Charu Mazumdar

To the Youth and the Students


Published:  Liberation, April 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.


AFTER the death of the great Marxist-Leninist, Stalin, the Soviet revisionist renegade clique usurped the leadership of the state, party and the army and established a bourgeois dictatorship in the Soviet Union, the land of the Great October Socialist Revolution. This revisionist renegade clique has become the leader and focal point of the revisionists of the world. Naturally, after the establishment of bourgeois dictatorship, they have become the No. 1 accomplice of the imperialists; particularly, they have advanced far along the road of collaboration with the U.S. imperialists. This is because U.S. imperialism is today the leader of the imperialist camp, and is pursuing even more fiercely and widely the aggressive policies of the German, Italian and Japanese imperialists. The traitorous leaders of the Soviet Union are supporting these aggressive activities and even use Lenin's name to belittle them and are themselves carrying on colonial exploitation with various imperialist powers and, in particular, with U.S. imperialism. By acting in this way, the leaders of the Soviet state and party have turned into enemies of all liberation struggles of the world, enemies of the great Socialist China, enemies of communism and even of the Soviet people. In India also they are acting as No. 1 accomplice of U.S. imperialism and are directing the state power and exploiting the people of India. As in various other parts of the world, they are allies of the reactionaries in India and support them. That is why India's liberation struggle can win victory only by fighting against the guns of the Soviet revisionists and by hitting out at the Soviet revisionists' state power. This explains why the Dange clique and the neo-revisionist leadership have, by their actions, joined the Indian reactionary clique and have turned into enemies of all democratic movements. They consciously and zealously support the bourgeois and imperialist propaganda.

It is because of these world developments that the thought of Chairman Mao has emerged as the only Marxism-Leninism, Marxism-Leninism which he has greatly developed and enriched through the great proletarian cultural revolution. This is why the world has entered today into the era of Mao Tse-tung's thought. Therefore, the thought of Chairman Mao can be called Marxism of the era of the total collapse of imperialism.

So, the political task of the student and youth workers is to study this new and developed Marxism, the thought of Chairman Mao, and put it into practice. He who shuns this task can never acquire the knowledge about the principles of Marxism. They must, therefore, study the Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. As Chairman Mao has said, there can only be one criterion by which we should judge whether a youth or a student is a revolutionary. This criterion is whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants, does so in practice and carries on mass work.

The Quotations of People's War published by the Central Committee of the great Communist Party of China is now available with us, a Bengali translation of which has also been published. This book is meant for revolutionary workers and peasants. We should make this our propaganda and agitation material. Whether a worker is revolutionary or not will be judged on the basis of the number of workers and peasants to whom he has read out and explained this book.

We have seen how good agitators in the student movement, how even students who fought in the barricade over some student demand or political issue, subsequently sat for the I.A.S. examination and became administrators, that is, went over to the enemy camp. As Chairman Mao teaches us, only those students and youth who can integrate themselves with the masses of peasants and workers are revolutionaries; those who cannot are at first non-revolutionaries and may in some cases join the counter-revolutionary camp afterwards.

This is a lesson which we get not only from China but from every country in the world. From my own experience I can say that unless the revolutionaries in the towns and cities undertake this task, they will eventually become demoralized and degenerate.

The political organization of the youth and the students must necessarily be a Red Guard organization, and they should undertake the task of spreading the Quotations of Chairman Mao as widely as possible in different areas.


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