A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes.

So wrote Plekhanov in 1898. Roy was certainly no “great man” even by leftist standards. It is certainly something when leftists who have managed to create a personality cult around mediocre persons such as Stalin and Mao do not do so around Roy. Were Roy’s positions so dangerous to leftism that they just had to silence him and his work? It was not Roy’s writings per se which were damaging to the leftists, but what he represented: a rising labour movement in India. In what sense do we mean that Roy was “no great man”? Precisely that it was not Roy specifically who was “great” but the social movement which he represented and defended till he himself regressed as the labour movement lost strength. Roy’s positions cannot be understood alone but only in context of the social movement across the world at that time. If anything, Roy’s life allows us to draw some important lessons for political activity in our own time. So, while Roy is the subject, it is the social movement which will author his own life.

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By the time Roy had made the turn to communism from nationalism, India had already had a fledgling labour movement. The feudal lords had been dealt a serious blow in 1857 and had lost effective power in the country. By the fin de siècle, India had already had substantial capitalist development and, correspondingly, an emerging labour movement.

Twenty-five important strikes have been recorded in Bombay and Madras between 1882 and 1890, several big strikes in Bombay in 1892–93 and 1901, and a new note of militancy was evident among Calcutta jute workers in the mid-1890s, leading the Indian Jute Mills’ Association to ask the Bengal Government for ‘additional police supervision’ to curb ‘riotous combinations’ of millhands in April 1895.

Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, p.53

In 1908, Bombay textile workers (approximately 65,000) had gone on strike against the arrest of nationalist leader Tilak. While there certainly was working-class aggression and increased militancy amongst the workers, it was being directed towards the bourgeois-democratic movement rather than the independent class movement of the workers. The Second International had not paid close enough attention to the mass struggle in Asia which in turn signalled its lack of internationalism which was criticised by Luxemburg and Lenin.

But it was in 1918 that the pivotal turning point took place. The October revolution had signalled to the exploited workers of the world that capitalism had to be overthrown and that it was precisely the working-class who were capable of leading the movement to overthrow capitalism. Several major strikes broke out in India following the October revolution in the Madras and Bombay presidencies. Both cities had had substantial working-class presence and a long tradition of labour strikes. Already in 1917, worsening conditions of workers had led to spontaneous outbreaks of lock outs and picket lines in Ahmedabad, Bombay and Madras. In 1918, strikes threatened to break out across factories (Indian and British owned) as conditions worsened in the factories. Like in France and Switzerland, the workers of India tended greatly towards workerism and proved susceptible to its very limitations. Strikes were very commonly arbitrated between the governors and workers’ delegations. Disputes between millowners and millhands were settled on the table and the workers had not yet forged a distinct class identity. This made the workers susceptible to interventions from the nationalists. In 1918, B.P. Wadia led the formation of the Trade Union in Madras. The Congress in the Bombay presidency began to assimilate syndicalist unions into their fold (railway union, press & printers' union, postmans' union, etc.) and there were real attempts by the workers to spread the strike, at least of their trade, across the country. But strikes were generally confined to not even one particular trade but, very often, one particular region. Workers’ delegations were sent solely with the task of negotiating and if negotiations broke down, violence ensued. This hamstrung the labour movement which had swelled to include several hundred thousand workers across the country. But the attack did not come from the front but from the rear. The Congress intervened across all strikes to mediate the disputes and channel the militancy of the workers specifically against British owned factories even though Indian owned factories were worse in pay and conditions. The fledgling class solidarity formed by European and Indian workers in the strikes in Jamshedpur were to be buried. The most shameless attitude of the trade unionists was in Madras in 1918. Seeing October as their sign to channel their militancy against the capitalists, workers in the Buckingham & Carnatic Mills in Madras staged a lock out and sent delegations not to the governor’s house but to those workers in the railways who were striking as well. But Wadia would have none of it. Instead, he told the workers:

If by going on strike you were affecting the pockets of Messrs Binny & Co. I would not mind for they are making plenty of money; but by such a step you will injure the cause of the Allies. Our soldiers who have to be clothed, will be put to inconvenience, and we have no right to trouble those who are fighting our King’s battles, because a few Europeans connected with the mills and this Government are acting in a bad manner. Therefore we must have no strikes.

From the start, the Congress and the nationalists would not tolerate any generalisation of the class struggle. The Congress decided to extinguish the labour movement as soon as possible and had no qualms in doing so. Bound by this limitation, the workers of the Mills in Madras who had showed the first signs of a political consciousness became prey to bourgeois vultures who divided and crushed the workers along caste lines in 1921. But the brief interlude from 1918-1921 provided “enough meat on the bone” for those such as Roy to show that the workers in the colonies were already beginning to express class solidarity.

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Roy had initially been the founder of the Communist Party of Mexico. It was through this that the Communist International (Comintern) had come to learn of Roy and had invited him to participate in the Second Congress as well as establish a communist party. The Communist Party of India (CPI) was formed in 1920 in Tashkent. But this remained only a minor part of his life. Roy was focused much more on the Comintern and the activities of its Executive Committee (EC). It was in 1920 that Roy “made a name for himself”. Until 1920, the “emancipation of the colonies” had been sacrosanct amongst all communists. Even Luxemburg supported the national liberation of Armenia. But in 1920 Lenin was challenged on this question from someone who was from a colony itself. At the Second Congress, Roy challenged Lenin’s support for national liberation in the colonies. Instead, Roy (who was invited by Lenin to draw up his supplementary theses) rejected both a united front in the colonies and that national liberation was a task which should be supported. Roy spelled out in clear terms against any collaboration with the bourgeoisie:

Two movements can be discerned which are growing further and further apart with every day that passes. One of them is the bourgeois-democratic nationalist movement, which pursues the programme of political liberation with the conservation of the capitalist order; the other is the struggle of the propertyless peasants for their liberation from every kind of exploitation. The first movement attempts, often with success, to control the second; the Communist International must however fight against any such control, and the development of the class consciousness of the working masses of the colonies must consequently be directed towards the overthrow of foreign capitalism.

Roy made it explicitly clear that the revolution in the east will only occur with the proletariat of Europe, with a longer tradition of socialism, at the helm:

While undoubtedly it is the proletariat of the industrial countries of Europe and America which stands at the vanguard of the armies of the world revolution

Roy’s challenge to Lenin forced the abandonment of the phrase “bourgeois democratic” in favour of “national revolutionary” but neither Lenin nor Roy nor even the entirety of the Comintern remained clear what this “national revolutionary” movement was supposed to mean. The entirety of the Comintern was engulfed in ambiguity as to what “national revolutionary” movements were and how the communists could support them.

But Roy’s position on the national question, while welcome, was confused. Roy drew the wrong lessons from the defeat of the ebbing of the revolutionary wave. Roy viewed the revolution in the east as a necessary precondition for the revolution in Europe to win.

Now, where lies the source of strength of the British bourgeoisie? Judging from the industrial conditions obtaining in the British Isles at the present moment, it would appear that if its resources were limited to the productivity of those islands and the power of consumption of continental Europe, the capitalist order in Britain would certainly stand on the very brink of collapse. But despite all its chronic contradictions and the difficulties it is having in reconstructing the industrial fabric of the home country on the prewar basis, the capitalist class of Britain proves to be quite firm in its power. It still succeeds in deceiving a part and coercing another part of the proletariat. The possession of the vast nonEuropean empire, and the control over the newly created economic dependency to which continental Europe has been reduced, afford British capital a very wide scope of action, thus enabling it to maintain its position at home and incidentally securing its international power. Economic and industrial development of the rich and thickly populated countries of the East would supply new vigour to Western capital. There are great possibilities in these countries which will provide cheap labour power and new markets not to be exhausted very soon. Therefore the destruction of its monopolist right of exploitation in the vast Eastern colonial empire is a vital factor in the final and successful overthrow of the capitalist order in Europe.

Besides being overly economistic, Roy incorrectly viewed the outlets, that is markets, as being the reason for capitalist crisis without seeing the contradiction between wage labour and capital and the falling rate of profit at home as the root cause of the crisis. But Roy also neglected the political reasons. He saw the “Achilles heel” of the defeat in Europe being the strength of the bourgeoisie instead of taking into account historical reasons. Paraphrasing Luxemburg, the workers had held great faith in the Second International and its parties and their betrayal had a deep effect on the working-class. The late departure of the communists from the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) had confused the workers further and the abandonment of the revolutionary line within the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the opportunism of Zinoviev who used his power as chairman of the EC to prevent the left fraction in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) from breaking with the PSI and constituting a section of the Comintern were lost to Roy.

Another major weakness of Roy’s text lay in the ambiguity of the revolution in the east. Roy still saw that bourgeois democratic revolutions, while not to be supported, were still ‘revolutionary’, i.e. he had not yet seen the counter revolutionary character of these movements. Even in his intervention on the national and colonial question, Roy said,

In the first stage of its development the revolution in the colonies must be carried out according to the programme of purely petty-bourgeois demands, such as distribution of the land and so on.

While arguing against the assumption that the bourgeoisie must be allowed leadership, Roy still saw things in “stageist” and national terms, i.e., while world revolution was the precondition for socialism, revolutions could occur at different times and at different regions differently. World revolution did not mean the simultaneous break out of the class struggle. In Marxist terms, generalisation of the class struggle was lost. Roy’s internationalism had a bit more in common with Trotsky’s, but this was an issue which plagued the whole milieu at the time. There were others who pointed out Roy’s faults in his theses on the national question. Sultanzade, the delegate from Persia, pointed out that Roy, in his overemphasis on the revolutions in the east, tended to overestimate the strength of the proletariat against the attack from world capital.

Will the workers of that country be able to withstand the attack by the bourgeoisie of the entire world without the help of a big revolutionary movement in England and Europe? Of course not. The suppression of the revolution in Persia and China is clear proof of the fact.

But what the whole milieu had not yet come to realise was that the revolutionary wave had begun to ebb and the creeping opportunism of the Comintern was reflective of this fact. Roy’s own confusion on national liberation can be summed up best in his own words,

In the backward countries the national revolution is a step forwards. […] The population of the exploited countries whose economic and political evolution cannot proceed, have to pass through different revolutionary phases from the European peoples. Whoever thinks that it is reactionary to help these peoples in their national struggle is reactionary himself and speaks the language of imperialism.

Are these people only the workers and small and landless peasants or are they “all peoples”? Such questions were not discussed.

Despite the flaws in Roy’s theses discussed above, it did express a firm challenge against the necessity of national liberation but presented confusingly it contained severe defects. Encouraged by Lenin, Roy and Abani Mukherjee expanded their theses to quash the notion of “semi-feudalism” and prepared a book, India in Transition (1922). The ambiguities of the national question would come back to haunt Roy. Zinoviev chaired the Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in 1920 and began making open calls for pan-Islamism against Britain and urged the Afghan tribes (like the Germans attempted in 1914) to engage in a jihad against the British Empire. Roy distanced himself from the congress which he described as “Zinoviev’s Circus”.

One of the last pertinent articles on the national question written by Roy was in 1924 (The Second International & the Doctrine of Self-Determination). Here he once against castigated self-determination, writing:

The self-determination demanded by the Indian bourgeoisie is only the right to a small share in economic exploitation and political administration

He attacked the “non-cooperation movement” of Gandhi but had been unable to see, as he pointed out in his article, how the workers themselves were now raising utterly bourgeois demands. The political confusions caused by his earlier writings on national liberation led to the opportunist line in his pamphlet,

The peoples of the colonies cannot have the right of self-determination unless war is declared upon Imperialism.

There were signs of what was to come.

Around the same time that he wrote his article of 1924, Roy began to move further towards Stalinism. Aside from voting for Trotsky’s expulsion, he was sent to China to mediate a dispute between Borodin and the Kuomintang. Around this time, Roy had come to accept the “united front”. In 1927 at the Fifth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Roy’s report read,

We are returning to the situation which led to the World War of 1914. The race for markets is a characteristic feature of the contemporary international situation. As a result of the growing competition, the world is confronted with the threat of a new war, one even more burdensome and more destructive than the last war. The revolt of the colonial peoples has, on the other hand, decreased the possibility of creating overseas markets. In fact, the markets in a number of colonial countries have already shrunk to a considerable extent.

There in lies the rub of Roy’s capitulation to Stalinism. Roy thus came to fully support national liberation as a “war against imperialism”. Instead of considering national liberation as counter revolutionary, Roy and the Comintern now fully regarded them as “bulwarks against imperialism” whether conducted by the workers or the capitalist themselves. Of course, Roy was never inane enough to make the same claims as Mao but opportunism and lack of clarity on the national question leads us astray from the path of revolution and towards the counter revolution.

§

One thing which has been noticeably omitted is Roy and the CPI. While Roy played a more dominant role – prior to his expulsion for contributing to the KPD-Opposition (KPO) in Germany – as a member of the EC, he did have a hand to play in the formation of the CPI. Even within the CPI, Roy, in the early 1920s, fought against the very positions he would come to defend in 1927. There were already those within the CPI who supported a broad front alliance of nationalists against British imperialism. This faction had regrouped in Berlin and were called the “Berlin Group” led by Virendranath Chattopadhyay. In 1921, Virendranath, together with G. A. K. Lohani, Panduram Khankhoje and others submitted a document entitled Theses on India and the World Revolution which held that India was “semi-feudal” in nature and opposed Roy’s position in the Second Congress. Roy’s opinions concerning the activities of other Indian revolutionary groups carried enormous weight and he was considered the most effective spokesman so far as the Indian question was concerned but in reality, the CPI had already begun moving away from Roy as Roy began to move away from his 1920 position. But in the early 1920s, Roy led a strong opposition against all these currents. He opposed the broad front nationalism advocated by Barkatullah, preferring that the CPI distance itself away from the Congress. Ultimately, what the Comintern EC used to gain direct control of the CPI (in 1924) was the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The EC had commanded that the CPGB and CPI work closely together for obvious reasons. To take control of the CPI, the EC created the “Indian Foreign Bureau” with British and Indian members. The Bureau broke down almost immediately. In a letter to Petrov, Roy wrote,

Our Bureau is not working well. Particularly the British part of the work is very unsatisfactory. Contrary to the letter received from you, we are informed by the British party that the representative there has come back from Moscow with new instructions which reject entirely the new line we have been following till now. According to these new instructions, the Colonial Commission of the British Party assumes the supreme political responsibility for the work in India, Egypt and other colonies. This has already given rise to duplication of efforts and work in the wrong direction. The British party starts with the assumption that since they have not done anything in India, nothing whatsoever exists there, and that they must begin the whole thing. Not desiring to raise a conflict, I have handed over to the British party the entire sum sanctioned for the work of our Bureau in the British Colonies.

Till the 9th Comintern EC plenum in 1928, Roy remained at the helm of Indian affairs. But in 1928, Roy was removed and replaced with S. V. Ghate and D. A. Naoroji, both of whom supported Indian nationalism and Stalinism. Benn Bradley and the CPGB gained full control of the CPI soon after. In 1929 Roy was expelled from the Comintern. Renouncing communism, he came to support the Second World War before preaching on “Radical Humanism”.

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Despite the regression of his life, Roy offers us an interesting perspective of what might come about if we are not clear on key questions such as the national question. The opening of door to opportunism is what rots any individual and party from within. Could Roy’s confusions been overcome? Of course. The shining example is the Italian Left which drew accurate lessons from the experiences of the proletariat including a rejection of national-liberation following the massacre in China. But the precondition for this clarity is the political organisation of communists. What Roy’s life teaches is precisely that individual militancy is impossible and it is only as an organisation that we can work towards communism, the generalisation of the class struggle and prevention of regression of the painful lessons the communists and workers have learnt over centuries.