International Communist Current

Oh, whenever I wrote CPI(M), I hope it was obvious that I was referring to the Communist Party of India (Maoist) - merger of the MCCI and the People's War Group types - not the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which began in a previous millennium as a somewhat left split from the Communist Party of India and which has spent much of its existence running the West Bengal government. And which is much more often referred to as the CPI(M) than the Maoists are - the latter usually abbreviated as the Communist Party of India (Maoist) to avoid precisely this confusion. My desire for abbreviation got the better of me.

Also, regarding the sentence: "By the end of 1995 the CPN(M) were preparing to launch 'people's war', having always boycotted what they saw as a stooge parliament decorating the power of the monarchy and military backed by India and the US." It was the monarchy and its military supporters/allies who were seen as backed by the US and India, not the stooge parliament.

Whether these forces actually were reliable backers of the King, or in fact would have liked some kind of stable, probably Congress-led government able to resolve the on-going crisis, became a much more complicated issue over the years than it seemed when the 'constitutional monarchy' was enjoying its early years.

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is not "Chinese affiliated" in any simple sense, though given their ever-increasing role in managing the reproduction of Nepal's political economy, surrounded by India and China, they may start to favour the agendas of the PRC more. Nonetheless, the CPN(M) has long defined itself as within a political tendency extremely critical of a contemporary China regarded as essentially a capitalist dictatorship, to the point of supporting anti-regime activities, in the name of authentic maoism of course. The Chinese regime itself actively supported the Nepalese state against the CPN(M), not even giving rhetorical support to the 'people's war' of the guerrillas. In practice the CPN(UML) was often much more overtly sympathetic to the PRC, but since it took a significant role much earlier in the responsible management of the Nepalese state this is no surprise, whatever the ostensible ideological positions.

Similarly, the most active armed maoist groups in India, and those closest to the CPN(M), are not "Chinese affiliated", the most obvious and significant example being the Communist Party of India (Maoist), formed out of the merger of two of the biggest of India's militant maoist groups and named precisely to indicate their supportive relations with the Nepalese party.

The rhetoric of the organized Left in Nepal is formed overwhelmingly in relation to maoist political traditions. Even apart from any domestic considerations of this overwhelmingly 'peasant' nation, Nepal is surrounded on one side by the People's Republic of China, and on the other by parts of India in which radicalism exists in the shadow of the mass rebellion of Naxalbari.

Indeed, the interrelation of Nepalese and Indian maoists is long-standing; the ability of people to pass over the border in either direction has been significant, not least when the King of Nepal decides to try to save his monarchy by sealing the country off from the outside world, preventing any critic from legally traveling, cutting the net, seizing as much of communications as possible, etcetera - but also to organize relations of solidarity in India, a country which the CPN(M) anticipated might militarily intervene to prevent the military victory of the guerrillas in Nepal. It is not so many years ago that the two previously referred to armed Indian maoist groups, long hostile with one another to the point of sometimes murderous violence, joined together to form the CPI(M).

All this maoism is not a homogenous phenomenon, and certainly not simple identifiable with the Chinese regime: in Nepal, as elsewhere, it is a name covering a massive political spectrum. Because they are by far the two most prominent parties of the Left, the most obvious example is the differences between the soft euromaoism of the dominant tendencies within the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) on the one hand, and the 'people's war' strategy of the CPN(M) - though back in the struggles against the absolute monarchy in the 1980s many of the same people were in the same party. Differences came to the fore and led to this form of division as people in that 'democracy movement' pursued different paths in response to the creation of a kind of constitutional monarchy. The CPN(UML) decided to run for parliament and eventually attempt to become an elected government, adopting a legal strategy based around mass organisations of peasants, worker, students etctera. By the end of 1995 they were wishing the King a happy birthday.

By the end of 1995 the CPN(M) were preparing to launch 'people's war', having always boycotted what they saw as a stooge parliament decorating the power of the monarchy and military backed by India and the US. The CPN(M) started out sufficiently small that some CPN(UML) members argued that they shouldn't be taken seriously, that their rebellions should be treated as purely criminal matters, and that it would all soon be crushed. A decade later the CPN(M) had well over half the geography of Nepal, was constructing a capital for the 'new state', had tens of thousands of guerrillas and enormous mass organisations, was dealing with the problems of running half a country cut while off from much of the world and Nepal's primary industry (tourism), and was listed by the US as a terrorist organization - still is.

So within Nepalese maoism those parties more-or-less define the spectrum of legal-illegal strategies, with the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party falling some where between but closer to the UML, having people in parliament but being more vigorous in calling for the end of the monarchy and considering more direct methods to achieve this, etcetera.

The CPN(UML) still had portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao behind the speakers at its conferences and events, but no longer was so keen to refer to itself as specifically maoist. By contrast, the CPN(M) was long very critical of the Chinese regime but unabashedly maoist, and used the last couple of years to have a series of internal discussions leading to its controversial public statement attempting a provisional critique of Stalin and stalinism tout court, with an acknowledgment that further work needed to be done. This led to significant and public disagreement between the CPN(M) and the CPI(M), and many in RIM, with the Indian party in particular largely rejecting the attempted critique of stalinism.

Disputes between the two parties escalated as the CPN(M) then decided to a ceasefire and then to participate in the elections to the Constitutional Assembly, so long as the latter very directly put the question of the abolition of the monarchy on the table - a key political demand and also a smart one because the CPN(M) were the only major party which never wavered from their hostility to the institution of the monarchy and its current, mostly despised resident of the throne.

This little sketch of maoist ideology in Nepal is pretty crude, but what I would want to emphasize is not merely the political spectrum involved, but the evolving nature of maoist discourses, dotted with appeals to divergent versions of orthodoxy and with claims of innovation and development. As ways to understand politics and history, and as discourses mediating relations within movements and organizations, Maoism in a broad sense is hegemonic, but neither homogenous, nor unidirectional from leaders to members, party elite to masses. If there is a tendency to quasi-totalitarianism which would seek to simply prevent or crush all contestation, it has certainly not achieved dominance. Authoritarianism, and certainly hierarchy, are nonetheless significant, and even at its most militant, anti-feudal, and most committed to forms of 'popular power' as forms of social and economic management, the entire spectrum of maoist ideology remains on the terrain of a leftist capitalism. Whether the practices of people in struggle excede these bounds, or more accurately to what degree and with what development of clarity and what consequences, is much harder to tell. But I'm not optimistic.