Stalin and Roy

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"It is clear," said Molotov at the Sixteenth Congress, "that it is not such people as Roy, who defended the policy of a bloc with the national bourgeoisie and has now gone over to the camp of the right-wing renegades, who could create a communist party in India."

The bloc with the national bourgeoisie, which is the basis of Stalin and Molotov's tactics in China, is written into the program of the Comintern. Or can it be that it was Roy who wrote the program? Or did the present leader of the Comintern simply forget the program? Or is he intending to reexamine it?

The petty-bourgeois Indian democrat Roy considers, as is well known, that for the sake of the Indian revolution communists should construct neither a communist nor a proletarian party, but a popular-revolutionary party above classes, an Indian Kuomintang. Roy was expelled from the Comintern as a right-winger. Generally speaking, there is no place for proponents of a Kuomintang in a proletarian International. But the point is that Roy did not introduce his great idea about the incapacity of the party of the proletariat to lead a popular, that is, workers' and peasants', revolution into the Comintern — he got it from the Comintern. As early as 1927 Roy's idea enjoyed official acceptance. The following extract from the leading organ of the Comintern on Roy's views on the tasks of the revolution in India appeared in April 1927:

"Comrade Roy's book is devoted to the most central question of contemporary revolutionary politics in India — the question of the organization of a popular party representing the interests of the workers, the peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie. The necessity of such an organization flows from the present conditions of the national revolutionary movement in India."

And further:

"Hence the task of the proletariat is to organize all these petty-bourgeois classes and layers into a single popular-revolutionary party and lead it to the assault on imperialism. We recommend this book to the reader who wants to form a definite and clear conception of the contemporary state of the national revolutionary movement in India, for it gives the Leninist interpretation of contemporary revolutionary politics in India" (Kommunistichesky Internatsional, number 15, April 15, 1927, pp. 50 and 52).

And how could the Comintern organ say otherwise? Roy's idea was in fact the idea of Stalin.

On May 18, 1927, Stalin answered a question from the students of the Chinese university in Moscow on the leading revolutionary party in China thus:

"We have said and we still say that the Kuomintang is a party of a bloc of several oppressed classes… . When I said in 1925 of the Kuomintang that it was the party of the worker-peasant bloc, I did not at all have in mind the characteristics of the actual [?] state of affairs in the Kuomintang, the characteristics of those classes which in fact adhered to the Kuomintang in 1925. When I spoke of the Kuomintang, I had in mind the Kuomintang only as a model of a special type of popular-revolutionary party in the oppressed countries of the East, especially in such countries as China and India, as a special type of popular-revolutionary party which has to rely on the support of a revolutionary bloc of workers and the petty bourgeoisie of town and countryside."

And Stalin finished off his answer with the assertion that the Kuomintang must still in the future be "a special type of popular-revolutionary party in the countries of the East." The ridiculous, not to say unscrupulous, excuse that in 1925 Stalin was not speaking of the Kuomintang as it is, but of the Kuomintang as it ought to be, not of a fact but of an idea, is explained by the fact that Stalin had to justify himself to Chinese students after Chiang Kai-shek's coup, when it was already shown by experience that the Kuomintang contains not only oppressed classes, but also their oppressors. Stalin, however, did not hesitate. He merely separated the pure idea of the Kuomintang from the vile fact and asserted that this is the "type of popular-revolutionary party" for the countries of the East in general. This also meant the "Kuomintangization" of India.

Roy is nothing but a worthy disciple of Stalin.