Modern Communism and the Political Legacy of Hardial Bains - Part 2: Origins

Hardial Bains was born into the communist movement of India and his early politics were shaped by events in that country as well as by developments in the post-war international communist movement. He began his life as a communist activist at the age of nine in the late 1940s in the Punjab, and by his teens he was a national leader of the communist student movement in India. He was actively involved in the successful election campaign of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Kerala State in 1957. However, his joy at the victory quickly turned to disillusionment when the CPI capitulated to the demands of the central government and handed over power without a fight. Hunted by the Indian state feeling and betrayed by his party, Hardial Bains left India at the age of 19 and moved to Vancouver to live with relatives. Thus, one phase of his political life came to an end and another began.

As a communist, Hardial Bains accepted the principle of the Communist International that a communist have the duty to join the communist party of whatever country they lived in, and if there is no such party they had a duty to build one. Shortly after his arrival in Vancouver in 1959, Hardial applied to join the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). However, he was advised by CPC officials in Vancouver that there was no future for communism in Canada and that he would do better to join the CCF (which later became the NDP), and on this basis they refused his application. As a result of this and other experiences, Hardial made up his mind to rebuild a revolutionary communist movement in Canada.

This period also coincided with the outbreak of open polemics within the international communist movement between the Soviet party and its supporters, on the one hand, and the Chinese and Albanian parties on the other. Those polemics, the behaviour of Nikita Khrushchev, as well as his own experiences in the Indian communist movement all convinced Hardial Bains that the split within the international communist movement was a split over whether the communist movement existed to serve the revolutionary struggle of the people or the revolutionary struggles of the people existed to serve the interests of the communists - in other words, it was a split between revolution and counter-revolution. Like many other young communists throughout the world, Hardial Bains sided with revolution.

Determined to build a revolutionary communist movement in Canada, Hardial Bains was faced with a dilemma; Canada during the early 1960s was still in the depths of Cold War fervour; any mention of "communism" or "socialism" met with closed ears and closed minds. So Hardial Bains was forced to examine the world around him and figure out new methods to reach people. Convinced of the power of enlightened ideas, he developed a style of work which remained with him for the remainder of his life, a style of work based on developing the broadest possible political discussion amongst the people. By 1963 this work led to the founding of an organization devoted to the development of political discussion on an organized basis. This organization was called The Internationalists.

Throughout the 1960s Hardial Bains continued to develop an atmosphere of profound political discussion through the vehicle of The Internationalists and, when he found himself working in Ireland, he founded branches of The Internationalists in Ireland and Britain. During those years he also discovered many of the principles which contributed to the political philosophy and culture that were his hallmark in later years. One of those principles was summed up in the phrase: Understanding requires the conscious participation of the individual, an act of finding out.

In many ways, this phrase characterized Hardial Bains' entire philosophy of political education. While he was certainly no opponent of study, he firmly believed that people do not learn in a meaningful sense from reading books; true understanding is achieved only through the application of theory to practice, that theory must serve practice and not the opposite. Thus, he opposed "preaching" to people or simply handing out pamphlets from the sidelines. Only when people have gained experience in changing the world can they understand or even appreciate theory. So whenever comrades expressed a lack of understanding of some particular issue, invariably his advice was that they should plunge themselves into the struggle, become one with the movement, and one day they would understand. To him, book learning represented past experience with solving the problems of yesterday, but no matter how correct those books may be, no matter how much insight they may contain, only living, struggling human beings are capable of solving the problems of today.

Hardial Bains took this principle very seriously and insisted that any communist worthy of the name must be capable of finding things out for him or herself. He dismissed as dogmatists those who began their work by running to books, or to speeches and articles that he had written. He was convinced that all those who followed the developments in the world around them were capable of theorizing what those developments signified, if only they would free their minds of dogmas and prejudices. He upheld this principle particularly in the case of his own comrades. Whether during the time of The Internationalists or later after CPC(M-L) was founded, he insisted that comrades think for themselves. He expressed the greatest contempt for those comrades who simply agreed to anything he said, knowing full well that they neither understood him nor had any intention of implementing what they had agreed with.

To Hardial Bains, modern communism, if it is to flourish, must necessarily represent the very best that humanity is capable of creating, and both dogmatism and currying favour with "leaders" are unbefitting of a communist. In his view only those with the courage of their own convictions, those who dared to challenge all old ideas, those who were capable of independent thought, were fit to be members of a communist party. In other words, a communist party must be a party of revolutionaries, in the true sense of the word. This conviction emerged in the course of his formation as a communist during the 1950s and 1960s in both India and Canada and remained with him throughout his entire life.