IN THE 1930s, a group of young, educated Myanmar radicals, who became known as the Thakins, emerged within the broader nationalist movement Dobama Asiayone (We Burmans Association).

Marxist ideas and literature had circulated in British-ruled Burma since the early 1930s, often as a result of Myanmar students in Britain making contact with the British Communist Party and the League Against Imperialism. A Red Dragon Book Club was set up in 1937 modelled on Britain’s Left Book Club. 

In August 1939, a small group of the Thakins, including Aung San, held the founding congress of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). 

Although Aung San soon broke with the CPB and started to work with the Japanese, the party soon achieved prominence due to its struggles against the Japanese occupation. 

During the 1940s, Aung San reoriented his Japanese-sponsored Burma Independence Army toward an alliance with the CPB’s forces, resulting in the formation of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) with the CPB’s Thakin Than Tun as the general secretary and Aung San as its military commander. 

The league led the popular rising against the Japanese on March 27 1945, but this wartime unity between the left, centre and right of the anti-Japanese movement did not last long. 

In 1947, Aung San was assassinated by rightwingers and, soon after independence in January 1948, the CPB was forced underground and embarked on a 40-year armed struggle.

The CPB subsequently established a People’s Army and created base areas in remote parts of the country, populated by the many ethnic minority groups that account for a substantial part of Myanmar’s population.

During the disastrous Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the CPB sided with China. China’s communists had after all waged a successful struggle against foreign powers and a domestic dictatorship in a largely peasant country, conditions which seemed quite similar to those of Myanmar. 

In addition, the fake socialist rhetoric of Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party, combined with its expropriation of private-sector assets, misled the Soviet Communist Party into believing that Burma was in some sense a country of “socialist orientation,” as the terminology of the time put it. 

Unsurprisingly, the CPB sympathised with China. However, this also led to the party mimicking many of the negative features promoted by Chinese communists at the time, including the practices of the Cultural Revolution. 

The CPB today is self-critical of this era which led to the unjust persecution and even execution of loyal CPB members, and a growing isolation from the mass movements that had hitherto supported the CPB.

A CPB representative tells me: “We suffered a death blow due to our ultra-left policies that we practised during the 1960s and 1970s in the Pegu Yoma Region of our headquarters in central Burma. 

“We lost our decades-long base areas and had to rely on the frontier areas, where the masses hadn’t experienced much in the way of class struggle and the political atmosphere was not militant. 

“According to my own experience, the emergence of the base areas there was rather unnatural. They emerged there not out of the class struggle of the local people, but more like an imported item. 

“We had no choice at that time when our old bases were in jeopardy. Even before we left the base areas, we used to tell the cadres that Burma’s revolution would make a turn only when we could hear gunshots along the Irrawaddy River basin,” where Myanmar’s main cities and towns are located.

However, a second major crisis in the party unfolded in the late 1980s and the CPB’s frontier bases also collapsed. 

The party’s remaining members were forced to regroup in exceptionally difficult circumstances, with key cadres either in prison, deep underground or in exile.

Having fought one of the longest armed struggles in recorded history, a total of around 40 years, today the CPB believes that various forms of struggle, armed and non-violent, are not counterposed but are complementary, depending on actual conditions.

“I don’t think that the armed struggle and non-violent methods are mutually exclusive, instead they support each other. 

“We always strived for above-ground activities of our comrades in the cities even at times when we were accomplishing quite impressive military victories in the rural areas. 

“Our party’s tactical line acknowledges the role and necessity of non-violent methods. We oppose basing our tactics solely on either one of the two and opposing the other,” the party representative insists.

Having reorganised the party’s leadership core, the CPB must deploy its limited resources carefully. In the current crisis, this is clearly focused on resisting the junta.

“We do everything that an underground anti-government party can do. We have our party website (www.cp-burma.org) and publications (both online and offline). 

“We make contacts with all anti-military dictatorship elements (both armed and unarmed) and try to work together against the military regime.” 

The CPB’s immediate demands are:

• Eradicate the military clique, military dictatorship and military bureaucratic system in Burma. 
• Abolish the 2008 national constitution.
• Establish a people’s democracy in Myanmar. 

As far as the CPB is concerned: “We want the people of the whole world to stand by the side of the people of Burma and express their support, condemn the military’s brutal oppression where even children under 12 were shot dead.”

Going into more detail on each of these three points, the representative of the CPB says: “We have been saying all along that the ‘three militaries’: the military clique, the military government and the military bureaucratic system are the three evils that have been suppressing, exploiting and killing the people of Burma since independence. 

“They ignited and kept ablaze one of the world’s longest-lasting civil wars that has afflicted the people for more than eight decades. 

“By promoting civil war, the top army leaders expanded their military machine, made the civilian political leaders accept the necessity of their role and threaten them with coup d’etats. 

“Furthermore. the generals profited from arms deals and also earnt bribes from businesses (both domestic and foreign) who invested in the army-controlled regions, especially the border areas where there is frequent fighting.”

In the party’s analysis: “The military clique, the military dictatorship and the military bureaucratic system are interrelated. One cannot exist without the other two. 

“The military is powerless without the military-bureaucratic system, which includes the military institutions, and only with these institutions could it wield its power so ruthlessly. 

“The two interact to set up, defend and carry out the military dictatorship which is the scourge of the entire nation, the people of Burma, both Burman and ethnic minority peoples.”

The party also believes that the abolition of the existing constitution is essential.

“The 2008 national constitution was the brainchild of Senior General Than Shwe and was approved by a fraudulent referendum. 

“It was held on the very same day that an unprecedented tsunami hit Burma’s highly populated area, the Irrawaddy delta region. 

“Yet the then military government claimed that the people from that region, who had fled from their devastated homes, cast ballots in favour of the constitution. 

“Initially, only the CPB and a few left-leaning forces above-ground pointed out that the constitution was designed to uphold military rule and should be abolished at all costs. 

“But now, after Min Aung Hlaing’s latest coup, other forces and people have denounced this constitution.

“We firmly believe that the 2008 national constitution was designed to let the military play the decisive card in the parliamentary and other governing bodies. 

“The National League for Democracy (NLD) had to tolerate or stick together with the military if it wanted to stay intact. 

“But now, the situation has changed drastically. Many of the NLD’s prominent leaders are in detention and many are on the run,” the CPB spokesman says.

The CPB’s belief is that the next stage of the struggle should be to establish a people’s democracy in Myanmar.

“We fully believe in the doctrine that says that all existing societies and democracies have specific class characteristics. 

“At present, only the military leadership and their cronies enjoy the ‘highest democracy’ in our country and the people have been denied it for decades. 

“Fraud and force have been rampant in the so-called elections of the past and we have often witnessed killings by the armed forces. 

“Ordinary people have been brutally killed or detained as soon as they lift up their hands against the governing class. 

“So, together with these oppressed people, we want democracy. Democracy for the people — this has naturally become an essential demand of our party in all stages of our revolution.”