Chairman of the National Committee, submitted in January 1960, a full programme of opposition to the League's policy.

That programme, in accordance with our rules, was circulated to the entire membership and a small faction was recruited on the basis of it. Behan addressed aggregate meetings of the membership on his programme and continued to speak and write publicly for the League.

All these facts are omitted •by Behan. He selects certain events and fabricates others in order to give a picture of soul-less political conspirators interested only in power.

There is little wonder that Behan does not say what his political programme was With the help • of a few clippings from the 'Financial Times', he confidently dicted a serious economic depression by the autumn of 1960, a depression in which the workers would turn away from the Labour Party and seek a revolutionary alter native.

We must, therefore, set ourselves up as an independent open revolutionary party to appeal to these disillusioned workers, he maintained.

The League rejected this sectarian nonsense at its conference in 1960. In the aftermath, Behan formed his 'Workers' Party, which has not been heard of since.

If Behan insists on writing about his political experience, then he will have to accept that we reply with the truth. Why does he give no full accounting of his own political tendency after 1960? What happened to his Wurkers' Party?

He gives no explanation because he feels responsible țo no one but himself, a 'free' individual in capitalist society. He no longer accepts the food shock of the killings, the general heated atmosphere of discontent and the revulsion of abject living conditions were not properly canalised in an organised direction.

The Indian scene is i reflection of the total world crisis of the need for revolutionary Marxist leadership.

Lack of leadership is shown in the parliamentary debates in the House of Commons (Lok Sabha). On September 18 the right-wing Communist leader, N. H. Mukherjee accused Premier Shastri of being a schizophrenic. This Moscow mouthpiece accused Shastri of departing from Nehru's progressive (sic) policies!

The injured Shastri spent two hours replying to the Communists, maintaining rigidly that he is no split personality.

While the Communist Party spent its energy attacking perWITH BREAS Macgibbon and discipline of the working-class movement in any sense and consequently his book becomes a weapon of the enemy class, appealing to individual freedom under capitalism.

From "super - militancy, Behan has slipped over into submission to the authority of the system. We will prove this from the book.

Behan plays the great hero in describing his role in the South Bank strike during the construction of Shell-Mex House, particularly his arrest and sentence to imprisonment.

Here again he indulges in slanders, making it appear that he was pushed to the front to get arrested, while his political comrades ran off to the cafe.

Quite apart from the record of Trotskyists in this country and all over the world in the face of police repression, there is another important point here. Behan's conduct of industrial matters was under constant criticism from the League. On this particular occasion, he was specifically instructed to avoid an obviously prepared police provocation, but his political bankruptcy left him no alternative but adventurism and individual heroics.

One of the most significant sentences in the book concerns the South Bank strike. It would do very well as a scab's testament:

'Our mass picket is pressed back, and slowly the gates yawn open to admit all those who have a mind to enter.

Then we see what's afool.

A coach comes belting down the road. At first we see it's empty and wonder why all the fuss about an empty coach. Then someone spots it. A cry goes up.

"The dirty scabby bastards.

They're lying down on the floor so we can't see them."

'Suddenly I feel afraid.

What is there about us to terrify anyone. Surely we are the brotherhood of love? Imagine me in that struggle notably developed, with no discernable leadership.

As the crisis developed, the military, educational and religious segments of the bourgeois state were properly mobilized. Negotiations were duly conducted with other governments.

The Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy speedily supplied equipment to the MiG aeroplane factories. To it will be added the generous gift of 20 helicopters, aircraft and light tanks.

Negotiations were also conducted with Nasser and the Egyptian bourgeoisie on the purchase of supersonic aircraft.

On September 26, Chavan, the Minister of Defence, in the midst of impending workers' demonstrations, announced calmly that a well-equipped army of 825,000 men and a 45 Squadron Air Force will be maintained.

Seeing this in relation to unprecedented police assaults, we can now guess what the Indian working class and peasantry are in for!

"Toil'

The bourgeoisie also is too slow in beckoning academicians and pedagogues.

The ruling class chirps in a chorus - recommend proper educational facilities in correspondence with the food crisis.

Mr. Harish Chandra (chairman) of the UP Universities Commission, states:

*Political parties should not carry their politics and rivalries into the campus of educational institutions .

There should be no objections to students establishing clubs of their own where they may discuss and debate ideologies from an academic standpoint [sic] ... Dignity of labour should be inculcated amongst them.' the line coach. Shouldn't a man be free to do what he likes, work or not? Is our dictatorship any less evil than the employer's? ...

And in the same paragraph he attacks 'politicals' for not getting arrested!

Behan is quite explicit about his break from the working class: 'I swore then that never again would I hold a union card and I never have' he says after describing being drummed out of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers.

This same Behan wrote last year in "Twentieth Century' magazine that John Bloom's trading methods opened up new possibilities for capitalism! It is clear that his political evolution is not conplete and that his opinions are close to the extreme right.

To colour his own political renegacy, he indulges in the lowest kind of muck in his writing against the politicallyconscious section of the working class, the Marxists. He describes one man as, 'Riddled, like most extreme politicians, with sexual frustration. The same morbid theme returns when he caricatures a Trotskyist during the South Bank strike, 'he cringes when he passes John Law. He will live, like the Voyeur, through the actions of others'.

Earlier in the book, he says of a political organiser that, 'He became a revolutionary in a fit of spite brought on by his failure to make a pile selling holy pictures door to door.

Like all bad and tiresome comedians, he cannot help repeating his jokes, and writes a hundred pages later about some other character, 'He was a small man made revolutionary by his failure to make a fortune selling floor polish door to door' Behind all this slander, behind the cheap stories about sex, so contemptuous of women, which recur constantly in the book, lies Behan's complete turn, not only against Marxism, but against the workers as a class Instead of recognising capipolitics must not be carried into the universities. They should toil and sweat—it is dignified— so that the purses of the capitalists are fattened. If this is not so, then the gun barrel of world imperialism will point hazardously between their eyes.

In conclusion, another paradox must be recorded in the chapter of working-class history.

Wail

While the Bombay stock exchange records bleak weather, while cash sections rule quiet, while working people live through the morass of humiliation and poverty, the Indian capitalist class has proclaimed an 'Untouchability' Week' to carry the spiritual teachings of Ghandi to the outcasts!

This is a 'do-good week"

—a revival of the 'HarijanSeva' campaign—in which the workers are taught to be spiritually conscious in the midst of material starvation!

In down-to-earth language, it is a petty attempt to teach the masses how to wail over their miserable conditions and how not to organise themselves under a perceptibly dynamic leadership a leadership which would be an iron fist of defence against ruling class onslaughts.

History calls on the Socialist Labour League and the British working class to play an important role in constructing the tap roots of a powerful Fourth Trotskyist International. The salvation of mankind, and especially the starving millions in Asia, lies in a world party of workers and peasants, and certainly not in the horrific Stalinist committee rooms in Moscow and Peking.

Thus flows the logic of the coming socialist revolution in all its structural, expressive and substantial senses.

talism and fighting like the capitalists for the bigger share, we pursued a mirage of Labour to power to solve our problems.' Yes Behan has 'recognised' capitalism, i.e., he has accepted it as an unalterable fact, and he turns his hate against those who want to change it.

He naturally, therefore, adopts the boss's line on important questions. He comes out clearly against nationalization.

Telling how four men met their death in building Shell Mex House, he says, 'It's not the firm's fault, but they are blamed just the same! His answer to the 'tyranny' of the trade unions is a secret ballot for all strike actions. 'In what other way can workers really make up their minds whether or not an issue is serious enough to jeopardise the future of their families?' How much farther is it possible to go? There is no limit, once you abandon the working class.

There is a strong racialist undercurrent in Behan's book. He describes Whitechapel as *A mixture of seamen, dockers Jewish clothing shops, and Indians who never seem to do anything much, and pontificates later, 'How inoffensive the Indian is'. He describes the sacking of an Indian worker and adds, 'one more Bengal Lancer hit the dust'.

Writing about the anarchists he uses the following interesting expression, 'At first all you could hear was the Spaniards jabbering away'. Britishers speak, but foreigners jabber It is very near full circle.

The Irish 'rebel' now mouths the common filth of British imperialist ideology without shame.

Theoretical backwardness, the attempt to substitute subjectivism and activism for serious attention to Marxist theory and organisation led Behan to impatience, superficiality and arrogance relation to the working class In our epoch where the lines are so clearly drawn between reaction and revolution, there is no stopping place once the road away from Marxism is taken. Behan's book should be consulted for purposes of political pathology, as an example of the descent into rottenness and political degeneracy which awaits the whole of humanity if we do not succeed in the building of a revolutionary Marxist leadership.

But we are building it. For every Behan, we shall win and train for the working class thousand young worker-revolutionaries.

Oct ber Farewell to K Three