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Capitalism, Left watch, Movements, Politics

Marxist Coordination Committee and Lal Nishan Party Merge with CPI(ML) Liberation: Dipankar Bhattacharya

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[In two very significant developments in the non-mainstream Left, the Marxist Coordination Committee (MCC) of the Dhanbad-Jharkhand region and the Lal Nishan Party (LNP) of Maharashtra merged with the CPI(ML) Liberation. While the merger with the took place in September 2024, the one with the LNP happened on 31 May 2025. What is really significant about these two developments is that both the MCC and the LNP, in different ways moved away from orthodox thinking from the beginning. It is not surprising then that they decided to merge with the CPI(ML) Liberation, which in my reckoning, has made some very significant departures from orthodoxy on a range of issues concerning the Indian social and political scene (as also on matters such as democracy and climate change). It is no wonder then that while the MCC, founded by the legendary AK Roy, had developed strong ties of the trade unions in the colliery with the larger adivasi Jharkhandi society, the LNP in its time, distinguished itself by standing by and campaigning for Ambedkar in the early 1950s.

Here we reproduce two pieces by CPI(ML) General Secretary DIPANKAR BHATTACHARYA published in their journal Liberation. The pieces separately discuss the two mergers. – AN]

Lal Nishan Party’s Unification with CPI(ML): Towards a Stronger Communist Movement to Defeat the Fascist Offensive

To defeat the growing fascist offensive, India today urgently needs a stronger presence and role of the Left. The merger of the Lal Nishan Party of Maharashtra with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), announced at a unity conference in Shrirampur on 31 May, marks an encouraging step in this direction. This unification brings together two great legacies of India’s communist movement in a state which has historically been the cradle of the quest for social equality. Maharashtra also happens to be the ideological fountainhead of Indian fascism and every advance of the communist movement in Maharashtra today has great value. The unification of LNP and CPI(ML) therefore evokes a lot of hope in the centenary year of India’s organised communist movement.

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Capitalism, Debates, Left watch, Politics, Right watch

Bengal 2021, Fascism and the Left(s)

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‘The specific threat of National Socialism was obscured amid general talk of the perils of “fascists”, a term egregiously applied to Bruning, Social Democrats and all and sundry. Dogmatic catastrophist theorising led the Communists to actively underplay the Nazis: Ernst Thalman warned the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] Central Committee in February 1932 “that nothing would be more disastrous than an opportunistic overestimation of Hitler-fascism.’  – Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich – A New History, p. 136

Ernst Thalman warned his party’s Central Committee against ‘opportunistically overestimating Hitler’, literally months before Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January the following year. What is more, this statement was made at a time when the intentions of the Nazis were hidden to nobody. As Burleigh puts it, they had frequently announced their contempt for the law and ‘by 1932 were vowing to intern Communists and Social Democrat opponents in concentration camps.’ (p. 149) Thalman, we know, was killed in the Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1944, eleven years after being held in captivity. Indeed, Thalman was arrested barely a year after he warned his party not to overestimate ‘Hitler-fascism’.

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