Charu Mazumdar

To the Comrades Who are
Working in Villages


Published:  Liberation, January 1969
Source: Selected Works of Charu Mazumdar
Transcription: CPI-ML
HTML Markup: Nik McDonald for MIA, June 2006
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2006). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.


Chairman Mao instructs us to make class analysis. No doubt, our comrades who are going to villages are making class analysis accordingly. But their shortcoming is that they make this class analysis by themselves and do it mentally. As a result, the peasant cadres are not learning how to make class analysis. What is even worse, the revolutionary classes are not becoming conscious of their own responsibility. Therefore, the first task of our comrades at the baithaks [small meetings] of peasant cadres should be to make a class analysis of every cadre according to what Chairman Mao teaches in respect of making class analysis of the peasants. Moreover, the comrades must do it after considering the opinions of peasant cadres. Only when this is accomplished, our organizers should clearly expound the mass line and explain to the poor and landless peasants why they, more than anyone else, need revolution so urgently, and that, for this reason, the poor and landless peasants should take upon themselves more responsibility than others to make this revolution victorious. Division of jobs too has to be done only after this.

At the next meeting, the first thing to be done is to make an assessment of the work done, and to try repeatedly to make the poor and landless peasants conscious of their responsibility so that they can undertake increasingly greater responsibility.

Class analysis must be done every two or three months on the basis of work done. This time the analysis must be done on the basis of these three principles: (1) class basis; (2) eagerness to do work; (3) eagerness to fight. Correct analysis of classes can be done only through such checkup. This is because while making class analysis for the first time, peasant cadres are likely to include many middle peasants in the poor peasant category. Such mistakes of the previous analysis can be rectified when analysis is again made on the basis of the above three principles. When peasant organizers start doing their work in this way, the rank and file peasant organizers will learn to make class analysis themselves. Moreover, revolutionary classes will grow conscious of their own responsibility.

Only when we organize our work in this way can all the revolutionary classes be awakened, made conscious and be helped to carry out their revolutionary tasks. This three-point checkup, that is, checkup on the basis of the above three principles, will serve as a preliminary rectification campaign among the peasant masses and so, the struggle against revisionism will take a concrete form. In this way we can also develop peasants as leaders. This means the peasant movement will cease to be dependent on the wishes and desires of the petty bourgeois comrades who come from the intelligentsia. Further, this will help to quicken the process of integration of the comrades who come from the intelligentsia. On the other hand, those comrades who are unable to integrate themselves with the peasantry will not be able to hinder the struggle.

At the present time we have a great need for petty bourgeois comrades who come from the intelligentsia. But we must remember that not all of them will remain revolutionaries to the end. On the contrary, it is more probable that many of the cadres who come from the intelligentsia will later become non-revolutionaries and even counter-revolutionaries. We must never forget this. Therefore, if these cadres make the class analysis and carry out the work of checkup in the areas they work even for once, such areas will thereafter cease to be dependent on them. So every cadre coming from the intelligentsia should keep notes of the class analysis which he makes with the help of the peasants. They should then send such notes. These notes may then be published in Liberation, Deshabrati and our other journals as reports of investigation after careful consideration. These reports will be of great help to the comrades working in other areas.

Now, when struggles are breaking out in various areas, we must lay the greatest emphasis on developing revolutionary cadres. This is the most urgent task at present and we must throw all our might in carrying out this task.

An immense possibility has opened up before us, tremendous victories are coming within the reach of the revolutionary masses of India. Our ranks must cast away all sorts of defeatist ideas and thinking from their minds. That is, as Chairman Mao teaches: "We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking, all views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong."

Our slogan today is as Chairman Mao says: "Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory."


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