India¶
Core Argument¶
Here the author launches a polemic against the Independent Labour Party’s (ILP) position on Indian independence, as expressed in a resolution to its conference. While acknowledging that the ILP has taken a “radical departure” by breaking with its previous uncritical support for the Indian National Congress and now recognising that an influential section of the Congress is “anti-socialist” and may compromise with British imperialism, the author argues this is wholly insufficient. The ILP’s demand for unconditional freedom is praised as courageous relative to social patriots and Stalinists, but is dismissed as mere “platonic sympathy” — a position of abstract goodwill divorced from revolutionary method.
The core of the argument is a Marxist critique of the ILP’s analysis of colonial liberation. The author seizes on a phrase from the ILP resolution — that “the passion for national independence has tended to obscure fundamental class divisions” — and inverts it. Far from being a problem, the author insists, this passion for national independence, this intense hatred of the foreign oppressor, is the “best cement” for socialist revolution. The treachery of the Congress leadership does not lie in its nationalism, but in its material ties to Indian landlords, moneylenders, and foreign capital. Because a genuine struggle against British imperialism would require mobilising millions of peasants and workers, and because such mass action would threaten the class interests of the Indian bourgeoisie and landlords, the Congress has repeatedly betrayed the struggle at the moment of crisis and will inevitably seek a compromise with imperialism.
The chapter draws on the theoretical framework of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, positing the necessity of a Leninist vanguard party. Only the Indian working class can lead a consistent anti-imperialist struggle to the end, but the proletariat cannot do so without a “far-sighted vanguard” armed with revolutionary theory. The primary task for British revolutionary socialists, therefore, is not merely to pass sympathetic resolutions, but actively to assist in building such a party in India. The polemic is directed squarely at the ILP’s left reformism, which the author charges with missing the essence of the colonial question by substituting abstract solidarity for the concrete tasks of Bolshevik organisation and class struggle.