Statement of the International Secretariat, League for the Fifth International
In direct defiance of the King’s daytime curfew and a shoot-to-kill order, a tidal wave of workers, peasants and youth is flowing into the capital Kathmandu. Hundreds of thousands, many carrying the red flags of the Communist Party, are singing and chanting slogans for an end to the absolute monarchy of King Gyanendra, for a republic and an elected Constituent Assembly.
Reports are coming in of the mass demonstrations defying tear gas, plastic bullets, baton charges and live rounds. Police cordons have been broken through. Young people, women and children are among the marchers. Workers – many of them women – are pressing forwards behind trade union banners; young men are engaging riot police with petrol bombs.
The police and army have withdrawn from large parts of Kathmandu and – in a clear sign both of the regime’s panic and the movement’s immediate next task – have formed a defensive circle around government buildings and the King’s palace in the very centre of the capital.
Yesterday the King, manoeuvring in the face of a two week long general strike against his fratricidal autocracy, made an apparent concession: to agree to talk to the opposition about involving senior figures in government. The Seven Party Alliance (SPA) of opposition parties met today to consider Gyanendra’s gambit. But the mass protests continued – the streets filled with people. Under this pressure the SPA parties rejected Gyanendra’s trap and – at once, as if in reply – the protests were swelled as hundreds of thousands marched from the outlying districts into the capital.
There is little doubt that the regime is paralysed. The forces of repression are falling back. A bold offensive today – smashing the police lines, seizing the government buildings, surrounding the army and police barracks, occupying the main transport centres, capturing the palace, arresting the King and his ministers – can bring a swift end to Gyanendra’s regime and open the road to the social transformation of Nepal.
Another condition for a successful revolution is also undoubtedly present – that the masses are prepared to die. Western journalists reporting from Kathmandu repeatedly quote demonstrators as saying just this. “We are ready to sacrifice our lives for the nation because we are about to be killed, but we are not concerned about that,” one marcher told the Guardian. Another told the BBC, “I am not afraid, I do not fear the government. Every Nepalese person here is willing to give up their lives in exchange for freedom.”
The two-week long general strike has fully confirmed the classical analysis of Lenin and Trotsky that a general strike poses the question of power and demands an unambiguous answer to the question, “who will be master in the house?” And it is this question that the Seven Party Alliance has utterly failed to answer.
Since its formation in 2005, after Gyanendra dissolved parliament and established autocratic rule, the SPA has demanded three things: the restoration of parliament; an interim government to supervise elections to a Constituent Assembly; and for the Constituent Assembly to determine the fate of the monarchy.
This programme perfectly expresses the aims of the SPA’s component parties. The bourgeois and liberal nationalist parties want to reopen space for their own participation in the political process and government, not to allow the masses to rule themselves. Hence they want a government of professional parliamentarians that can control the election of a Constituent Assembly itself, without allowing the masses to influence the process; hence they refuse to declare in advance that the monarchy must be abolished and replaced by a republic.
Most shameful of all, the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) – the main party of the urban workers – participates in this bourgeois bloc and limits its own demands to a capitalist democracy. Its crowning slogan is not a workers’ and peasants’ government, but a ”Multi-Party People’s Democracy”. In the crucible of revolutionary struggle it has offered neither guidance nor a revolutionary programme for the overthrow of Gyanendra’s regime.
The masses have already burst through the limits of the SPA’s cowardly three-point programme by calling for an end to the monarchy. The BBC reports one teacher saying that Gyanendra “is only offering us what he had snatched from us in 2005,” when he abolished parliament and assumed absolute power. A housewife added, “Nobody is happy with what the king said. We want democracy and freedom. So many people have died. What for? So that the king can continue to live in his palace and appoint and dismiss prime ministers at will?”
Will the pressure of the masses be sufficient to force the CPN (M) cadres to send its 15,000 strong militia into battle now to overthrow the monarchy and seize the power? Only struggle will decide.
The next step for the toiling masses of town and countryside is clear. To arms – for an insurrection in Kathmandu! By boldly confronting the soldiers, marching right up to their lines, appealing to them as the sons of workers and peasants, breaking their loyalty to their officers and their resolve to fight their brothers and sisters, their families, on the streets, the army can be torn apart. The soldiers’ guns can be turned over to the people. The revolutionary youth and workers can take up the arms in the fight for freedom.
In place of the SPA’s three-point plan for capitalist stabilisation and continued monarchical rule, consistent democrats, communists and all those who want freedom should fight for:
• the execution of Gyanendra and his dynasty;
• establishment of a provisional revolutionary government of workers and poor peasants, excluding the bourgeois parties;
• not a cabal of seven party leaders but democratic councils of workers’ and peasants’ delegates to supervise elections to a Constituent Assembly;
• a workers’ and peasants’ government based on delegate councils to give land to the peasants, nationalise the key levers of the economy under workers’ control and create a democratic plan of production;
• the spreading of the revolution across south Asia – for a socialist federation of south Asian states.
The revolution is the harshest judge of the parties that represent the popular masses – only the revolution can put their programmes and policies to the test and see if they are wanting or if they meet the needs of the workers and peasants. And the revolution is cruelly exposing the vacillation and hesitation not only of the urban parties but also of that most feared party of the revolutionary peasants – the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).
Led by Prachanda, the CPN (M) has been conducting a long guerrilla war in the countryside. The suffering, poverty, land hunger and oppression of the peasants have provided it with an ample soil in which to take root. Its self-sacrificing militants have conducted a long and heroic war against the landlords and the army.
But the CPN (M)’s programme is a classic expression both of the inconsistent aims of the peasantry and the political incapacity of Maoism. Like all Maoists, the CPN (M)’s adherence to Stalin’s model of a revolution by stages, in which the masses must restrict their goals to the formation of a democratic (bourgeois) republic and refrain from leading the workers to power, has inevitably led them to accommodate to the bourgeoisie.
The Maoist party fails to understand the need for the urban workers to take a leading role in the revolution and only belatedly backed the general strike several days after it had begun. It has suspended its guerrilla war for the duration of the strike but does not appear to have made its guns available to the masses to launch an insurrection in Kathmandu. Its leader Prachanda only weeks ago renounced the call for the abolition of the monarchy, arguing (in adherence to the policy of the SPA) that the fate of the monarchy could be decided after democratic rights have been won, and even that the monarchy might be preserved for a time under Maoist government.
Thus Maoism, despite its determined use of guerrilla methods and the undeniable courage of its cadres – reveals itself to be at best a populist force like the SRs in the Russian revolution, at worst a fifth wheel on the chariot of the bourgeois liberals.
Today the battle is deepening and spreading. The task of insurrection cannot be postponed. Either the masses’ demands will be met, and Gyanendra will meet the fate all autocrats deserve, from the Romanovs to the Ceausescus, or the SPA, CPN (UML) and CPN (M) will grant his vicious regime a much needed breathing space and fritter away the huge reserves of determination and hope that the selfless actions of the masses have unleashed.
If Gyanendra flees – and already the Indian ruling class is readying itself to accept the world’s last Hindu monarch into exile – the greatest danger will be the smooth assumption of power by the SPA, leaving the army and repressive apparatus intact, and granting the bourgeois parliamentarians free rein to restrict popular representation and pursue a neoliberal programme of attacks on the poor.
The independent action of the workers and peasants, the arming of the working people, the establishment of workers’ and peasants’ councils are their best line of defence. The bolder the actions of the masses in the struggle to overthrow Gyanendra and his criminal gang, the greater their power after the revolution, the stronger their defence against counter-revolution in the stormy months to come.
The crisis in Nepal shows that even in countries where the modern working class is a minority, its leadership is the factor on which the fate of the whole people depends. Lenin’s insistence on the need for the hegemony of the proletariat in the democratic revolution, the complete independence of the workers’ party from the bourgeois liberals is again confirmed as critical for victory. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution – that today the bourgeoisie is too weak to solve even democratic tasks consistently – is again confirmed. The twenty-first century is not a time in which the revolutionary events of the last 150 years fall into abeyance, but an epoch of wars and revolutions.
The workers and peasants of Nepal are fighting out this great drama in the full view of the world. The outcome of their struggle will have a direct impact also in India, where a billion people are watching. Victory to them!
International Secretariat, League for the Fifth International, 22 April 2006