Programme of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India
1. Introduction
In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels issued their famous appeal in The Communist Manifesto: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!” This call expressed the idea that the working class across national boundaries shared common interests and must unite in the struggle against capitalism. Many decades later, these ideas inspired the socialist revolution of November 1917, which was preceded by the February Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsar and established the Provisional Government. In the November Revolution, the workers and peasants of Russia, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, overthrew the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky. In the aftermath of the revolution, Lenin helped establish the Communist International (Comintern) to coordinate revolutionary movements and promote socialism on a global scale. He declared: “[T]he world revolution is beginning and growing in intensity everywhere.”
The growth of the international communist movement influenced political developments in colonial India as well. The Communist Party of India (CPI) was formed in Tashkent in October 1920, with M. N. Roy playing a central role. In the mid-1920s, radical political initiatives also developed within India. In Bengal, activists organised the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Bengal to mobilise workers and peasants within the broader anti-colonial struggle. Saumyendranath Tagore joined this movement and soon emerged as one of its prominent leaders. Through political organising and writing, he argued for the necessity of an independent revolutionary movement of workers and peasants against both imperialism and the compromising tendencies of the national bourgeoisie.
Tagore later travelled to Europe and took part in debates within the Communist International. At the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, he criticised the theses presented by Otto Kuusinen on the colonial question. Kuusinen argued that communist movements in colonies should make temporary agreements with the national bourgeoisie and follow the strategic leadership of the proletariat in imperialist countries. Tagore opposed this line, insisting that the Indian bourgeoisie had already shown its readiness to compromise with imperialism and could not provide consistent revolutionary leadership. He argued instead that the anti-imperialist struggle in colonial countries must be led by the proletariat, with the peasantry and other oppressed sections supporting it.
After returning to India in 1934 and finding the communist movement fragmented, Tagore and several associates founded the Communist League of India. This organisation later developed into the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI). The RCPI rejected the stagist theory of revolution and instead called for a socialist revolution led by the working class, with the peasantry as its principal ally.
During the Second World War, a major ideological debate emerged within the communist movement in India over the character of the conflict. Following changes in the policy of the Communist International after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the CPI characterised the war as a “people’s war” against fascism. The RCPI, however, described the conflict as an imperialist war and supported the mass anti-colonial upsurge that took place during the Quit India Movement of 1942 and attempted to turn it into a revolution. These contrasting interpretations deepened the political and ideological differences between the two organisations.
Following Indian independence in 1947, the RCPI argued that political power had passed mainly into the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie and landlord classes. The party therefore continued to advocate a socialist transformation of society under the leadership of the working class, supported by peasants and other oppressed social groups, while maintaining the principle of proletarian internationalism and linking the struggle in India with the broader goal of socialism on a world scale.
The RCPI presents its programme to the working class, which must lead the socialist revolution; to the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie, which must support the working class; and to the other exploited and oppressed strata who also have a supporting role in the socialist revolution. The RCPI seeks to replace India’s bourgeois democracy with proletarian democracy through socialist revolution. Upholding the banner of proletarian internationalism, the RCPI will not stop at establishing socialism in India alone but will strive for world socialism by waging a global struggle against the bourgeoisie, aided by an international organisation of all communists.
2. The Indian State and Society
In August 1947, India gained independence from British colonial rule. This achievement, however, was not the result of a great anti-imperialist revolution, but rather the outcome of specific historical circumstances. The imperial rulers had already been weakened by the war and the post-war crisis, and consequently, they were compelled to transfer power to the Indian bourgeoisie. Despite this transfer of political authority, the British bourgeoisie managed to retain a significant role in the Indian economy. This shift marked the beginning of a new partnership between the Indian and British bourgeoisie.
Over time, American capital also entered the Indian economy, and the Indian, American, and British bourgeoisie began to dominate the Indian economy jointly. The Indian bourgeoisie knew well that it was impossible for capitalism to endure in their country without collaboration with the foreign bourgeoisie, given the shortage of goods and the tough competition in the world market. They also realised that they needed the state to play a role in saving capitalism in a then underdeveloped country like India. Therefore, to stabilise capitalism, the capitalist state intervened, and together with the national bourgeoisie, began industrialising the country. The bourgeoisie, with the help of the state, developed key industries like transport, steel, communication, mining, etc., which they could not have done on their own because of the lack of required investment and the risks involved.
In this “mixed economy”, state-owned industries did not exploit their workers any less than the private ones. Government workers were also paid very little, so that private workers would not realise that they themselves were exploited. Under the guise of a socialist tendency, the state thus kept a large section of the working class under an illusion in order to suppress any resistance on their part. This kind of economy not only helped the bourgeoisie develop the basic infrastructure of the country—most of which would later belong to them—but also created an illusion among some sections of the Left that the state was progressive and socialist, thereby jeopardising the socialist movement.
This class compromise at the level of industry was accompanied by state intervention in agriculture. In the 1950s, in the agricultural arena, the capitalist state attempted to eradicate the pre-capitalist economy from above amidst the close ties of the capitalists and landlords. The legal abolition of the zamindari system with heavy compensation imposed financial burdens on the tillers, as they were required to bear the cost of compensating the dispossessed landlords through land revenue and instalments collected by the state. The payment of heavy compensations led to the emergence of capitalist farmers, who benefitted from cheap credits and seeds and fertilisers at subsidised rates.
The economy of India is thus capitalist in nature, marked by private ownership, accumulation of wealth, and the subordination of labour to profit. Yet this structure is not uniform. It demonstrates the uneven and combined development of capitalism, where capitalism advances in contradictory ways, integrating the most advanced sectors of global capital with backward, pre-capitalist forms of labour. India exemplifies this character both within its domestic economy and in its position in the global system.
Industry and agriculture reveal disparities in productivity, organisation, and social conditions. Capitalism in India has developed in an uneven and combined manner: it has penetrated deeply into the countryside but has not modernised it in a linear fashion, instead fusing pre-capitalist relations with advanced forms of capitalist accumulation into a single system of exploitation. Wealthy farmers adopt mechanisation, biotechnology and export-oriented crops, while millions of smallholders and landless labourers survive on tiny plots or seasonal wage work, increasingly drawn into global circuits of capital dominated by multinational corporations controlling seeds, fertilisers and markets. Land relations, therefore, remain central to class power and surplus extraction even after the decline of the zamindari system.
Caste- and gender-based hierarchies, along with residual forms of landlordism, continue to shape access to land, credit and local political power, as capitalists, landlords and upper-caste elites frequently operate in alliance through their integration with markets, credit systems and the state. Marx and Engels, while emphasising the historically revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie, argued that it “has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations”; the Indian experience, however, demonstrates that capitalist development has not eliminated pre-capitalist relations but has instead reorganised and reproduced them in forms that facilitate land concentration, speculative holding, exploitative tenancy, dispossession and the semi-proletarianisation of small and marginal peasants.
The state plays a decisive role in this process. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Far from being neutral, the Indian state acts to secure capital accumulation through subsidies, tax concessions, and Special Economic Zones. It routinely resists workers’ demands for higher wages and peasants’ movements for fairer prices, protecting the interests of capitalists and landlords. Since independence, the state has combined planning with private enterprise. Nationalised industries in steel, power, and transport coexisted with capitalist agriculture under the Green Revolution. Yet entrenched hierarchies of caste, class, and property endured, ensuring that growth primarily enriched ruling elites while vast sections of the working class and rural population remained in poverty.
The liberalisation of 1991 opened the economy to foreign investment, dismantling state monopolies, and binding India more tightly to global markets. As Lenin argued, capitalism in its imperialist stage subordinates weaker economies to global capital, integrating them into an unequal international order.
Conglomerates such as Reliance, Tata, Infosys, and Adani operate with advanced technologies and global finance, placing parts of Indian production at the forefront of capitalist modernity. At the same time, millions of informal workers labour in sweatshops, construction sites, and small factories under precarious conditions. Modern corporate profits rest not only on advanced production but also on cheap, insecure labour.
India has emerged as a hub for information technology, pharmaceuticals, and even space research, yet its development remains tied to advanced capitalist economies for capital, technology, and markets. The outsourcing model directly connects Indian workers to Western corporations, but the wages earned are only a fraction of those abroad. Farmers linked to export markets are equally vulnerable to fluctuations in international demand and prices, forces far beyond their control. These forms of integration demonstrate how global capitalism produces growth while simultaneously reinforcing dependence.
Thus, the Indian economy demonstrates the central features of capitalist development—wealth concentrated in a minority, labour commodified, and agriculture commercialised. Yet its development is marked by uneven and combined dynamics, where advanced industry and archaic relations of production coexist in a single system of accumulation. The state serves this process, defending the shared interests of capitalists and landlords, while the masses of workers and peasants bear its contradictions. In India, there has been a compromise between the bourgeoisie and pre-capitalist classes. Indian capitalism is certainly not as developed as capitalism in the United States, England, France or any other advanced capitalist country, but it remains a capitalist state, irrespective of the degree of its capitalist development.
Since the adoption of neo-liberal reforms in 1991, India has steadily moved towards privatising public industries, thereby reducing the role of the state in key sectors. Successive bourgeois governments have advanced this agenda, often justifying it in the name of efficiency, competitiveness, and fiscal discipline.
3. The Stage of Revolution
India is a capitalist state—the dominant mode of production is capitalist, the decisive sectors of the economy operate on the basis of wage labour and profit, and the state functions as the political instrument through which the collective interests of the bourgeoisie are organised and defended. Whether through planning, regulation, subsidies, liberalisation, or privatisation, state policy consistently secures the conditions for capital accumulation. The fundamental social contradiction, therefore, is between capital and labour.
The uneven and combined character of Indian development does not alter this conclusion. Advanced technology, finance capital, global supply chains, and multinational corporations coexist with informal labour, agrarian distress, caste oppression and patriarchal domination. Although the latter are pre-capitalist remnants, they are integrated into capitalism. They form part of a single structure of accumulation in which surplus is extracted from workers and peasants under diverse and interconnected forms.
In such conditions, the historical stage cannot be defined as a preparatory democratic phase directed against pre-capitalism or colonial domination. The principal barrier to social transformation is the rule of the bourgeoisie itself. The tasks that confront the masses are secure employment, living wages, redistribution of land, democratic control of means of production, eradication of caste hierarchy, equality based on gender and sexuality, universal access to education and healthcare, and protection from the ravages of market anarchy, and these cannot be realised within the limits of capitalist property relations.
The experience of the “mixed economy” demonstrated that state ownership without workers’ power leaves the structure of exploitation intact. The subsequent era of liberalisation further confirmed that private capital, both domestic and foreign, intensifies inequality and dependence. In both phases, the working class remained subordinated to the interests of profit. What determines the character of the epoch is not the proportion of state versus private ownership, but the class that controls the state and directs production.
The growth of a vast proletariat—industrial workers, service employees, logistics and transport workers, construction labourers, agricultural labourers, and the immense informal workforce—creates the material foundation for a new social order. This class occupies strategic positions within production and distribution. It is bound together not only nationally but internationally through global circuits of capital. Its struggle, therefore, necessarily transcends narrow economic demands and poses the question of political power.
In India, capitalist development has centralised production, socialised labour, and integrated the economy on a national and international scale. Yet the appropriation of wealth remains private. This contradiction, which is between socialised production and private accumulation, defines the epoch.
Accordingly, the immediate perspective is not the reform of capitalism but its overthrow. The expropriation of the major conglomerates, banks and large landed interests, the establishment of democratic control over industry and agriculture, and the reorganisation of economic life according to social need rather than profit are not distant abstractions but historically posed necessities. Therefore, the current stage of revolution in India is a socialist one.
In countries characterised by uneven and combined development, the bourgeoisie proves incapable of consistently carrying out the historic tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois-democratic revolution, such as thorough agrarian transformation, full democratic equality, and independent economic development. These tasks therefore fall to the working class. After assuming political power, the working class cannot confine itself to democratic reforms but must proceed directly toward socialist transformation. Under workers’ power these tasks will be carried out consciously through socialist planning. The socialisation of the major industries, banks, and natural resources will make it possible to mobilise society’s productive capacity in a coordinated manner, allowing rapid industrial development directed toward social need rather than private profit. The revolution develops as an uninterrupted process in which democratic tasks pass over into socialist measures, linking them inseparably and giving the revolution a permanent character.
In India today, the struggle for democratic rights, social equality and economic security converges with the struggle for workers’ power. The socialist transformation of society is not a future stage separated by intermediary class regimes; it is the direct and necessary resolution of the contradictions generated by Indian capitalism itself. Therefore, only a socialist revolution can uproot the material basis of caste, patriarchy and heteronormative oppression, because these structures are woven into capitalist property relations and upheld by the existing state.
Caste is not merely a matter of prejudice or social custom. It determines who owns and controls resources, who gains access to education and stable employment, and who is pushed into the most insecure and degrading forms of labour. Capitalism has not dissolved caste—it has rather adapted to it. Marginalised communities remain disproportionately trapped in precarious work, while privilege is reproduced through inherited wealth, social networks and institutional power. However, there are capitalists among the historically oppressed communities, and we do not hesitate to wage a struggle against the entire capitalist class, irrespective of caste, gender, religion, and the like. Breaking this link between caste and class requires more than reform—it requires the transfer of economic and political power into the hands of the working majority, united across caste lines. The problem of caste can be solved only through equal distribution of wealth, after private properties of all the exploiters across caste lines are concentrated in the hands of the working class collectively.
Gender inequality in India is visible in declining global standings in economic participation, political representation, health and education, as well as in persistent wage gaps and the ugly reality of gender-based violence. Women remain under-represented in parliament and concentrated in lower-paid or insecure employment, which demonstrates that formal constitutional equality has not translated into substantive equality. These conditions expose the patriarchal character of Indian society, where access to opportunity, income and public power continues to favour men and patriarchal values. The coexistence of advanced economic sectors with entrenched gender hierarchy reflects the uneven and combined development of capitalism, in which modern growth proceeds alongside structural inequality.
The same applies to the oppression of LGBTQIA+ people. Mere legal reforms do not by themselves secure dignity and security. As long as social legitimacy is tied to a patriarchal model of family and property, those who do not conform to dominant norms face exclusion and insecurity. Genuine equality requires that access to housing, employment, inheritance and social recognition be detached from restrictive and unequal social structures.
The continued weight of caste hierarchy, patriarchal control, and sexual stigma within an advanced and globally integrated economy shows how unevenly capitalism develops: the most modern sectors of production coexist with social hierarchies that are not simply leftovers from the past but are reshaped and sustained because they help maintain exploitation and division in a casteist, patriarchal capitalist society.
For this reason, the struggle against caste, gender and sexual oppression cannot be separated from the struggle against capital. Only by ending bourgeois rule and establishing democratic control by the working class can these forms of domination be dismantled at their roots, rather than merely softened at the surface. This can happen only through a socialist revolution, which will also eradicate pre-capitalist elements from the capitalist society.
4. The Leading Class
Capitalism in India is marked by the fusion of advanced sectors with persistent pre-capitalist social relations. Since the dominant mode of production is capitalist, and since surplus extraction is organised primarily through wage labour and market relations, the only class capable of abolishing this system at its root is the working class. The proletariat occupies a structurally decisive position within production, circulation and distribution. Capital depends daily upon its labour power. This position gives the working class both the material interest and the social capacity to reorganise production on a new basis. The proletariat is not merely a socio-economic category defined by occupation or income. It is the class that, lacking ownership of the means of production, is compelled to sell its labour power to capital. When this class develops class consciousness and recognises its shared conditions of exploitation, it becomes a political force capable of struggling against capital.
The working class must unite with all exploited and oppressed strata whose conditions are shaped by capitalist accumulation. Chief among these are the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie. The peasantry in India is internally stratified, ranging from relatively prosperous capitalist farmers to small landholders, marginal peasants and landless labourers. While sections of the rural propertied strata are integrated into capitalist accumulation, millions face indebtedness, price volatility and dispossession. Their struggle against land concentration, market anarchy and agrarian distress objectively converges with the proletarian struggle against capital. Under working-class leadership, agrarian demands, such as redistribution of land, cooperative organisation, guaranteed prices and social protection, can be linked to a broader transformation of property relations.
Our task, therefore, is to unite the working class, which will lead the socialist revolution, with active support from the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, comprising intellectuals, academicians, small traders, doctors, lawyers, and the like. Although the latter are not part of the proletariat in the strict sense, these groups are increasingly brought under the control of corporate finance, large retail chains, private education corporations and insurance capital. Their independence is steadily reduced, and their livelihoods grow more insecure. Politically, they may hesitate or shift towards opportunistic positions, but in times of crisis they can rally behind a movement that offers democratic control over the economy and protection from monopoly power. The responsibility of the revolutionary party is to secure their active backing while firmly maintaining working-class leadership.
5. The United Front
We affirm that the working class can liberate itself only through its own united and conscious struggle. Today, workers are divided among different parties, trade unions and political tendencies. These divisions weaken our strength and allow the ruling class to attack wages, jobs, land and democratic rights. In a period of deep economic crisis, privatisation, agrarian distress and the growth of communal and authoritarian forces, unity in action has become an urgent necessity.
We therefore uphold the United Front as a central tactic of proletarian struggle. As developed at the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist International, the United Front means unity in action without surrendering political principles. It is a practical agreement among working-class organisations to fight together for immediate demands, such as higher wages, secure employment, land rights, public services, and trade union freedoms, and also to defend against communalism and fascistic violence.
We call for joint action among all working-class organisations: communist, socialist, social-democratic, and independent trade unions. When any section of workers is attacked by the state, employers, or reactionary forces, we stand for collective, organised resistance.
At the same time, we maintain complete political independence. The United Front is neither a merger of parties nor a compromise on our political programme. Within every joint struggle, we participate openly and place our views before the working people in a spirit of unity and frank discussion. Through common experience in action, the masses themselves will form their own understanding of the policies and methods that best defend their interests.
The strength of the United Front must typically grow from below—from factories, fields, offices, etc. However, we also recognise that agreements from above between leaderships may at times be necessary to organise united resistance, such as during elections. Such agreements must be open, transparent and aimed at mobilising the masses, not replacing them with backroom deals.
The United Front is essentially and strictly a unity of the working class and its organisations. It does not extend to alliances with bourgeois parties in the name of saving “democracy” while leaving capitalist power untouched. We reject class collaboration. The defence of democratic rights cannot be separated from the struggle against the capitalist system that threatens those rights.
Through united struggles over daily issues, workers build confidence, solidarity, and political clarity. The United Front strengthens our collective power and prepares us for greater battles ahead. It is not the final goal, but a vital step towards the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of workers’ power based on democratic control of society and the economy. The United Front strengthens our ability to organise disciplined, united, and purposeful struggles, transforming scattered resistance into collective power. In doing so, it enables us to fight effectively and consciously even within the capitalist framework.
6. Our Tasks Within the Capitalist Framework
6.1. Transitional Demands
We are convinced that the problems that people face under capitalism cannot be solved with reforms. In fact, at times, even the bourgeoisie are against a welfare state. However, we cannot wait for these problems to be solved till a socialist revolution takes place. Even under capitalism, the workers and other exploited and oppressed masses deserve to live better lives. When they struggle for these demands, they will also understand the limits of bourgeois democracy. Until the beginning of the socialist revolution—and in order to pave the way for it—let us build our Party around the following transitional programme:
Stand in solidarity with the international working class in their struggles within and against capitalism, and even within workers’ states, in their pursuit of greater proletarian democracy.
Organise the world working class to oppose embargoes imposed by capitalist countries on states whose governments have socialist or anti-capitalist tendencies.
Protest the persecution of undocumented immigrants and advocate for the free movement of people across the globe.
Support gender-sexual, linguistic, and religious minorities, and address their issues from a Marxist perspective.
Build a United Front of workers’ organisations against capitalism and fascism, and raise class consciousness by educating the working class, youths, and students in the ideas of scientific socialism.
We raise the following demands to bridge the gap between the immediate struggles of the oppressed and exploited, and the ultimate goal of socialist revolution. In India, based on this programme, we will organise the masses demanding the following, which will also influence the international working class to raise similar demands in the countries they live in:
Democratic and Political Rights
Establish the right to recall all elected representatives at every level.
Release all political prisoners and lift bans on political literature advocating the rights of workers, peasants, Dalits, Adivasis, and other exploited and oppressed sections of society.
Repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) and all other repressive laws.
Disarm the police of lethal weapons and make body cameras compulsory in all policing operations.
Reduce the salaries and privileges of bureaucrats and elected representatives to the level of an average worker.
Workers’ Power and Democratic Control of Production
Establish workers’ democracy in all industries, ensuring workers’ participation in decision-making related to production, distribution, recruitment, and wage administration.
Guarantee the unrestricted right of workers to organise, unionise, and strike.
Economic Transformation and Public Ownership
Nationalise all banks and major industries and halt the privatisation of existing public-sector enterprises.
Socialise the energy sector and abolish private ownership and management of natural resources.
Abolish indirect taxation and introduce a progressive system of direct taxation.
Regulate interest rates on loans, fixing the maximum rate at 5 per cent per annum for the common people.
Agrarian Justice and Rural Development
Write off all debts of landless, small, and poor peasants.
Improve the conditions of agrarian workers through access to advanced machinery and modern agricultural techniques.
Protect the land, forests, and natural resources of tribal people and other indigenous communities.
Enact special laws for the upliftment and protection of tribal people and other historically marginalised communities.
Labour Rights and Social Security
Ensure a six-hour working day, five days a week, in all sectors and create new vacancies to fulfil labour needs.
Guarantee equal pay for equal and similar work across all sectors.
Introduce mandatory annual salary increments of at least 15 per cent for all workers.
Provide adequate travelling allowances to all workers and housing allowances to those residing far from their workplaces.
Ensure enhanced medical leave for workers above the age of fifty.
Introduce menstrual leave for all menstruating workers and students.
Implement a comprehensive pension policy covering workers in public, private, and joint industries.
Provide unemployment benefits to all job-seekers and establish small industries to generate employment.
Universal Social Rights and Welfare
Guarantee the right to free and universal healthcare for all.
Ensure free and universal education at all levels, with all educational expenses borne by the state.
Guarantee the rights to food, shelter, work, rest, and financial security for all.
Eliminate homelessness and begging by ensuring free education, healthcare, and shelter for roadside dwellers.
Abolish child labour by banning the employment of minors and guaranteeing free, compulsory education for all children.
Social Equality and Emancipation
Abolish patriarchy in all its forms, including the prohibition of dowry, the elimination of child marriage, and the recognition of genders beyond the binary.
Legalise same-sex marriage and permit the adoption of children by same-sex, transgender, and non-binary couples, and ensure their right to access insurance, housing, joint property, and other social benefits currently available to married heterosexual couples.
Promote scientific temper and implement strong measures against harmful, superstitious, and oppressive practices.
Provide an adequate unemployment dole for all who are out of work and a regular stipend for homemakers in recognition of the social value of unpaid domestic labour.
Given that current affirmative action policies are restricted to reservations in government jobs and higher education, introduce a more inclusive, bottom-up policy of affirmative action by directly investing in primary education and basic infrastructure for Bahujan, Dalit, and Adivasi people, as well as in their social upliftment.
Introduce strict laws against caste discrimination in educational institutes and workplaces.
Form mandatory Internal Complaints Committees, gender sensitisation programmes, and SC–ST–OBC cells in all schools, colleges, universities, workplaces, and other institutions with democratic representation.
Linguistic and Cultural Rights
Protect the linguistic rights of all communities, including the smallest ones.
Ensure the right of every community to receive education in its mother tongue.
In multilingual regions, prevent the imposition of a single official language and ensure the use of all locally spoken languages in education and public life.
Withdraw the state’s involvement and intervention in religious matters and uphold the principle of secularism, ensuring religion remains a private affair.
Ensure unrestricted access to all religious places and abolish all discriminatory restrictions on entry.
These demands arise from the real needs of the masses but cannot be fully realised within the limits of capitalist property relations. In the course of struggle for these demands, the working class will be driven to challenge the power of capital itself.
6.2. A Progressive Use of the Bourgeois Legislature
The legislature in a modern state is an instrument of the bourgeoisie’s class rule. It exists to secure the political conditions of capitalist exploitation and to preserve the dominance of property over labour. Our Party does not believe that genuine liberation can be achieved through legislation enacted within institutions whose primary function is to safeguard private property. Nevertheless, as long as large sections of the working class continue to regard parliament as an important centre of political decision-making, we will not leave this political arena entirely in the hands of parties that represent capitalist interests or merely seek limited reforms within the existing system. We shall contest and utilise the legislature as one arena of struggle within the broader conflict between labour and capital.
Our participation is tactical and conditional. Parliamentarism may be historically obsolete in the epoch of proletarian revolution, but it still remains politically relevant. We enter the bourgeois legislature not to adapt to it, but to confront it. We enter the legislature not to strengthen it, but to expose its limits before the masses. Our legislators shall use every opportunity to reveal the class character of the state, to denounce imperialism and exploitation, and to expose how the machinery of parliament ultimately serves the narrow horizons of the capitalist class.
Within the legislature, our representatives shall act as tribunes of the people. They shall speak for workers in struggle, for the unemployed, for tenants, for the oppressed and marginalised. They shall introduce and support measures that improve the material conditions of the working class—defending wages, public services, democratic rights, and social provision—while making clear that such reforms, though necessary and hard-won, cannot abolish exploitation at its root. In this way, parliamentary activity shall be linked inseparably to extra-parliamentary struggle: to trade unions, mass organisations, strikes, and campaigns.
We reject careerism and opportunism. Our deputies shall not become legislators in the bourgeois sense, but disciplined representatives of a revolutionary movement. They shall be accountable to the Party and subject to recall. Their conduct shall be governed by collective decision and by fidelity to working-class interests. Parliamentary work shall never be elevated above mass struggle; it shall serve it.
We aim to assist the working class in overcoming parliamentary illusions through lived political experience. We prepare the ground for a higher form of democracy based on workers’ power. The progressive use of the bourgeois legislature thus forms part of our broader strategy: to organise, educate, and mobilise the proletariat for the conquest of political power and the construction of socialism.
6.3. Should We Form a Government in the Bourgeois State?
The formation of a government within a bourgeois state is not a question of prestige, but of strategy. The present state is not a neutral entity. Its entire machinery, including the judiciary, bureaucracy, armed forces, and security apparatus, has been developed to defend private property and the existing social system. In the struggle between labour and capital, it stands with the latter. Merely entering government does not equate to gaining real control over these entrenched structures. The decisive question is therefore not whether office can be attained, but whether the balance of forces allows the working class to use a governmental position to advance its struggle rather than become absorbed by the system.
Our Party does not treat governmental participation as an end in itself. We reject the illusion that socialism can be introduced through any parliamentary road. A government that merely administers capitalism, even with progressive intentions, ultimately becomes responsible for managing exploitation. Such a path leads to demoralisation and political disarmament.
Nevertheless, the Party does not adopt an abstract refusal to assume governmental responsibility under all conditions. Under certain circumstances, participation in government may serve as a platform for implementing urgent measures in defence of workers’ interests, expanding democratic rights, disarming reaction, and strengthening organs of popular power outside the state apparatus. Nevertheless, even then, participation must be clearly presented as transitional and conflictual, not as harmonious co-operation with capital.
If the Party enters the government, it will do so without forming alliances or coalitions with bourgeois parties of any size. Political independence from all parties representing capital is a fundamental principle. Any government formed through parliamentary elections would operate within the limits of the existing bourgeois framework and could therefore accomplish, at most, tasks of a social-democratic character. We shall state this openly. Within those limits, we would pursue a programme aimed at shifting the balance of power towards labour: the nationalisation of key sectors of the economy under democratic control; creation of new assets in the public sector; the fulfilment of our transitional demands; the decommodification of basic rights like transportation, education, healthcare, housing, etc.; the steady reduction, and ultimately the elimination, of reliance on private investment; the introduction of workers’ democracy in workplaces and the curtailment of powers of the bourgeoisie; and the strengthening and extension of trade unions.
If the Party were to enter government, it would do so only while maintaining full political independence and strong organisational discipline. It would resist anti-working-class policies demanded by capital, connect every action in government with mobilisation outside parliament—in workplaces, communities, and unions—and prepare the working class to confront institutions that obstruct democratic and social change.
Above all, the Party must tell the truth: without a transformation of state power itself, no genuine emancipation is possible. The real source of change is the organised strength of the people. Government office can, in certain circumstances, be used to help build and extend that strength, but it must never replace it, for if it becomes a substitute for mass struggle, the revolutionary objective is compromised.
Thus, the issue is not simply whether to form a government. The real questions are under what conditions, for what aim, and how this relates to the independent power of the working class. Taking office can only be justified if it strengthens, rather than weakens, the broader struggle for working-class power.
7. The Proletarian State
While the existing state functions as the organised power of the bourgeoisie, the proletarian state would function as the organised power of labour. Its purpose would be the expropriation of capital, the socialisation of the means of production, and the democratic planning of economic life according to social need. Such a transformation must be simultaneously anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and must also confront pre-capitalist remnants.
With the overthrow of bourgeois rule and the expropriation of the major conglomerates, banks, and large landed interests, the victorious socialist revolution will establish the political rule of the working class, supported by the peasantry and other oppressed strata. This will be a workers’ state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, exercising power in the interests of the immense majority and dismantling the material foundations of exploitation. Its central task will be to abolish capitalist property relations and reorganise society on socialist lines. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the transitional state, arising from the conquest of political power by the working class, which crushes the resistance of the bourgeoisie and constitutes the indispensable bridge from capitalist society to the socialist order.
7.1. Radical Democratisation under Workers’ Power
Political authority at every level would be entrusted to councils and assemblies chosen through universal, equal and direct suffrage, and grounded in workplaces, neighbourhoods and rural communities.
Guaranteeing the right to recall elected representatives and subjecting all administrative bodies to transparent public scrutiny and workers’ control.
Abolishing the bureaucratic insulation of the state apparatus and restructuring the civil service, judiciary, police and armed forces under democratic oversight by the working people.
Ensuring full democratic rights for all working people and their organisations; the workers’ state will guarantee freedom of speech, organisation, assembly, and press.
Establishing a swift, accessible and socially accountable system of justice, eliminating corruption, corporate influence and political criminality.
7.2. Socialist Reorganisation of the Economy
Nationalisation of the economy—major industries, finance capital, large-scale agribusiness and strategic infrastructure—without compensation.
Democratic planning of production and distribution according to social need rather than private profit.
Socialist planning will prioritise ecological sustainability, replacing the destructive logic of profit-driven extraction with rational and democratic stewardship of natural resources.
Comprehensive agrarian transformation: redistribution of concentrated landholdings, cancellation of usurious debts, support for cooperatives, and integration of agriculture into a planned economy.
Abolition of precarious and contractual labour systems; guarantee of secure employment, a living wage, equal pay for equal work, and full trade union rights.
Expansion of socially necessary production, such as housing, public transport, renewable energy, healthcare equipment, and education infrastructure.
Integration of scientific research and technological development into a publicly planned framework.
Establishing universal and free access to healthcare, education at all levels, nutritious food, housing, water, sanitation, childcare, and eldercare as enforceable social rights.
7.3. Social Equality and the Abolition of Oppression
Breaking the material basis of caste hierarchy through the redistribution of wealth, universal access to quality education, and the dismantling of property-based privilege.
Ensuring substantive gender equality by socialising domestic labour through public services, guaranteeing reproductive rights, equal wages, and representation in all spheres of public life.
Securing full equality and protection for LGBTQIA+ persons by detaching civil, economic and social rights from patriarchal and heteronormative structures.
Guaranteeing the rights of oppressed nationalities and minorities, including meaningful regional autonomy within a voluntary and democratic socialist federation.
7.4. Internationalism
Withdrawing from all imperialist military alignments and unequal economic arrangements that subordinate domestic development to global capital.
Promoting solidarity with workers and oppressed peoples worldwide and guiding them in organising socialist revolutions in their own countries, recognising that the final victory of socialism lies in the defeat of capitalism worldwide.
Firmly opposing imperialist domination and war; recognising all oppressed nationalities within larger oppressive states; and supporting their struggle for national liberation on the basis of the right to self-determination.
This workers’ state will not represent a transitional compromise between classes but the political supremacy of labour over capital. It will constitute a transitional form of state power through which the working class suppresses the resistance of the bourgeoisie while carrying forward an uninterrupted revolution. By uniting democratic transformation with socialist expropriation, it will dismantle both capitalist exploitation and the pre-capitalist hierarchies sustained within it, laying the foundations of a classless socialist society.
The proletarian state will carry through and realise those transitional demands that could not be fulfilled under bourgeois democracy, constrained as it is by capitalist property relations and the rule of capital. While the revolutionary party unites the masses in struggle around these demands during the period of bourgeois rule, it does so not in submission to that order, nor to perfect it, but to defend working-class interests, expose the structural limits of bourgeois democracy, and prepare the forces capable of transcending it. In the proletarian state, these demands will no longer remain partial or obstructed reforms within a hostile framework. Still, they will be implemented decisively as part of the broader socialist transformation of society.
8. The World Socialist Revolution
Socialism cannot be confined within national boundaries. Capitalism is a global system in which production, finance, technology and trade are organised across continents. Workers in every country are linked through this world economy, and the exploitation of labour in one region strengthens the power of capital everywhere. For this reason, the struggle of the working class against capitalism necessarily assumes an international character. The emancipation of labour in one country is inseparable from the emancipation of labour worldwide.
During the imperialist stage of capitalism, having failed to resolve the contradictions within their own societies, the bourgeoisie of different countries increasingly combined their forces to exploit the world proletariat. The expansion of global markets, international finance and multinational corporations has integrated workers from every continent into a single system of production. As Marx and Engels observed, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Capitalism thus creates the very international conditions that make a global struggle of labour against capital both necessary and possible.
The working masses of all countries ultimately share common interests that surpass national divisions. Capital moves internationally in search of profit, coordinating its power through multinational corporations, financial institutions and political alliances. A socialist revolution that remains isolated within a single country would therefore face enormous economic, diplomatic and military pressure from the capitalist world system. The long-term survival and development of socialism thus depend upon the extension of the revolution internationally.
The experience of past revolutions demonstrates that revolutions may first occur in individual countries where contradictions are most intense. Yet such victories represent only the beginning of a broader historical process. The consolidation of socialism requires the spread of revolutionary movements across borders, particularly in the major centres of global capitalism. Only when the international system of exploitation is dismantled can imperialism, economic domination and war be permanently abolished.
The working class in India forms part of this global proletariat. Its labour is integrated into international circuits of production and exchange, linking Indian workers directly with workers across the world. Its historic task is to unite with workers internationally and to seize state power from the bourgeoisie, establishing the political rule of labour as part of the world socialist revolution. For this reason, the struggle for socialism in India must consciously uphold proletarian internationalism, rejecting all forms of chauvinism, communalism and nationalism that divide the working class. Our Party therefore understands the necessity of an international organisation of communist parties capable of coordinating struggles against global capitalism.
The Revolutionary Communist Party of India dedicates itself to this historic mission. The socialist revolution in India will be both a national and an international act—an integral part of the global struggle for the emancipation of labour and the creation of a socialist world. Therefore, we proudly say that we stand for World Socialism.
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