Kolkata, Jan 5 : Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) veteran Jyoti Basu on Saturday supported West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's policy of welcoming private capital in the State for industrialisation purpose.

Basu said that socialism was not achievable at this point of time.

"We have been working within the capitalist system and private capital has to be used while social welfare programmes by the state government would continue," Basu told reporters here.

"Socialism is a far cry. Socialism is our political agenda and it was mentioned in our party document, but capitalism will continue to be the compulsion for the future," he added.

Bhattacharjee, on January 3, had strongly came in the favour of capitalism saying that socialism cannot be used as the only way to industrialise the state.

"If we have learned from the failure of the Soviet Union, we have also learned from the miracle of China," he had said.

Smaller parties in the Left Front Government, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), had accused Bhattacharjee of drifting away from the ideology followed by the Left for over 30 years.

The Chief Minister had brought American firm McKinsey and Company to attract multinational corporations to the state. As a result, US fast food chains like McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut and Subway started coming to Kolkata and shoe company Reebok has built one of its largest showrooms in Asia here.

IBM, Pepsi, and Mitsubishi too are investing tens of millions of dollars in the state. (ANI)