Throughout the 40th anniversary year of Party Foundation (22 April 2009 -- 22 April 2010) Liberation will be publishing excerpts from old party documents, articles, reports etc to give you a feel of those times, those struggles. In this issue we bring you excerpts from one of the two resolutions (the other one being the ‘Political Resolution’) that the AICCCR adopted unanimously on 22 April 1969.

Resolution on Party Organization

Background

The Political Resolution has already made it amply clear how at each critical stage of our national liberation struggle the leadership of the Party consciously betrayed the revolutionary cause by dragging the Party into the morass of right opportunism and left sectarianism. We have seen how the Party leadership betrayed the great armed struggle of the Telengana peasantry, the struggle of the people in the Native States, the great Tebhaga and Bakasht peasant struggles in North India, the great mutiny of the R.I.N. ratings and other sections of the armed forces. We have seen how the Party leadership recoiled in dread at the sight of the great anti-imperialist and anti-feudal upsurge that engulfed the whole of India in the post-war years… We have seen how the Party leadership consciously worked in post-war years to transform the Party from the weapon of class struggle into the weapon of class collaboration, from the general staff of revolution into a docile stooge of reaction, from a revolutionary Party into a legal and parliamentary Party and from a Party of proletarian internationalism into a national chauvinist Party. The bloody repression unleashed on the heroic peasant masses of Naxalbari by the revisionist leadership was the final act of treachery which completely unmasked its ugly and counter-revolutionary face….

However, the history of the Party also proves that time and again the Party ranks have risen in open revolt against the policies of betrayals by the leadership and have been constantly fighting for a thorough revolutionary and proletarian internationalist line in both theory and practice.

To sum up, it can be safely said that the history of the Communist Party of India has been the history of ceaseless struggles between the bourgeois stand-point and the proletarian stand-point, between the bourgeois line and the proletarian line and between the bourgeois reactionary leadership and the proletarian revolutionary ranks.

It must also be emphasized that the revolutionary struggle of the Naxalbari peasantry represented the final break of the revolutionary ranks with the counter-revolutionary leadership, and the formation of the All India Co-ordination Committee of the Communist Revolutionaries was the first link in the chain process of building a truly revolutionary Communist Party in India. Inspired by the invincible Thought of Chairman Mao and drawing lessons from the great Chinese Revolution, the All India Co-ordination Committee has been conducting heroic armed struggles in many parts of the country, particularly in Srikakulam, Lakhimpur Kheri and other places. … The last eighteen months have witnessed the unification of the revolutionaries of India on all the essentials of a Party Programme, thus placing the immediate formation of the Party on the agenda, as Chairman Mao teaches us: “If there is to be a revolution, there must be a revolutionary Party.”

The Ideological-Political Unification

The building of a revolutionary Party is, first and foremost, the ideological and political building. The neo-revisionist leadership of the Party could easily befool the revolutionary ranks simply by deferring the ideological and political questions to a secondary place and putting the organizational tasks in the first place…. We must now draw a proper lesson from this mistake and must give first place to ideology and politics above everything else. The ideological and political building of the Party today means : i) That we all accept Marxism-Leninism-Mao’s Thought as the guide to all revolutionary activity and apply these general truths to our concrete conditions. We all pledge to become true disciples of Chairman Mao, the greatest Marxist-Leninist of our era.

ii) We must attain unanimity regarding fundamental problems raised during our struggle against revisionists of all varieties and also regarding the mistakes made by most of the revolutionaries.

iii) We must attain unanimity regarding the essential points of our Party Programme, namely, the nature of the Indian society, the primary task and perspective of the Indian revolution, the motive force of our revolution and the path that we have to traverse, that is, on the general plan of the Indian revolution.

The unanimity that we have arrived at is being summarized in another resolution and the whole of the Party has to be educated and united on that basis.

The Party of Armed Revolution

Our experience, like the experiences gained by many other parties, shows that the so-called interweaving of parliamentary and non-parliamentary paths, in practice, amounts only to the degeneration of the Party into a parliamentary party, into the position of an appendage to the reactionary ruling classes. In present-day India, the big landlords and the big bourgeoisie have found out a new device for hoodwinking the people, i.e., by setting up non-Congress governments with revisionists and reactionary politicians of all descriptions. Under such conditions, great pulls and pressures of parliamentarism are bound to creep in again and again.

All these pressures and pulls have to be combated most vehemently so that we are able to lead the Indian people on the path of revolution. So, our Party is the Party of Armed Revolution. No other path exists before the Indian people than the path of Armed Revolution. It must be understood that the Party cannot be built in isolation from armed struggle.

The Rural-Based Party

…path of armed revolution is the path of People’s War. In the conditions in India, Asia and all other semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries in Africa and Latin America, it is first and foremost a peasants’ war against feudalism. Therefore, the first and foremost task of our Party is to rouse the peasant masses in the countryside to wage guerilla war, unfold agrarian revolution, build rural base areas, use the countryside to encircle the cities and finally to capture the cities and to liberate the whole country. Thus, in the present-day phase of the Indian Revolution, the centre of gravity of our work has to be in the villages.

The Secret and Underground Party

A revolutionary Party, to be able to conduct a long-drawn armed struggle, cannot and must not remain a legal Party.

It must function with the utmost secrecy and keep its main cadres underground. Though the Party should learn to utilize all possible legal opportunities for developing its revolutionary activities, it should under no circumstances function in the open.

… the Party should concentrate, in the main, on developing guerilla forms of armed struggle and not waste time and its energies in holding open mass meetings and forming kisan sabhas in the old style.

A Party of a New Style

According to Chairman Mao, the Marxist-Leninist style of work essentially entails integrating theory with practice, forging close links with the masses and practising criticism and self-criticism. It means that our Party, while persisting in the ideological and political line, has to evolve a mass line on the basis of ‘taking from the masses and giving to the masses’ and must constantly raise the level of its understanding.

It also means that it has to evolve a proper method of criticism and self-criticism. The cadre has to be educated through self-criticism by the leadership. In criticizing the mistakes of the cadre, the policy of ‘curing the disease and saving the patient’ will have to be constantly worked out.

It is in this way that our Party is going to be a Party of the new style.

Developing Teams of Revolutionary Leadership

Absolute devotion to the cause, contact with the masses, ability to find out one’s bearings and observance of discipline independently are the first and foremost criteria on the basis of which the teams of leadership should be reorganized at all levels. We should not, in the least, hesitate in ‘getting rid of the stale and taking in the fresh.’ It will be the incumbent duty of these leading teams at different levels to work out the method of ‘combining the general with the particular’ and of ‘combining the leadership with the masses’.

…Every member of these leading teams, in whatever post he is, should be entrusted with the task of particular guidance to a selected area and to get personal experience therefrom.

Recruitment of Party Members

While enrolling the membership of the Party, all notions about mass membership of the Party should be combated, a revolutionary Party does not become a mass party by virtue of its large number of members. Such is the criterion fixed by revisionists and parliamentary parties. A revolutionary Party becomes a mass Party by virtue of its mass line, by virtue of its closest links with the masses, by virtue of its being merged with the masses. It is not the number but the quality that is essential and primary for a revolutionary Party.

We will enroll only such members in our Party who accept Marxism-Leninism-Mao's Thought as a guide to action, who accept all the essential points of our Party Programme and the organizational line set forth in our Political and Organizational resolutions, participate in daily activity under the discipline of some of the Party organizations and give financial aid to the Party according to their capacity. Those comrades who are unable to fulfil these primary conditions of Party membership but have stood with us in revolt against the revisionists, will certainly not like to degrade our Party to the level of social-democracy by relaxing these conditions and we are fully entitled to expect that they will remain our best sympathizers and helpers.

Democratic Centralism

To conduct a revolutionary struggle, establishing iron discipline in the Party is indispensable. But the first condition to establish iron discipline in the Party is by creating an atmosphere of democracy and establishing democracy under central guidance. Only by constantly giving correct line of guidance, only by constantly getting familiar with the lower bodies and with the life of the masses, only by taking firm and well-considered decisions and only by promptly transmitting those decisions to the lower bodies, getting them thoroughly discussed and helping the lower bodies in finding out methods of implementing them, can the democracy under central guidance be developed and the authority of the leadership established.

This is the proper way of establishing the authority of the leading bodies. This is the proper way of developing innumerable successors of revolution by unleashing their initiative.

Fight wrong conceptions and alien trends

The bureaucratic methods employed by the bourgeois reactionary leadership of the Party during the entire period of our Party’s existence, coupled with their meanest craftiness, have terribly shaken the confidence of the Party ranks and, as a result, all sorts of idealist, anarchic and autonomist tendencies have grown inside them. The apprehension of a possible re-emergence of a bureaucratic leadership has been utilized by various petty-bourgeois groups who are assiduously campaigning to prevent the building up of a revolutionary Party in India. All sorts of anti-Marxist ideas and concepts like ‘historical inevitability of groupism at this stage’, ‘the Party growing automatically out of struggle’ and leaving the task of building the Party to spontaneity in the name of building the Party from below, and general varieties of ‘poly-centrism’, are being preached by these groups. On the one hand, they claim to preach the thought of Chairman Mao and support the Naxalbari path and on the other, they deliberately work to sabotage the building of a revolutionary Communist Party in India which alone can lead a revolution through to the end.

Hence the building up of the Party means, on the one hand, declaring a relentless war against the bureaucratic methods of leadership still prevalent among us at various levels and on the other, exposing and annihilating the alien, idealistic, anarchic and autonomistic concepts being preached by these groups. It is only by exposing and thoroughly smashing these alien concepts that those honest revolutionaries who are still following these groups can be won over to the Party.

There must be complete clarity in our minds about the methods of our leadership, the style of our work and our day-to-day practical life. Revisionist methods, habits and practices still dominate and they can be eradicated and revolutionary proletarian methods, habits and practices can grow only by constant endeavour to remould ourselves through active participation in revolutionary struggles and subjecting ourselves to criticism and self-criticism.

Ours is the real Communist Party of India. (It will affix the word ‘Marxist-Leninist’ after its name to denote its differentiation from the parties running under the leadership of the Dange clique and the neo-revisionists).

This is the Party of the proletariat and it represents the true aspirations and policies of the revolutionary class.

This Party will take as its first task the training of revolutionary cadres in revolutionary activity.

This Party will be a Party of armed struggle and will be a rural-based Party in the first instance and will give first preference to the building of revolutionary base areas in the countryside rather than work in the cities in the present phase of the revolution.

This Party will give first preference to preparing the working class to assume the role of leadership of our revolution rather than to carrying on economic and cultural activities in the cities.

This Party will give first preference to the task of organizing leading teams of the Party rather than to the enrolment of Party members on a mass scale.

This Party will give first preference to the quality of membership rather than to the quantity.

This Party will be organized on the basis of democratic centralism but it will give first preference to the task of unleashing democracy under centralized guidance rather than to formal discipline.

This Party will develop a mass line and will be the first on criticism and self-criticism.
It is in this way that we take our first organizational steps towards rebuilding the Party.

The All India Co-ordination Committee sets up the Central Organizing Committee from its midst with those of its members leading the armed struggles as its guiding force.

The Committee appeals to all the State units and all other units to discuss this resolution along with our Political resolution and to send us their points and suggestions within the next two months.

It appeals to all its State Committees to set up State Organizing Committees and Committees for different areas in the same manner, strictly adhering to the criteria set forth for the leading teams. It is only under the strict guidance of the State Organizing Committees that the members of the Party will be enrolled.

It appeals to all revolutionary comrades to unite ideologically and politically and to shoulder the responsibility of rebuilding the Party. It is on the basis of this discussion and some experience of the functioning of the Party that the Central Organizing Committee will place before a Party Congress the drafts of the Party Programme and the Party Constitution and take further steps towards Party-building.

We earnestly appeal to all State units of the Co-ordination Committee to prepare reports on the conditions of the masses and self-critical reviews of their functioning so that a consolidated review of all-India developments may be placed before the Congress and necessary decisions may be taken on that basis.

We are fully confident that our Party, led by the invincible Thought of Chairman Mao and trying to become his worthy disciple, will be able to lead the revolution through to the end.

[source: Naxalbari and After: A Frontier Anthology, Vol II, edited by Samar Sen et al. Some misprints have been corrected].