On Red Polemique

 The article written by Aahwan/Mazdoor Bigul in Red Polemique, against the positions of the ‘Pratibaddha-Lalkaar’ group on the national question is not a serious ideological critique but a deeply dishonest polemic filled with slander, distortions, selective quotation and deliberate misrepresentation. Instead of engaging with our actual positions, the authors construct a caricature and then attack that caricature with sectarian hysteria. The entire article reeks of political bad faith.

The authors repeatedly accuse us of denying the right of nations to self-determination, of reducing the national question to federalism, of denying capitalism in India, of embracing “Bundism” and “Trotskyism,” and of liquidating Marxist-Leninist-Maoist on the national question. Yet a reading of the book (National question and Marxism by Sukhwinder) itself exposes these accusations as either outright falsehoods or grotesque manipulations.

The first and most central accusation is that we allegedly reject the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principle of self-determination. This is a blatant lie.

In the very opening section of the book we explicitly state:

“Communist Party of India, in its revolutionary period, had been an advocate of self-determination of nations including the right to secession… But ever since capitulating to reformism in 1951, it has abandoned the Marxist-Leninist principle of self-determination of nations…”

Further, the book repeatedly recognises the existence of national oppression in India and supports the democratic rights of oppressed nationalities including Kashmiri and oppressed nations in the North-east:

“In India, the Kashmiris and few nations of North-East are fighting for their independence.”

How then can anyone honestly claim that we deny self-determination? The accusation survives only through wilful distortion. 

The second major falsification is the claim that we deny capitalism in India or somehow collapse into semi-feudal romanticism. Again, the book says the exact opposite.

It states:

“Most groups of this camp deny capitalist development in India. They see India as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country.”

This statement is not ambiguous. We explicitly criticise mechanical semi-feudal formulations and recognise capitalist development in India. The polemic therefore attributes to us a position we directly reject in writing. This is not ideological struggle. It is fabrication.

The article further claims that we deny national oppression because India supposedly lacks a single oppressor nation in the Tsarist Russian sense. Yet our book directly addresses this question through Lenin, and Stalin.

“India is a multinational country. The ruling bourgeoisie of India is hell bent on making it a single nation…”

And further:

“India is a multinational country like Austria and unlike Russia. In India, there is no single nation that oppresses other nations.”

The polemic dishonestly removes the second sentence from its theoretical context and pretends we therefore deny oppression altogether. But the point being made is entirely Leninist: multinational states may experience national oppression even where no single compact oppressor nation exists in the Tsarist Russian form.

The book itself immediately clarifies:

“Hindi is imposed on various nationalities residing in India… Provision of school instruction in various national languages is frequently prohibited…”

Thus the existence of national oppression is affirmed repeatedly. The argument concerns the structure of oppression in a multinational capitalist state, not its absence.

Another slander advanced by the article is that we supposedly reduce nationhood to language and descend into “linguistic nationalism.” Yet the book explicitly adopts Stalin’s classical Marxist definition of a nation:

“A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”

This is the exact opposite of reducing nationhood merely to language. We repeatedly insist upon: common economic life, historical development, territory, capitalist formation, and class relations.

The article therefore attacks a position we do not hold.

The authors further accuse us of “Bundism” and “Austro-Marxism” because we discuss federal restructuring, linguistic equality and democratic rights within a multinational state. Yet Lenin himself distinguished between Russia and Austria on the national question and acknowledged differing historical formations. Our book extensively cites Lenin precisely on this question.

The article behaves as though every discussion of multinational federal arrangements automatically becomes “Bundism.” This is a weak analysis.

Equally dishonest is the accusation that we ignore class struggle and tail bourgeois nationalism. The entire book is saturated with class analysis. We repeatedly discuss about the bourgeois origins of national movements, the relation between market formation and nations, monopoly capital, uneven capitalist development, bourgeois domination, and the class composition of national struggles.

The article simply erases these sections because they demolish its narrative.

Most revealing is the method employed throughout the polemic. Instead of quoting us fully and engaging concretely, the article: selectively extracts phrases,  strips them of theoretical context, substitutes invented conclusions, and then attacks these inventions with hysterical rhetoric like “Trotsky-Bundism,” “idiocy,” “noodlebrain,” and “reactionary reformism.”

Such language reflects intellectual bankruptcy rather than political confidence.

The real disagreement is not whether national oppression exists, nor whether nations possess the right to self-determination. The disagreement concerns: the concrete structure of Indian multinationality,the relation between democratic restructuring and national liberation, the character of Indian capitalism, and the strategic tasks of revolution in a multinational capitalist state.

Marxism demands concrete analysis of concrete conditions, not theological denunciations. The article fails precisely because it substitutes abuse for analysis and fabrication for political struggle.