Liberation
[ We are publishing two editorials from the inaugural issue of Liberation, which appeared in November 1967 . By way of observing the 40th year of our publication, in the coming issues too we will be reproducing important articles and comments published in past numbers of Liberation at major junctures of national and international politics . ]
LIBERATION appears at a time when India is in the throes of an acute economic and political crisis, when the class struggle within our country and outside grows sharper and sharper, when the imperialists and their stooges, aided by the Soviet revisionists, are waging a brutal, fascist war against the peoples in three continents. In India , the big bourgeoisie, big landlords and their masters, the U.S. and British imperialists, are bleeding the people white. To deceive the starving, super-exploited people of this country the ruling classes seek to preserve the facade of parliamentary democracy and resort from time to time to the worst kind of chauvinism – a game in which revisionists and neo-revisionists have joined them. On the other hand, brutal, fascist attacks are being made on the working class and the peasantry and on the national minorities whenever they rise in revolt.
But the forces of liberation are marching from victory to victory all over the world. Seven hundred million Chinese people, who are in the van of the world-wide struggle for freedom, world peace and socialism, are building a socialist society with amazing swiftness. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has swept away from the minds of the Chinese people the thoughts and habits alien to socialism and ensured a future which will not tolerate reversion to capitalism as in the first socialist state of the world. The heroic Vietnamese people, applying correctly Mao Tse-tung's strategy and tactics of People's War, are dealing shattering blows to the most powerful of all imperialisms. The people of Southeast Asia have taken to the path of armed struggle against imperialism and its native stooges. Revolutionary storms are also blowing over Africa and Latin America . Within the USA , the citadel of world reaction, the Afro-Americans, supported by sections of poor whites, are valiantly fighting to break the age-old fetters of slavery. Here, in India , an unprecedented revolutionary situation is fast developing. The brave peasants of Naxalbari armed with Mao Tse-tung's thought, have raised the banner of revolt against feudal oppression, against the rule of the reactionary classes. For the first time in India 's history, the revolutionary peasant movement led by the working class has been able to smash a weak link in the feudal-comprador bourgeois-imperialist chain despite all the terror unleashed by the rulers. Naxalbari marks the beginning of a new era in India 's history – the beginning of the end of the old regime of exploitation by imperialism and its parasites. The message of Naxalbari, the message of agrarian revolution led by the working class as the only path to complete national liberation and socialism, is spreading and dispelling from the minds of our peasantry and working class the gloom of despair and instilling into them a revolutionary consciousness and a revolutionary urge. Naxalbari has smashed the barrier, the barrier erected by revisionist politics to isolate the toiling people of India from the world revolutionary forces battling against imperialism and all reaction – in China , Vietnam , Burma and other countries. It is Naxalbari which has given the revolutionary working people of India their rightful place as a contingent of the world revolutionary forces.
Naxalbari has also torn the mask off the neo-revisionist clique led by Ranadive, Namboodiripad, Sundarayya, and Co., and spells its doom. The perfidy of these neo-revisionist leaders like that of the Dangeites knows no limit. When the long-delayed social revolution is breaking out, they are acting as the last reserve of the reactionary ruling classes, which are now caught in the meshes of a deepening economic and political crisis. Hiding their real intentions under a cloak of left phraseology, they have discarded Marxism and stepped forward to defend the old hated regime, but the revolutionary forces will no doubt cast them into the dustbin of history and march forward towards People's Democracy and Socialism.
Liberation dedicates itself to the noblest of all causes – the liberation of the toiling people. It dedicates itself to the cause of the Indian Revolution and takes the pledge to wage an uncompromising fight against the imperialists and native reactionaries including the revisionists and neo-revisionists.
Liberation sends its warmest fraternal greetings to the great Chinese comrades, the valiant Vietnamese comrades, the brave comrades in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Ceylon, the U.S.A. and all other countries, who, guided by the thought of Mao Tse-tung, Marxism-Leninism of our era, are fighting relentless battles for national liberation, world peace and socialism.