The Revolutionary Communists of India are a group of people building the beginnings of a section of the Revolutionary Communist International. We hold ourselves to the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Ted Grant, and we are building a revolutionary party capable of overthrowing capitalism, in India and across the world.
We seek to build a party along the lines of the Bolsheviks in 1917 — the first working-class party not only to take power from the capitalist class, but to hold on to it. It is these traditions that we seek to revive, in their unadulterated form, within India today.
The Situation
India is a hell on earth for the nearly 1.5 billion people who live under this system. The masses of India are caught between two failed forces.
On one side stands a corrupt, bloodthirsty and crippled capitalist class, completely incapable of solving the burning questions of Indian society today: the development of mass industry, the ending of poverty and homelessness, of casualised unstable work and unemployment, the question of national oppression, of caste, the question of communal violence and women’s oppression, the list is endless.
The Indian bourgeoisie developed out of the stunted conditions of pre-independence India. A parasitic layer, it has opened up huge swathes of India to foreign capital, particularly US capital, which dominates through huge industries centred around a few towns and cities. On the outskirts of which, people are held back in near-feudal conditions, eking out an existence from the land, or languishing in slums. Never has so much existed alongside so little.
Much is made of Ambani’s Antilla, in the midst of the same city that houses the world’s biggest slums. In reality, this symbol of vast inequality shows the real nature of Indian capitalism across the subcontinent.
The Indian economy is completely tied to global capital and too bankrupt to resolve any of these questions. Twenty per cent of India lacks access to basic sanitation. 1 in 6 have no internet. Forty per cent of roads remain unpaved. Even the basic fabric of a modern nation they have not been able to build. At the time of writing, hundreds of thousands of workers are out of work, due to gas shortages imposed by the Iran war. Despite this, India has the biggest gas refinery in the world in Jamnagar. Only, this refinery is not used to meet the needs of the Indian working class. It is part of a huge money-making scheme, refining Russian crude into diesel, kerosene etc to compete on the world market.
In the process, the Ambanis and Adanis have amassed exorbitant wealth – India’s 284 billionaires own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the country combined. Meanwhile, 615,000 young children under five died last year from malnutrition and easily preventable disease. 28% of global deaths from TB, a disease now curable with a course of antibiotics, occur in India. Two hundred million in the country are chronically undernourished, 20% of which are children, the highest in the world.
And yet again, India is a net exporter of crops and dairy. $53 billion worth of produce is exported each year, and wherever it can’t be sold for a profit, millions of tons of food are routinely left to rot in godowns by The Food Corporation of India. This is enough to feed everyone in India, and still export enough food for 750 million people.
The whole system in India, like many other ex-colonial countries, is geared towards this parasitical profiteering. Commodities are produced cheaply by some of the most exploited workers in the world, and exported overseas to line the pockets of the rich.
Not for nothing, the Modi regime, and the state more broadly, are terrified of the potential of the Indian working class. With a deep tradition of organising and militancy, when the Indian working class is directed in a coordinated manner at the core of the system itself – at private property and the nation state, no force on earth will stop it.
The brutal crackdown on the recent strikes across the NCR and the concessions won by the farmers’ protests are a sign of the bosses’ fear and the weakness of the state. The Modi-RSS regime too, is the political expression of this incapacity — channelling the contradictions of bankrupt Indian capitalism into the brutalisation of Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, women, students, and every other section of the working class.
But the Indian working class is failed by the Left, who are completely incapable of navigating this storm. This is the second failed force in Indian society.
Instead, seeing the victory of the BJP in multiple states – and even the swing from CPI(M) to INC in Kerala, rather than drawing the conclusion that they have failed, they scream from the hills about the rise of fascism – the victory of Modi is equated with fascism, the complete, armed and violent liquidation of all the organisations of the working class.
It is true that the RSS, Shiv Sena and their ilk contain many fascist elements, that they rely on a layer of the petty-bourgeois and lumpenised layers of Indian society, that they whip up sectarian and caste divides and the rest. But the blame for the fact these scum have been allowed to run riot does not lie on the “fascist” Modi, but on the corrupt, pathetic and counter-revolutionary role the left has played in the past period. A strong, organised working class could crush these far-right thugs for good and prepare the ground for a struggle against the entire Modi regime. It is out of the complete vacuum of such a force that the Lefts have let these elements flourish.
Tied to Indian capitalism, and after decades of poverty and decay, the INC is deeply hated. Yet the “communists” hitch themselves to this wagon under the weak slogan of the “India Alliance”. When called on to lead, these lefts actively stifle the masses, sapping off energy through isolated, infrequent one-day general strikes.
The whole political establishment in India, right, left, or even “communist” conspires to achieve one thing and one thing only – to keep business – and the handsome cut of the money they receive – flowing, and to keep the masses within the guardrails of “safe” activity.
The path forward is neither of these. It is to return to the real lessons of the movements of the working class, and its distilled essence – the genuine ideas of Marxism and their embodiment in the building of a revolutionary Marxist organisation rooted in the working class and the youth.
Why We Are Small
Our forces in India today are small. This is not an accident.
India holds nearly one-seventh of the world’s population. It is, as Lenin referred to Russia, a “prison house of nations” — hundreds of nationalities, languages, castes and oppressed peoples held within its borders. No centralised leadership can cover every question that arises across this vast country at this stage of our development.
What India has always lacked is not activists, willing recruits, or revolutionary energy. India has these in abundance. What is missing is genuinely revolutionary ideas, embodied in a cadre-based organisation capable of welding them together into a unified force. This is what Lenin called the subjective factor in history.
A cadre is not the same as a member or a sympathiser. A cadre is a communist who has internalised the method of Marxism so thoroughly that they can think and act independently — applying our ideas to their local conditions, training and educating others, building the organisation under whatever circumstances they find. This is what India is missing. This is what we are building.
In the words of Leon Trotsky, “you can have revolutionaries wise and ignorant, intelligent or mediocre, but you can’t have revolutionaries who lack the willingness to smash obstacles.”
What We Stand For
We are distinguished from the existing Indian left not by what we are against, but by what we are for.
India, in all of its complexities still has many of the bourgeois democratic tasks left unresolved — genuine land reform, secular and democratic rights, equality across caste and gender, real national self-determination — these cannot be completed by the decrepit Indian bourgeoisie. They can be completed only by the working class, leading the oppressed of all kinds, and in completing them the working class must and will necessarily move beyond them to the socialist tasks. This means we have no interest in finding the “progressive” elements within the capitalist class – they do not exist. Only the working class is capable of putting an end to the barbarism of Indian society. This is what permanent revolution means.
We defend the genuine position of unflinching internationalism. Capitalism is global; the working class is global; Indian capitalism is tied up in the entire world market. The Indian revolution will be and can only be part of a wider revolution across South Asia, as part of a world revolution, or it is nothing. The defeated isolated revolutions of the twentieth century stand as a warning. We are a section-to-be of the Revolutionary Communist International because the alternative — socialism in one country — is a known death sentence, as the policies of the Stalinised Communist Parties have shown.
We are against any and every attempt to divide and conquer the working class, whether on the lines of gender, race, caste, religion or anything else. We stand for the utmost unity of the working class, and reject any form of understanding that lowers this struggle to the question of subjective opinions, language and morality. These oppressions are class questions first and foremost, used by the capitalist class, for their own interests.
We hold ourselves to the genuine methods of democratic centralism as the means by which a revolutionary organisation arrives at decisions. This means full freedom of discussion between members of the party, and full unity in action and adherence to those democratic decisions once we have come to a decision.
These are the ideas we are building around. If you are looking for these ideas, we are who you are looking for.
What Is Required
Such an organisation does not drop from the heavens. No one will prepare it for us. You, the reader, will have to build it, in your town, your university, in your workplace. And to do so requires real sacrifice.
It requires sacrifice of your time and your energy — to read seriously, to study and understand the method of Marxism, to discuss with comrades, to find others, to build where you are.
It requires money. A revolutionary press, printed materials, mass meetings, building towards an apparatus of full-time staff — these things cost. Finances are the sinews of war, and we intend to wage class war against the parasitical bourgeoisie. Without resources, this will remain a utopia. Without funds, we can build nothing.
For this reason, we ask every recruit for a monthly subscription of Rs. 300 — roughly half a day’s pay for an average urban worker, a more substantial sacrifice for a manual or rural worker. This is conscious. The fees themselves are a filter. We are not interested in those looking for material support from us, nor in those unwilling to commit their own resources to the work. The subscription establishes that you are serious, and that you are with us, rather than expecting us to be with you.
This sacrifice, these ideas and these methods are what built the RSDLP, the party that led the working class in Russia to the conquest of power. It is from them that we have the most to learn, and it is on their shoulders that we stand.
What Is To Be Done?
If you have read this far and you mean it, here is what we ask of you, in this order:
- Set up a Rs. 300 monthly subscription through this link on our website.
- Read our introductory texts, including the Communist Manifesto, Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist International and What Is Marxism? Make notes on the texts, write down your questions and get in touch via the website. A comrade from the RC(I) will be in touch to discuss the text with you and clarify your questions.
- Read the articles on this website. Make it a habit to routinely discuss our analysis of world events and events in India.
- Find a small handful of comrades — people in your local area, town, city, village or state — willing to read and discuss seriously with you. Take your understanding of the text and discuss it with them. Look in the universities and colleges. Find those who have not been disillusioned by the wider left, or left to languish in the trade unions. Look for those who are awakening to political activity and are hungry – hungry to learn, and hungry to build.
- Form a reading circle. Meet weekly. Take one chapter at a time. Discuss it. Debate it. Test the ideas against the India you live in. Where you disagree among yourselves, do not paper over the disagreement — look for the answer in further texts and in the experience of the international. Report back on your discussion – how did you prepare, what questions came up?
- Submit a report through the form on our website. Tell us who you are, where you are, who you have gathered, what you have read, what questions have arisen, and what you need from us. We will respond to every report.
Your reading circle is not the end. It is the beginning. As your circle deepens, expand it — bring new members in, take it from two to three, three to five, five to ten. Maintain the discipline of theory throughout. Our website and our cadres will be responsive to the questions you raise.
Once we have a network of these circles across India — once we know who is building, who is serious, who is becoming a cadre — we will begin to come together as an organisation, and in time to constitute the Indian section of the Revolutionary Communist International with all its democratic structures.
This is the work. There is no shortcut, and there is no one else who can do it for us.
The Task
The world is in the deepest crisis capitalism has ever seen. War and barbarism are on the order of the day. The task on our shoulders — on yours — is the largest in human history: not only the overthrow of capitalism but the overthrow of class society itself, and the ushering in of a new epoch for humanity. An epoch in which no one dies of starvation by the side of the road. In which billions are not consumed by mind-numbing toil, but live their life to the fullest, surrounded by a wealth of knowledge, culture and art. In which humanity makes the leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
That is what we are fighting for. That is what we will build in India.
If that is what you want to commit your life to, begin today.
Join the Revolutionary Communists of India!
Build the Revolutionary Communist International!
Long live the world revolution!
Inquilab Zindabad!
