https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/12/meet-m12.html
India: ICFI supporters hold May Day meeting in Bangalore
By our correspondents
12 May 2017
On May 1, Indian supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth
International (ICFI) held a May Day public meeting on “World War and the
Centenary of Russian Revolution” in Bangalore, the Karnataka state
capital. It was the second public event in India organised by ICFI
supporters focusing on the October 1917 Revolution and its contemporary
significance, following a public meeting in Chennai, Tamil Nadu on March 5.
As part of their campaign to build the Bangalore meeting, ICFI
supporters spoke with garment workers in Peediya and students and IT
employees in different parts of the city, including Shivaji Nagar,
Marathali and Electronic City. Several hundred English-, Tamil- and
Kannada-language leaflets were distributed.
Campaigners discussed with workers and students the danger of another
world war and the necessity for an international anti-war movement based
on the working class and a socialist perspective, and promoted the World
Socialist Web Site ’s online lecture series on the Russian Revolution.
The Bangalore meeting was chaired by Sathish Simon and addressed by Arun
Kumar from the ICFI supporters group and Socialist Equality Party (SEP)
(Sri Lanka) assistant national secretary Deepal Jayasekara, who
travelled from Colombo to speak at the event.
Kumar referred to the Trump administration’s cruise-missile attack in
Syria, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bombing in Afghanistan and
Washington’s escalating military bullying of North Korea. He warned that
these actions posed the danger of a new world war involving nuclear
weapons. The speaker noted that over the past quarter century the US had
conducted an unending series of imperialist wars under the pretext of a
“war on terrorism.”
“The attack on Syria, Afghanistan and bullying of the small state of
North Korea are only manifestations of dangerously sharpening
geo-political conflicts between the US and China, the US and Russia and
also the US and Europe,” he said.
Kumar reviewed how the South Asian region increasingly had been drawn
into growing global geo-political tensions and, in particular, the US
war preparations against China, which had escalated under the Trump
administration.
“The Modi government has transformed India into a frontline state in the
US war drive against China and is strengthening military-strategic ties
with the US,” the speaker said. “As a sign of the rapid integration of
India into the US’s anti-China ‘Pivot to Asia’ campaign launched by
former President Obama, New Delhi signed an agreement last year
providing the US military’s access to Indian bases. India has now become
a major service and repair hub for the US Seventh Fleet, which is
central to US war preparations against China.”
Kumar noted that the US military courting of India had further
emboldened the Modi government to take an increasingly jingoistic stance
against Pakistan. These developments, he said, posed “deadly
consequences for the working class and oppressed masses in the region
and internationally.” The speaker explained why it was necessary for the
Indian working class to join with their class brothers and sisters in
the region and throughout the world and fight for the anti-war,
socialist movement that the ICFI was constructing.
Deepal Jayasejara (right) addressing Bangalore meeting
Deepal Jayasekara spoke at length about the historic significance of the
1917 Russian Revolution. He explained that the crisis of the capitalist
system that led to World War I and later World War II, had developed to
a higher and more profound level. “All the unresolved contradictions of
the past century are reemerging with explosive force to the surface of
world politics,” he said. “Under these conditions and on the centenary
of Russian Revolution, the events of 1917 acquire a new and intense
contemporary relevance.”
The Bolshevik Party’s struggle to lead the working class to power in the
October Revolution was based on an international perspective, he said
and added: “Above all Lenin and Trotsky recognised that the objective
basis for the socialist revolution in Russia was rooted, in the final
analysis, in the international contradictions of the world imperialist
system—i.e., between the outdated national-state system and the highly
integrated world economy. The fate of the Russian Revolution therefore
depended on the extension of workers’ power beyond the borders of Soviet
Russia.”
The speaker reviewed Lenin’s fight against the opportunists in the
Second International, who had lined up with their imperialist ruling
classes to support WWI, and explained Lenin’s struggle in April 1917 to
reorient the Bolshevik Party and turn it to preparing the working class
to overthrow the Provisional Government, take power and establish the
first workers’ state in October.
“Today, under conditions of the worst global economic crisis since the
1930s, deepening austerity and the imperialist drive toward a new world
war, millions of workers internationally are being driven into a renewed
upsurge of class struggles,” Jayasekara said. “The most advanced
elements among them will inevitably turn toward the experiences of the
Russian Revolution.”
The speaker exposed the efforts of India’s main Stalinist parliamentary
party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, which attempted
to claim the legacy of the October Revolution while falsifying the basic
theoretical issues underlining Russian Revolution.
A recent booklet published by the CPM on the centenary, Jayasekara said,
presented the October Revolution as a national event and not as the
opening shot of a world socialist revolution.
In opposition to Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, which was
vindicated by the Russian Revolution, the CPM repeated the anti-Marxist
Stalinist “two-stage” theory. This nationalist perspective insisted that
the bourgeois-democratic revolution was the “first stage,” with the
working class politically subordinated to the national bourgeoisie, and
the “second stage”—the socialist revolution—postponed forever.
Jayasekera concluded his address by calling on everyone at the meeting
to join with the ICFI and the SEP to build a section of the ICFI in
India, as the revolutionary party of Indian working class.
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