MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Organisations


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Madras Labour Union

 

The oldest registered trade union in India.

Located the city of Madras, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, was an are of early industrialization even before the Europeans arrived in the 18th Century and silk and cotton from it's mills were desired all over the world. These mill workers formed the first union in India. During the 20th century before independence, the loyalty of the workers in the unions were faught over by the Congress Socialist Party, the Communist Party of India and the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India, a Trotskyist organization that won control of this union in 1945 leading a famous mill workers strike.

 

Maximalists

A Russian party once a wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries who aimed to supplement the SR tactic of political terrorism with economic terrorism. In this they aimed to assassinate landlords and bourgeois instead of targeting political figures. Their primary means of finance was through holding up banks. Among its leaders were I. Pavlov, who described the exploiters as a "degenerate race" who had developed "all the most vile characteristics in humans". The party concluded in its programme, that all members of such a race needed to be exterminated, as the affliction was a genetic one, passed down onto children.

The Maximalists were banished from the SR party in October 1906 and formed their own party, officially called the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists.

 

Mazdoor Kisan Party of India

An politically unstable merger of a number of left parties attempting to provide an alternative to the Communist Party of India and Socialist Party of India from 1952-57.