Manabendra Nath Roy

Manabendra Nath Roy in the 1930s

Manabendra Nath Roy ( MN Roy ; Bengali মানবেন্দ্র নাথ রায় Mānabendra Nāth Rāẏ , born March 21, 1887 in the village of Arbelia, West Bengal ; † January 25, 1954 in Dehradun ) was a Bengali Indian revolutionary, philosopher, political theorist and activist. He is considered the founder of radical humanism.

Life

He grew up under materially good conditions. His father belonged to the higher caste, the Brahmins .

The beginnings

Under his birth name Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, MN Roy joined the revolutionary underground movement for the liberation of India at the age of 18. He was a companion of the "legendary" Indian revolutionary Bagha Jatin and in 1915, under the cover name Charles A. Martin, was one of the key figures in the plans to liberate India from English rule during the First World War with the help of German arms deliveries, which never took place. During that year he made various trips abroad (the Dutch East Indies , Japan , Korea , Mexico , the Philippines and the USA ) to find help for the liberation of India, but without success. After the USA entered the World War, he was arrested, but was able to flee to Mexico in 1917. There he turned to the labor movement and came into contact with the Russian Mikhail Borodin . He later changed the name from Charles A. Martin to Narendra Nath Bhattacharya in order to escape British intelligence.

Communist activities

Like Marx, Roy was also a philosopher and activist; Lenin once called him "the oriental Marx". He played a leading role in the revolutions in Mexico , the Middle East , the Soviet Union , China and Indonesia . In 1920 he was involved in the founding of the Communist Party of India in Tashkent .

Roy made contact with Mexican and American activists and intellectuals, including the Mexican President Venustiano Carranza . Roy later became general secretary of the Socialist Party of Mexico and later founded the Partido Comunista Mexicano .

In May 1920 he was invited by Lenin to the second congress of the Comintern. There he was able to draw attention to the colonial question and his theories. Roy held the highest offices in the Communist International and in 1927 led the Chinese delegation of the Comintern.

At the same time he wrote such works as India in Transition (1922), The Future of Indian Politics (1926) and Revolution and Counter-revolution in China (1930). He also founded the party organ of the Communist Party of India The Vanguard , later renamed The Masses , and headed it for seven years from 1922 to 1928.

In 1929 he was finally expelled from the Communist International because at its sixth congress he publicly criticized the general line laid down by Stalin for the Comintern. He joined the IVKO and became a member of the closer office. In this role he kept in close contact with a strong group of opposition communists in India.

Radical humanism

In 1930 he returned to India. There he spent five years in various prisons because of his "political anti-colonial agitation" and wrote a 6,000-page manuscript during this time, which he provisionally called The Philosophical Consequence of Modern Science .

After his release, he campaigned against authoritarianism, supported the anti-fascist war and published the weekly newspaper Independent India , which was later renamed Radical Humanist . He later brought out another weekly paper called the Humanist Way . He advocated solidarity and the preservation of individuality.

Roy and the Second World War

During the Second World War , he called on his compatriots to support the British army and fight fascism and National Socialism. In this he differed from MK Gandhi and most of the Indian freedom movement. In Roy's opinion a victory for Germany and the Axis Powers would mean the end of democracy worldwide and India would never be liberated. India can only achieve freedom in a free world. Roy founded a radical democratic party and his own trade union movement. After losing in the first elections after independence, he dissolved the RDP again.

He died on January 25, 1954 on the way from his home in Dehradun to Calcutta . His widow Ellen, b. Gottschalk from Berlin , a former member of the KPD-O , fell victim to an unexplained murder in 1960 in Dehradun.

literature

• Theodor Bergmann : "Against the Current". The history of the KPD (opposition) . VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2004 (with a short biography of Manabendra Nath Roy).

Web links

• Literature by and about Manabendra Nath Roy in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ramendra Nath:  MN Roy (1887-1954). In: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• extensive biography at banglapedia.com
• Texts by MN Roy in the Marxists Internet Archive