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Colorful Classics #18
Historic Eight Documents
Written between 1965 and 1967 at a time when the Communist movement in India was at a crossroads between parliamentarism and the path of the people’s war, these Historic Eight Documents were the main ideological basis of the Naxalbari uprising. They continue to have a deep influence on those who persevered in waging this protracted struggle of over 50 years.
83 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 12, 2025
This is a short anti-revisionist document that reminds us revolutions are wonderful, but they are won the way all real freedom must be won- in blood, sweat, courage, and sacrifice. The focus in these documents is on building a revolutionary movement with the physical means to advance and defend the concrete interests of the dispossessed, while establishing authentic proletarian power.
Mazumdar analyzes social discontent in India and its relationship to imperialism, Soviet revisionism, criticizes blind obedience to Marxist Leninist parties who win power in bourgeois governments, their subsequent betrayal of the peasantry, outlines the Party Activist Group's role in political education and armed struggle, and demonstrates why gross economism is a cemetery for the revolution.
Mazumdar analyzes social discontent in India and its relationship to imperialism, Soviet revisionism, criticizes blind obedience to Marxist Leninist parties who win power in bourgeois governments, their subsequent betrayal of the peasantry, outlines the Party Activist Group's role in political education and armed struggle, and demonstrates why gross economism is a cemetery for the revolution.
April 22, 2021
A good example of how local issues can elucidate universal truths. This is such a short read that I won't give too much time to outlining it's contents, but suffice it to say that I found the following lessons from the early days of Indian anti-revisionism particularly relevant today:
The dangers of revisionism and social imperialism for undermining the revolutionary proletarian struggle. For those defending social imperialism today as a lesser evil to capitalism must remember that differing scales and severity of oppression don't change the fact that social imperialists have and will continue to undermine revolutionary programs which risk the status quo.
The importance of a) creating liberated zones where people's power and institutions can be constructed and spread and b) armed struggle as a means of defending power in and expanding said zones. I.e., PPW.
Objective, materialist analysis of the conditions in which revolution is waged. Dogmatic application of the tactics of past revolutions yield poor and often dangerous results, as well as impede meaningful engagement with the masses.
The correct analysis of class forces to determine the motive forces of revolution. To focus on the proletariat at the expense of the peasantry in a country like India, for example, would lead to poor allocation of organizational efforts and resources and, more broadly, the failure to generate forces and tactics capable of seizing and maintaining power in the real material conditions.
The necessity of the party to identify the needs of the masses and to not chide the economistic urges of some elements of the masses but to use these mass movements as opportunities to further develop revolutionary consciousness.
The dangers of revisionism and social imperialism for undermining the revolutionary proletarian struggle. For those defending social imperialism today as a lesser evil to capitalism must remember that differing scales and severity of oppression don't change the fact that social imperialists have and will continue to undermine revolutionary programs which risk the status quo.
The importance of a) creating liberated zones where people's power and institutions can be constructed and spread and b) armed struggle as a means of defending power in and expanding said zones. I.e., PPW.
Objective, materialist analysis of the conditions in which revolution is waged. Dogmatic application of the tactics of past revolutions yield poor and often dangerous results, as well as impede meaningful engagement with the masses.
The correct analysis of class forces to determine the motive forces of revolution. To focus on the proletariat at the expense of the peasantry in a country like India, for example, would lead to poor allocation of organizational efforts and resources and, more broadly, the failure to generate forces and tactics capable of seizing and maintaining power in the real material conditions.
The necessity of the party to identify the needs of the masses and to not chide the economistic urges of some elements of the masses but to use these mass movements as opportunities to further develop revolutionary consciousness.
June 13, 2021
Masterpiece, must read. Struggle against feudalism, capitalism and revisionism. Not the parliamentary democracy but the armed struggle of the peasant class lead by the proletariat class is the only path to revolution.
August 17, 2025
#Reviewing my previous Reads, #Overrated Books To Roast:
Charu Mazumdar (CM), hailed by his followers as the “Father of Naxalbari,” is also remembered as the man who destroyed a generation in Bengal. His Historic Eight Documents—issued between 1965 and 1967—became the “Bible” of Naxalism, inspiring armed uprisings, political purges, and a trail of wasted lives.
But if one reads them rather “prudently,” the texts are less “historic” than hysteric: Maoist cut-and-paste jobs, riddled with dogma, misreadings of Indian society, and dripping with hypocrisy.
The tragedy lies not just in their failure, but in the fact that thousands of bright young minds of the 1960s and ’70s—students, peasants, workers—were lured into self-destructive adventurism by this pamphlet-sized theology of violence. Let’s roast this “scripture” and the man behind it.
The very title, Historic Eight Documents, screams self-importance. You don’t call your own homework “historic” unless you already suspect no one else ever will.
In reality, these were internal factional notes of a breakaway CPI(M) leader, written in polemical fury against so-called “revisionists.” Only after the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 did they get canonized as gospel by CPI(ML). Imagine your angry WhatsApp rants being turned into a sacred book—that’s the vibe.
And yet, for all their fiery tone, the content is astonishingly derivative. Across 15,000 words, there isn’t a single quote from Marx or Engels. Instead, Mao is cited 16 times, Lenin barely 12, and Stalin looms like an awkward ghost at a family reunion.
CM wasn’t writing Marxism for India—he was parroting Maoism with a Bengali accent. His famous slogan, “Chairman Mao is our Chairman,” wasn’t a metaphor; it was a confession. He had outsourced Indian revolutionary thinking to Beijing wholesale.
Even Zhou Enlai, no stranger to ideological theatrics, had to tell Indian comrades like Sourin Bose that treating the Indian communist movement as a Chinese puppet was absurd. When the Chinese foreign ministry has to remind you to stop being such a fanboy, you know you’ve gone off the rails. But by then, CM had already hardwired Mao-worship into the DNA of his party.
Mao’s formula—encircle the cities from the countryside, annihilate class enemies, build liberated zones—worked in semi-colonial, pre-industrial China. CM assumed, with blind faith, that India in the 1960s was the same. Except India wasn’t China. India had universal suffrage, a functioning parliamentary system (however flawed), mass trade unions, an entrenched multi-party democracy, and a deeply layered caste structure that didn’t map neatly onto “peasants vs. landlords.”
CM’s solution? Pretend it was 1930s Yan’an, slap “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” as a label on India, and demand everyone pick up a rifle.
The Documents declared: only armed struggle. No parliament, no trade unions, no mass fronts. Basically, “delete everything that connects us to real people, and let’s prove our politics by how many bullets we fire.” It was political seppuku disguised as purity.
Most infamous was CM’s obsession with “annihilation of class enemies.” Not tactical killing, not defense, but annihilation as proof of ideological faith. In Bengal, this translated into young men being encouraged — sometimes pressured — to assassinate landlords, “informers,” rival leftists, or basically anyone the leadership declared an enemy.
Revolutionary credentials became a kill-count. Marx wrote about “mass action,” Lenin built disciplined parties, Mao mobilized millions — CM turned communism into a death cult initiation ritual.
The effect was catastrophic. Villages became killing fields. Police reprisals were savage, but fratricidal violence among the Left was equally corrosive. Students from Presidency, Jadavpur, and Calcutta University abandoned bright futures to join underground squads. Many were dead within months.
What began as a dream of revolution became a conveyor belt into prisons, morgues, or exile. A generation’s potential was sacrificed on the altar of Charu’s fantasies.
And the irony? Charu himself wasn’t living the peasant life he glorified. He was a bhadralok intellectual, issuing fiery directives from safe houses, while urging poor peasants to be the cannon fodder. His Eighth Document thundered: “Marxists must always try to establish the leadership of the poor and landless peasants.”
But in practice, leadership never left the hands of middle-class ideologues. The “landless peasants” were the fuel, never the drivers. CM’s idea of peasant leadership was basically cosplay — urban radicals playing at peasant revolution while keeping the command firmly in elite hands.
His hypocrisy deepens when you examine his cult of leadership. In the Second Document, CM declared, “The party directive coming from higher leadership must be carried out. Because the Party’s highest leader is he who has firmly established himself as a Marxist.” Translation: obey me because I say so.
This wasn’t democratic centralism; it was self-appointed papacy. Marx had warned against the cult of personality; CM embodied it with gusto.
The economic “analysis” inside the Documents deserves a roast of its own. In the First Document (1965), CM claimed the principal contradiction in India was between “the trading community and monopoly industrialists”. That’s not just wrong — it’s comedy. In a developing economy, traders and industrialists were often part of the same networks of capital formation.
But CM’s framework needed enemies to annihilate, so he conjured up this bizarre rivalry and then justified targeting small traders and moneylenders.
Complex caste and class dynamics?
Land reform struggles?
Agrarian capitalism’s uneven development?
Nah, it's easier to Xerox Mao’s template and declare random people “class enemies”.
The sycophancy toward Mao reached almost comic heights. In the Sixth Document, CM wrote: “After Lenin, Comrade Mao Tse-tung has today filled Lenin’s position. So the struggle against revisionism cannot be carried out by opposing the Chinese Party and Comrade Mao.” Translation: Mao is the new Lenin; questioning him is treason.
Forget Marxist analysis; just read Mao’s little red book and call it a day. This wasn’t Marxism — it was Maoist fanfiction with blood in the footnotes.
And let’s not forget the supposed “historic” peasant power CM promised. In practice, his campaign meant villages militarised, peasants squeezed between guerrillas and police, crops seized, families shattered, and livelihoods destroyed. CM called it liberation; peasants called it survival between two guns.
His followers didn’t organise lasting institutions — no unions, no cooperatives, no enduring peasant organisations. Just short-lived “actions” followed by retaliation. The result wasn’t transformation but chaos.
By the time CM died in police custody in 1972, the Naxalite movement was in shambles. Thousands of cadres had been killed. Bengal was soaked in blood. The wider communist movement had splintered beyond repair.
And yet, even in death, CM’s cult lingered.
His hagiographers turned him into a martyr; his documents remained sacred scripture. Into the 1990s, you could still find CPI(ML) leaders insisting “Mao is forever our Chairman,” parroting the same theology of violence, long after its failure was evident.
Today, no Naxalite group would dare plaster “Chairman Mao is our Chairman” on posters, but the addiction to dogma lingers. The Eight Documents trained generations to substitute Maoist scripture for actual analysis of India’s contradictions.
That’s CM’s true historic legacy: he taught the Indian Left how to cosplay revolution while avoiding reality.
And what was the outcome of this cosplay? Bengal in the late ’60s and early ’70s watched some of its brightest students vanish into jungles, never to return. Villages were scarred, the state unleashed waves of brutal repression, and the communist movement in India was fractured for decades. Charu didn’t lead a revolution; he lit a bonfire and threw a generation into it.
If Lenin warned against “left-wing infantilism”, CM embodied it in full. His Eight Documents were less a roadmap to revolution than a suicide note written on behalf of thousands of duped followers. Draped in Marxist language but devoid of Marxist substance, they reveal what happens when ideology detaches from reality: it eats its own children.
Charu Mazumdar’s legacy is not liberation but devastation. His followers wanted a Lenin; they got a doctrinaire middleman for Mao. His “historic” documents are historic only as cautionary tales — how not to make revolution, how not to read your society, and how not to waste human potential.
If Marxism is meant to be the ruthless critique of everything existing, CM turned it into the ruthless mimicry of someone else’s script.
So yes, the Eight Documents were historic — but in the same way Chernobyl was historic. Not because they worked, but because they left a toxic fallout that scarred everything around them.
Final Verdict: Mazumdar was less the “Father of Naxalbari” than its gravedigger. His Eight Documents didn’t guide a revolution; they scripted a tragedy.
Not a handbook of liberation, but a suicide pact — Xeroxed from Mao, weaponised in Bengal, and paid for in blood.
Please steer clear.
Charu Mazumdar (CM), hailed by his followers as the “Father of Naxalbari,” is also remembered as the man who destroyed a generation in Bengal. His Historic Eight Documents—issued between 1965 and 1967—became the “Bible” of Naxalism, inspiring armed uprisings, political purges, and a trail of wasted lives.
But if one reads them rather “prudently,” the texts are less “historic” than hysteric: Maoist cut-and-paste jobs, riddled with dogma, misreadings of Indian society, and dripping with hypocrisy.
The tragedy lies not just in their failure, but in the fact that thousands of bright young minds of the 1960s and ’70s—students, peasants, workers—were lured into self-destructive adventurism by this pamphlet-sized theology of violence. Let’s roast this “scripture” and the man behind it.
The very title, Historic Eight Documents, screams self-importance. You don’t call your own homework “historic” unless you already suspect no one else ever will.
In reality, these were internal factional notes of a breakaway CPI(M) leader, written in polemical fury against so-called “revisionists.” Only after the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 did they get canonized as gospel by CPI(ML). Imagine your angry WhatsApp rants being turned into a sacred book—that’s the vibe.
And yet, for all their fiery tone, the content is astonishingly derivative. Across 15,000 words, there isn’t a single quote from Marx or Engels. Instead, Mao is cited 16 times, Lenin barely 12, and Stalin looms like an awkward ghost at a family reunion.
CM wasn’t writing Marxism for India—he was parroting Maoism with a Bengali accent. His famous slogan, “Chairman Mao is our Chairman,” wasn’t a metaphor; it was a confession. He had outsourced Indian revolutionary thinking to Beijing wholesale.
Even Zhou Enlai, no stranger to ideological theatrics, had to tell Indian comrades like Sourin Bose that treating the Indian communist movement as a Chinese puppet was absurd. When the Chinese foreign ministry has to remind you to stop being such a fanboy, you know you’ve gone off the rails. But by then, CM had already hardwired Mao-worship into the DNA of his party.
Mao’s formula—encircle the cities from the countryside, annihilate class enemies, build liberated zones—worked in semi-colonial, pre-industrial China. CM assumed, with blind faith, that India in the 1960s was the same. Except India wasn’t China. India had universal suffrage, a functioning parliamentary system (however flawed), mass trade unions, an entrenched multi-party democracy, and a deeply layered caste structure that didn’t map neatly onto “peasants vs. landlords.”
CM’s solution? Pretend it was 1930s Yan’an, slap “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” as a label on India, and demand everyone pick up a rifle.
The Documents declared: only armed struggle. No parliament, no trade unions, no mass fronts. Basically, “delete everything that connects us to real people, and let’s prove our politics by how many bullets we fire.” It was political seppuku disguised as purity.
Most infamous was CM’s obsession with “annihilation of class enemies.” Not tactical killing, not defense, but annihilation as proof of ideological faith. In Bengal, this translated into young men being encouraged — sometimes pressured — to assassinate landlords, “informers,” rival leftists, or basically anyone the leadership declared an enemy.
Revolutionary credentials became a kill-count. Marx wrote about “mass action,” Lenin built disciplined parties, Mao mobilized millions — CM turned communism into a death cult initiation ritual.
The effect was catastrophic. Villages became killing fields. Police reprisals were savage, but fratricidal violence among the Left was equally corrosive. Students from Presidency, Jadavpur, and Calcutta University abandoned bright futures to join underground squads. Many were dead within months.
What began as a dream of revolution became a conveyor belt into prisons, morgues, or exile. A generation’s potential was sacrificed on the altar of Charu’s fantasies.
And the irony? Charu himself wasn’t living the peasant life he glorified. He was a bhadralok intellectual, issuing fiery directives from safe houses, while urging poor peasants to be the cannon fodder. His Eighth Document thundered: “Marxists must always try to establish the leadership of the poor and landless peasants.”
But in practice, leadership never left the hands of middle-class ideologues. The “landless peasants” were the fuel, never the drivers. CM’s idea of peasant leadership was basically cosplay — urban radicals playing at peasant revolution while keeping the command firmly in elite hands.
His hypocrisy deepens when you examine his cult of leadership. In the Second Document, CM declared, “The party directive coming from higher leadership must be carried out. Because the Party’s highest leader is he who has firmly established himself as a Marxist.” Translation: obey me because I say so.
This wasn’t democratic centralism; it was self-appointed papacy. Marx had warned against the cult of personality; CM embodied it with gusto.
The economic “analysis” inside the Documents deserves a roast of its own. In the First Document (1965), CM claimed the principal contradiction in India was between “the trading community and monopoly industrialists”. That’s not just wrong — it’s comedy. In a developing economy, traders and industrialists were often part of the same networks of capital formation.
But CM’s framework needed enemies to annihilate, so he conjured up this bizarre rivalry and then justified targeting small traders and moneylenders.
Complex caste and class dynamics?
Land reform struggles?
Agrarian capitalism’s uneven development?
Nah, it's easier to Xerox Mao’s template and declare random people “class enemies”.
The sycophancy toward Mao reached almost comic heights. In the Sixth Document, CM wrote: “After Lenin, Comrade Mao Tse-tung has today filled Lenin’s position. So the struggle against revisionism cannot be carried out by opposing the Chinese Party and Comrade Mao.” Translation: Mao is the new Lenin; questioning him is treason.
Forget Marxist analysis; just read Mao’s little red book and call it a day. This wasn’t Marxism — it was Maoist fanfiction with blood in the footnotes.
And let’s not forget the supposed “historic” peasant power CM promised. In practice, his campaign meant villages militarised, peasants squeezed between guerrillas and police, crops seized, families shattered, and livelihoods destroyed. CM called it liberation; peasants called it survival between two guns.
His followers didn’t organise lasting institutions — no unions, no cooperatives, no enduring peasant organisations. Just short-lived “actions” followed by retaliation. The result wasn’t transformation but chaos.
By the time CM died in police custody in 1972, the Naxalite movement was in shambles. Thousands of cadres had been killed. Bengal was soaked in blood. The wider communist movement had splintered beyond repair.
And yet, even in death, CM’s cult lingered.
His hagiographers turned him into a martyr; his documents remained sacred scripture. Into the 1990s, you could still find CPI(ML) leaders insisting “Mao is forever our Chairman,” parroting the same theology of violence, long after its failure was evident.
Today, no Naxalite group would dare plaster “Chairman Mao is our Chairman” on posters, but the addiction to dogma lingers. The Eight Documents trained generations to substitute Maoist scripture for actual analysis of India’s contradictions.
That’s CM’s true historic legacy: he taught the Indian Left how to cosplay revolution while avoiding reality.
And what was the outcome of this cosplay? Bengal in the late ’60s and early ’70s watched some of its brightest students vanish into jungles, never to return. Villages were scarred, the state unleashed waves of brutal repression, and the communist movement in India was fractured for decades. Charu didn’t lead a revolution; he lit a bonfire and threw a generation into it.
If Lenin warned against “left-wing infantilism”, CM embodied it in full. His Eight Documents were less a roadmap to revolution than a suicide note written on behalf of thousands of duped followers. Draped in Marxist language but devoid of Marxist substance, they reveal what happens when ideology detaches from reality: it eats its own children.
Charu Mazumdar’s legacy is not liberation but devastation. His followers wanted a Lenin; they got a doctrinaire middleman for Mao. His “historic” documents are historic only as cautionary tales — how not to make revolution, how not to read your society, and how not to waste human potential.
If Marxism is meant to be the ruthless critique of everything existing, CM turned it into the ruthless mimicry of someone else’s script.
So yes, the Eight Documents were historic — but in the same way Chernobyl was historic. Not because they worked, but because they left a toxic fallout that scarred everything around them.
Final Verdict: Mazumdar was less the “Father of Naxalbari” than its gravedigger. His Eight Documents didn’t guide a revolution; they scripted a tragedy.
Not a handbook of liberation, but a suicide pact — Xeroxed from Mao, weaponised in Bengal, and paid for in blood.
Please steer clear.
February 10, 2024
I realise now that I read this through a biased lens. Interesting… good insight into the working of a revolutionary party.
August 10, 2025
Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this one much. It’s basically a compilation of eight articles written by Charu Majumdar while he was underground as a senior member of CPI (Maoist). These writings became the ideological backbone of the Naxalite Movement in India.
I picked it up thinking it would be interesting to understand the “other side of the story” - purely for academic purposes. But most of it is Majumdar urging the youth and party members to follow Lenin and Mao Zedong’s path, fight revisionism, and push for a People’s Democratic Revolution through armed struggle. It’s all about the classic “revolution comes from the barrel of the gun” approach.
What struck me as ironic was that while he warns against blindly following the Indian state and government, he himself seems to blindly follow Mao and Lenin.
You can read this book if you want to academically explore the ideological foundation of the Naxalite movement. But remember, it’s part of revolutionary propaganda literature and needs to be read with caution. Personally, I believe in the principles of our Constitution, democracy, and humanitarianism. Methods like these will only bring violence, suffering, and regression, not progress.
I picked it up thinking it would be interesting to understand the “other side of the story” - purely for academic purposes. But most of it is Majumdar urging the youth and party members to follow Lenin and Mao Zedong’s path, fight revisionism, and push for a People’s Democratic Revolution through armed struggle. It’s all about the classic “revolution comes from the barrel of the gun” approach.
What struck me as ironic was that while he warns against blindly following the Indian state and government, he himself seems to blindly follow Mao and Lenin.
You can read this book if you want to academically explore the ideological foundation of the Naxalite movement. But remember, it’s part of revolutionary propaganda literature and needs to be read with caution. Personally, I believe in the principles of our Constitution, democracy, and humanitarianism. Methods like these will only bring violence, suffering, and regression, not progress.
October 22, 2025
Majumdar makes it very clear he lived off of daddy’s money and was scared of the same peasant class his family lorded over. The book is tactless, fragmented, continuously attributing the failures of a vanguard to just ‘revisionism’ while having no on-the-ground class or social analysis to offer. India’s semi-feudal, semi-democratic republic character was different from
pre-industrial China so of course the same tactics of the Chinese revolution can’t be employed. An easy takeaway from Mao would be to do investigate the existing mass movements and peasant groups at the time and understand how to change political characteristics there, A.K.A. social practice and planning political change. The activist group model isn’t a complete dud on paper but it’s useless when’s its primary tactics are “discussing class analysis” and “collecting weapons” and no vision of building people power. Many keep making the mistake of treating Mao’s writing as an inflexible dogma rather than evaluating social conditions and dare to believe in protracted revolution.
pre-industrial China so of course the same tactics of the Chinese revolution can’t be employed. An easy takeaway from Mao would be to do investigate the existing mass movements and peasant groups at the time and understand how to change political characteristics there, A.K.A. social practice and planning political change. The activist group model isn’t a complete dud on paper but it’s useless when’s its primary tactics are “discussing class analysis” and “collecting weapons” and no vision of building people power. Many keep making the mistake of treating Mao’s writing as an inflexible dogma rather than evaluating social conditions and dare to believe in protracted revolution.
July 3, 2025
short but sweet, this book is somewhat light on theory but heavy on praxis. This is not a work interested on heavy dense theory topics or a deep analysis of imperialism but about local issues along with how to organize local cadres. highly recommended.
January 2, 2023
The content of this text was really good and I look forward to studying it with my comrades, but the FLP version’s translation is very poor with many clear errors that make it a difficult read.
March 10, 2025
qué fuerte leer sobre el partido comunista de la india no tenía ni idea de qué línea habían llevado y resulta que es perfectamente aplicable a muchos contextos actuales (y qué fuerte que sigan existiendo los naxalitas lo están haciendo tan bien!!!)
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews