Critical notes on the statement of “The Struggle” (LIS Section in Pakistan) about the India-Pakistan conflict

 

By Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 22 May 2025, www.thecommunists.net

 

 

 

The recent armed conflict between India and Pakistan has put Kashmir, once again, at the centre of regional and global attention. [1] The Kashmiri people are one of the most severely oppressed in the world. The region has been divided between India, Pakistan and China since the end of the British colonial rule in South Asia in 1947. While the (strategically important) Chinese-controlled territory is more or less uninhabited, about 6 million people live in the Pakistan-controlled sector (nearly all of them Muslim) and another 16 million live in the India-controlled sector (of whom 68% are Muslims, most of the rest are Hindus).

 

All occupying powers oppress the Kashmiri people albeit one has to say that repression is particularly brutal in the Indian-occupied territory. Since the beginning of a large-scale uprising in 1989 with mass demonstrations, general strikes and guerilla attacks, the Indian security forces have killed about 100,000 Kashmiris and nearly 10,000 women were gang raped. Kashmir is probably the world's most militarized zones with about 750,000 Indian soldiers and police forces.

 

The RCIT has always opposed the division of Kashmir. The Kashmiri people are an oppressed nation and the program of national self-determination, as it was elaborated by the Marxist classics, fully applies to them. We unconditionally support the national liberation struggle of the Kashmiri people against their oppression. It is the Kashmiri people, and only them, who should decide the state form in which they want to live. We support the historic demand for independence of Kashmir which has become symbolized by the slogan “Azadi Kashmir” (“Free Kashmir”). In our view, a free and independent Kashmir should be a country controlled by the workers and peasants and not by a small clique of capitalists and landowners. This is why we fight for a united, independent and socialist Kashmir! As Marxists we combine such a slogan with the perspective of a voluntary Socialist Federation of South Asia. [2]

 

Such struggle against national oppression must be combined with the liberation struggle of the working class. The Kashmiri people can not become free if they are on their own. Socialists have to link such struggle with organising the masses in India respectively in Pakistan against the ruling class on the basis of a program for liberation of South Asia form imperialist domination.

 

 

 

“War is not a solution to any problem”?

 

 

 

The recent armed confrontation between India and Pakistan has forced all left-wing forces in India and Pakistan (as well as internationally) to publicly state their position on this conflict and on the Kashmir question. While some took a revolutionary position, ^[3] various reformist forces – particularly in India – completely capitulated to the wave of social-chauvinism. ^[4]

 

“The Struggle”, a sizeable Trotskyist organization in Pakistan, does not belong to those forces which joined their ruling class in the atmosphere of chauvinist war-hysteria. It is a long-standing organization whose historic leader has been the late Lal Khan, and which stands in the opportunist tradition of Ted Grant and Alan Woods (CWI/IMT). After an organizational rupture with their International, it joined the “International Socialist League” (LIS) – an international organisation whose most important section is the MST in Argentina – at its foundation in 2019. ^[5]

 

When the armed conflict between India and Pakistan was about to begin, it published a statement in which “The Struggle” expressed its opposition against the reactionary war between the ruling classes of both countries. [6]

 

However, this statement also contains a worrying pacifist perspective. Already at the very beginning, the comrades write “that the working masses of the region must firmly reject the war hysteria being stoked by the ruling classes of both India and Pakistan. War is not a solution to any problem; rather, it empowers the exploitative capitalist system and pushes the poor and downtrodden people of both countries further into the abyss of misery, destruction, and deprivation.”

 

To state that “war is not a solution to any problem” is a wrong formulation. Marxists have always been opposed to pacifist sermons which oppose wars in principle. We rather differentiate between reactionary wars of oppression and progressive wars of liberation. Wars between Great Powers or between the ruling classes are reactionary and socialists must intransigently oppose both camps. On the other side, wars of the working class against the bourgeoisie or of oppressed nations against their oppressors are highly progressive and socialists are obligated to support these by any means necessary.

 

In discussions about the program of the Bolshevik party, Lenin emphasized such a differentiation between different types of wars:

 

„Marxists have never forgotten that violence must inevitably accompany the collapse of capitalism in its entirety and the birth of socialist society. That violence will constitute a period of world history, a whole era of various kinds of wars, imperialist wars, civil wars inside countries, the intermingling of the two, national wars liberating the nationalities oppressed by the imperialists and by various combinations of imperialist powers that will inevitably enter into various alliances in the epoch of tremendous state-capitalist and military trusts and syndicates.“ ^[7]

 

Likewise, the leader of the October Revolution wrote somewhere else:

 

„There have been in the past numerous wars which, despite all the horrors, atrocities, distress and suffering that inevitably accompany all wars were progressive, i.e., benefited the development of mankind by helping to destroy most harmful and reactionary institutions (e.g., an autocracy or serfdom) and the most barbarous despotisms in Europe (the Turkish and the Russian). That is why the features historically specific to the present war must come up for examination.“ ^[8]

 

Later, Leon Trotsky – the second most important leader of the young workers state after 1917 who carried the banner of revolutionary continuity after Lenin’s death – repeated such necessary differentiation between different types of wars many times.

 

“We Bolshevik-Leninists absolutely reject and denounce the deceptive differentiation between a ‘defensive’ and an ‘offensive’ war. In a war between the capitalist states such a differentiation represents only a diplomatic cover to deceive the people. (…) The revolutionary proletariat distinguishes only between wars of oppression and wars of liberation. The character of a war is defined, not by diplomatic falsifications, but by the class which conducts the war and the objective aims it pursues in that war. The wars of the imperialist states, apart from the pretexts and political rhetoric, are of an oppressive character, reactionary and inimical to the people. Only the wars of the proletariat and of the oppressed nations can be characterized as wars of liberation. After its victory the armed insurrection of the proletariat against its oppressors is inevitably transformed into a revolutionary war of the proletarian state for the consolidation and extension of its victory. The policy of socialism does not and cannot have a purely ‘defensive’ character. It is the task of socialism to conquer the world.“ ^[9]

 

He therefore warned against the illusions of pacifism:

 

“To condemn war is easy; to overcome it is difficult. The struggle against war is a struggle against the classes which rule society and which hold in their hands both its productive forces and its destructive weapons. It is not possible to prevent war by moral indignation, by meetings, by resolutions, by newspaper articles, and by congresses. As long as the bourgeoisie has at its command the banks, the factories, the land, the press, and the state apparatus, it will always be able to drive the people to war when its interests demand it. But the propertied classes never cede power without a struggle (…) The essence of pacifism is a condemnation, whether hypocritical or sincere, of the use of force in general. By weakening the willpower of the oppressed, it serves the cause of the oppressors. Idealistic pacifism confronts war with moral indignation the way the lamb confronts the butcher's knife with plaintive bleatings” ^[10]

 

 

 

Pacifism is poison for oppressed people

 

 

 

While pacifist statements like the above-mentioned are bad enough, it becomes particularly shameful when socialists preach “peaceful means” for the liberation struggle of oppressed people like the Kashmiris. Such, “The Struggle” writes in its statement that “every oppressed nation in the region—including Jammu and Kashmir—has the right to determine its own destiny through peaceful and democratic means.”

 

How on earth should this be possible? India’s ruling class has demonstrated throughout its entire history that it is determined to keep its colonial possession of Kashmir. It has deployed in this region probably the highest number of soldiers per head in the world. Furthermore, it has waged several wars against Pakistan in order to continue its rule.

 

Likewise, the Pakistani government, which has always been dominated by the army command, will hardly accept national self-determination of its occupied part of Kashmir. This is even more the case since this would encourage the national liberation struggle of other oppressed people in Pakistan (e.g. the Baloch)

 

In fact, modern history has demonstrated beyond doubt that the working class as well as oppressed nations can achieve liberation only by countering the force of the ruling class with their own force. Think about the numerous anti-colonial struggles in World War II and the decades after – from Algeria to Korea, from Kenya to Vietnam, from India to Angola. The impossibility to fight against national oppression by “peaceful means” has been also confirmed by more recent experiences – from Chechnya to Kosova, from Somalia to Palestine, from Afghanistan to Iraq.

 

A peaceful road to freedom is a dangerous illusion, a poisonous idea which can only paralyse the determination of the masses to fight for liberation. It is an indispensable duty for revolutionary Marxists to combat such illusions and to support such struggles by any means necessary.

 

In a debate with Rosa Luxemburg about the national question and its relevance, Lenin wrote:

 

“National wars waged by colonies and semi-colonies in the imperialist era are not only probable but inevitable. About 1,000 million people, or over half of the world’s population, live in the colonies and semi-colonies (China, Turkey, Persia). The national liberation movements there are either already very strong, or are growing and maturing. Every war is the continuation of politics by other means. The continuation of national liberation politics in the colonies will inevitably take the form of national wars against imperialism.” ^[11]

 

Such wars must be supported by socialists irrespective of who started these conflicts:

 

„By a “defensive” war socialists have always understood a “just” war in this particular sense (Wilhelm Liebknecht once expressed himself precisely in this way). It is only in this sense that socialists have always regarded wars “for the defence of the fatherland”, or “defensive” wars, as legitimate, progressive and just. For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, these would be “just”, and “defensive” wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slaveholding and predatory “Great” Powers.“ ^[12]

 

Trotsky emphasized that those socialists who fail to support such national liberation wars – in the name of pacifism or other petty-bourgeois doctrines – are reactionary servants of the ruling class.

 

“The struggle for the self-determination of nations, for all people, for all those who are oppressed and who strive for independence, is one of the most important aspects of the struggle against war. Whoever directly or indirectly supports the system of colonization and protectorates, the domination of British capital in India, the domination of Japan in Korea or in Manchuria, of France in Indochina or in Africa, whoever does not fight against colonial enslavement, whoever does not support the uprisings of the oppressed nations and their independence, whoever defends or idealizes Gandhism, that is, the policy of passive resistance on questions which can be solved only by force of arms, is, despite good intentions or bad, a lackey, an apologist, an agent of the imperialists, of the slaveholders, of the militarists, and helps them to prepare new wars in pursuit of their old aims or new.“ ^[13]

 

 

 

The origin of “The Struggle’s” pacifism

 

 

 

The pacifism of “The Struggle” is not accidental. It comes from the opportunist tradition of Grant and Woods who always claimed that the workers and oppressed could achieve freedom by “peaceful means”.

 

Alan Woods and the IMT – to which “The Struggle” belonged for many years – claimed in a key document of this tendency (“Marxism and the State”):

 

“A peaceful transformation of society would be entirely possible if the trade union and reformist leaders were prepared to use the colossal power in their hands to change society. If the workers leaders did not do this, then there could be rivers of blood, and this would entirely be the responsibility of the reformist leaders. (…) it would be entirely possible to carry through the socialist transformation peacefully, and even through parliament, provided the trade unions and Labour Party were led by Marxists.” [14]

 

As we did show in our critical discussion of the Grantites’ pacifism, this has always been complete nonsense as the experience of successful as well as failed revolutions did show. The ruling class will always try to keep its power by force. Hence the liberation struggle will always and necessarily be characterised by violence – before, during and/or after taking power. The examples of the socialist revolution in Russia in 1917-21, in Hungary 1919 or of the above-mentioned national liberation struggles have proven this Marxist thesis beyond doubt. [15]

 

Naturally, we are aware that the decisive issue is not the use of force but the mobilisation and organisation of the masses under the leadership of a revolutionary party. But the armed struggle is an indispensable part of the liberation struggle and Marxists must politically educate and prepare the masses for this task. Spreading dangerous illusions about the possibility of a “peaceful struggle” create only political obstacles for the task of liberation. Authentic Marxists must consistently combat such illusion.

 

In conclusion, we shall point out that the example of “The Struggle” and its pacifist strategy is a telling example which demonstrates that in centrist organisations theory and practice, principles and politics often do not go hand-in-hand. It is one thing to adopt an abstract revolutionary program but it is something very different to concretise such principles to strategy and tactic in the concrete class struggle. What is a revolutionary program worth if it is combined with crawling opportunism and pacifism in practice?!

 

We urge the comrades of “The Struggle” and the LIS to overcome such serious mistakes!