INDIAN TROTSKYISTS HOLD NATIONAL CONFERENCE
By Magan Desai
A three-day conference of the Socialist Workers party, the Indian Section of the Fourth International, concluded in Baroda (Gujarat) on February 4, 1968, after electing a thirteen-member Central Committee with Comrade Magan Desai as the secretary.
More than forty delegates and observers from various states, including West Bengal, Bihar, Kerala, Maharashtra and Gujarat states, attended. The SWP was formed at a conference of Indian Trotskyists held in Bombay in August 1965.
The conference adopted an eightypage document outlining the programme of the SWP. The objective of the party has been defined as the achievement of socialist revolution and the establishment of a workers' government supported by the poor peasantry in India.
The programme has characterised the present Indian state as a capitalist state based on a constitution defending capitalist property relations. It has said that none of the basic problems of the people, including agrarian problems, industrialization, employment and democratic liberties, could be resolved within the present capitalist framework. It has characterised the Congress, Swatantra party, Jan Sangh, Bhartiya Kranti Dal, Hindu Mahasabha, Muslim League and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam as the parties of the Indian capitalist class; the PSP [Praja Socialist party] and the SSP [Samyukta Socialist party] as the parties of the middle class; and the Right and the Left Communist parties, the RSP [Revolutionary Socialist party] and the SWP, as working-class parties.
While stressing that the working class alone can lead the masses towards socialism, the SWP has sharply criticised the policies of the traditional workers' parties like the CPI [Communist party of India -~ the pro-Moscow CP], CPI(M) [Communist party of India (Marxist) -- the pro-Peking CP], and RSP, of seeking opportunist alliances with the capitalist and the communal parties in the name of building so-called "non-Congress coalitions," especially after the fourth general elections.
The programme has said that the Congress government during the last twenty years has sought to build capitalism, under the false pretext of constructing a "socialist pattern of society." It has asserted that the capitalist property relations can be transformed only through a socialist revolution, through revolutionary mass struggles of the exploited classes.
On the international situation the
SWP has called for demonstrations of soli-
darity of the international working-class
movement with the liberation struggle of
the Vietnamese people against U.S. impe-
rialism as well as with the anti-imperial-
ist movements of the colonial and semi-
colonial peoples against imperialisn.
The programme also expressed soli-
darity with the struggles of the working
people and the intelligentsia in the So-
viet Union and others workers’ states
against the present bureaucratic regimes
and for the establishment of proletarian
democracy.
The programme has sharply criti-
cised the sectarian refusal of the Chi-
nese and the Soviet bureaucracies to
forge a fighting united front with other
workers states for the defence of the
Vietnamese Revolution against world in-
perialisn.
The party has pledged its defence
of the property relations in the Soviet
Union and other workers states, includ-
ing Cuba, but has characterized the re-
gimes in Soviet Russia, China, and the
East European states, etc., as bureau-
cratically degenerated workers states.
It has called for political revolutions
against the bureaucratic privileges and
for the revival of workers' democracy in
these countries.
The programme has also referred to
the deepening crisis of international cap-
italism and has said that U.S. imperial-
ism, which has established its unchal-
lenged hegemony over the capitalist states,
has been paving the way for a third world
war -- a nuclear holocaust -- to "make
the world safe for capitalism." This ca-
tastrophe can be averted only through the
revolutionary intervention of the prole-
tariat to establish a socialist world.
In a separate resolution adopted
on the "non-Congress governments" in dif-
ferent states, the conference has strong-
ly criticised their opportunist multi-
class character and has said that the so-
called non-Congress governments -- even
the left-dominated governments in West
Bengal (now dismissed) and in Kerala --
have subserved the interests of the cap-
italist class and played the role of the
defenders of bourgeois property relations.
In West Bengal, where the left-dominated
United Front Ministry had been dismissed
by the Centre, it criticised the policies
of the traditional left parties to con-
fine the mass upsurge to the bourgeois
constitutional framework on the basis of
an opportunist multi-class coalition, in-
stead of developing the struggle of the
masses with the perspective of a workers and peasants government in India.
The resolution has called for the ereation of a united front of workers and peasant parties and for the creation of new organs of mass struggle in the form of workers councils and peoples committees in West Bengal.
The conference adopted a resolution paying revolutionary tribute to the Cuban revolutionary leader, Ernesto Che Guevara, "a symbol of the internationalist traditions of the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky." It also mourned the untimely deaths of Comrade Mallikarjun Rao of Andhra, a member of the organizing committee of the SWP; Comrade Kamalesh Banerjee, a former Trotskyist leader; and Comrade V.R.Nagarkatti, a party activist.
The newly formed Central Committee has elected a five-member secretariat. The conference concluded with a mass rally held at Gandhi Maidan in the centre of the city on February 4. Delegates and observers led a procession of workers to the rally from the venue of the conference.
The rally was presided over by