Unity Statement of RCPI and Radical Socialist, adopted after discussion on 9 and 10 August 2026
Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI) was formed during the India freedom struggle from a split in the then Stalinist and class collaborationist CPI in 1934 initially as Communist League and subsequently changed into RCPI when it became a party. The central leader of the RCPI was Saumyendranath Tagore, an Indian delegate to the 6th Congress of the Communist International, who was to gradually question the Colonial Thesis, the decision to expel Trotsky and the sectarian line during the rise of Hitler as well as the bureaucratic decline inside the USSR. In the late 1940s, there was a sharp division within the RCPI when Tagore opposed what he saw correctly as an ultraleft and adventurist line of armed uprising advocated by the majority of the leadership under Pannalal Dasgupta. This led to a split. Sudhin Kumar was able to ensure a recovery of that group after steering out of Dasgupta's politics of untimely locality based armed struggle. Subsequently all sides underwent a decline, but the RCPI continues to exist as a left party, and has achieved re-unification.
The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, emerged as a result of a split in the international communist movement in early 1930s against Menshevik, Kautskyan class collaborationist deviation and bureaucratic degeneration led by the Stalinist clique reflected in almost all the countries in the world. In India, it was the formation of the Bolshevik Leninist party of India and Ceylon, later the BLPI, that became the Indian Section of the Fourth International. The Indian Section of the Fourth International has undergone several political and organisational debacles and had different formations (as political group) at different times like Communist League, Inquilabi Communist Sangathan, Radical Socialist (RS) etc., but it has maintained a common lineage throughout. RS (as a political group) was operating as the section of FI in India.
Both RCPI and the Indian section of FI have some glorious legacies as well as dark spots in their history. Both the tendencies have key commonalities in their formative ideologies, with some differences as well, some of which have faded into irrelevance with the fall of the Soviet bloc and the changes in China. However, the journey together by these two tendencies has never really happened, although some efforts were taken at different times.
In spite of proximity in the formative ideologies there have been certain differences between the two political tendencies in actual practices by them in the last several decades. However, with the changing political terrain and the crisis of the left movement in India, RCPI and RS felt the necessity of coming together and to unite based on their original and formative ideologies as the axis of such unification. While not ignoring the mistakes committed, the dark spots and the deviations in the past by the two organisations (or their predecessors), but considering them as political lessons to be acknowledged, the unified organisation upholds only their positive heritage for their unified journey together in the days to come.
The unified organisation is a NEW IDENTITY carrying forward the revolutionary ideology of RCPI and RS, naming itself as RCPI, because of its continuity in maintaining the name, which is absent in the case of the Indian Section of the Fourth International.
The RCPI, as hereafter we shall call ourselves, stands for the following principles:
That socialism, our endeavour and goal, is possible and desirable but not inevitable. It will be built by the self-emancipation of the working class, leading behind it all the other exploited and oppressed categories—national minorities, oppressed genders and sexualities, castes, adivasis, and, in certain cases, oppressed religious minorities, without ignoring class realities.
A working-class-led revolution must inevitably result, if successful, in establishing the rule of the working class, supported by its allies through institutions of the broadest democracy, cutting out from the beginning bureaucratic and authoritarian institutions that curtail democracy. This was what Marx meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, not the rule of one party and its bureaucratic leadership, or even one great leader or the Ek Nayak.
We reject both Popular Frontism (strategic collaboration with bourgeois parties) as well as ultra-left versions of Stalinism, where minority heroism and armed action are promoted against mass mobilisations and mass struggles.
We reject the idea of revolution by stages. A revolution led by the working class cannot stop at some arbitrary point short of seizing the means of production from the current ruling class; it cannot stop at an imagined National, People's or New Democratic stage. We agree that this persists as a consequence of the uneven and combined character of capitalist development in India, tasks that in the 19th century could have been called tasks of the democratic revolution. While this needs special attention, we reject the view that this means a separate stage of revolution. Political power, the essence of a revolutionary overturn, must be under working-class leadership, whatever pre-capitalist remnants and capitalist distortions need to be tackled.
For us, communism is learnt from the experiences of nearly three centuries of working-class struggles, successful and failed revolutions, from the revolutionary practice of proletarian organisations since the Communist League of 1847, the first three Internationals during their periods of greatness, and other progressive social struggles and teachings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Lev Trotsky and Saumyendranath Tagore and many other Marxists thereafter. That is why our Marxism is also a method to incorporate the lessons of concrete material reality for social change. For this reason, we want to highlight that a contemporary revolutionary programme must take into account the developments since the 1940s.
We hold that the collapse of the USSR and the Transformations in China mean the restoration of capitalism in present-day China and Russia. While we continue to see US imperialism and NATO as the leading imperialist threats, we oppose any alignment with Russia, China in the name of anti-imperialism. BRICS, containing as it does many imperialist-sub-imperialist powers of its own, is not an anti-imperialist bloc.
We are all aware of global warming and other ecological issues. But we need to bring them explicitly into a socialist, class-struggle framework. The struggle against climate change must therefore be made coherent with the struggle for socialism.
What we stand for in today’s world and today’s India is gender justice, the rights of ethnic national entities, the full emancipation of oppressed castes from Brahmanical and upper caste oppression, and the linking of Adivasi rights with ecological concerns. We do not support extreme forms of identity politics, but we recognise the reality of multiple oppressions and identities. Identities are real, and exploitation, oppression, alienation, based on them trample all human rights. There is no advance to socialism without addressing these, because the worst victims of identity-based division and oppression are the working classes themselves. We do not consider that all organisations fighting for identity rights should be rejected. We must draw close to progressives among them.
We propose a transitional programme, a bridge between the immediate economic and other partial struggles with the struggle for a socialist alternative. It is important to combine the global perspective with immediate and localised demands. To win people away from the capitalist system, to encourage them to resist, successful struggles are needed that give courage and demonstrate that partial victories are possible. Successful struggles require better organisation. This is always true in principle, but today—in times when organised working-class struggles are weakened and the left is fragmented—it is important to promote practical cooperation in a non-sectarian way, especially among the anti-capitalist left, and at the same time to support workers in their self-organisation.
We need concrete programmes and recognition of what we have failed to do for women and sexual minorities—participation in women's rights and LGBTQI+ struggles, recruiting them, ensuring more space for them in party meetings and party leaderships. In the same way, we need concrete programmes and recognition of a specific orientation to the multiple oppressions and exploitation of Dalits and Adivasis and to recruit them, creating more space for them not just in the membership but the leadership of the party.
We are for the building of a Leninist party, which is not a structural prescription of the organisation, but a fundamental political pillar of socialist revolution and devoid of any Stalinist or social-democratic distortions. For us, the significance of democratic centralism is political and is much higher than its organisational dimension and is not some fixed format in the changing or escalating dynamics of class struggles. The right of all sections of the party to have their views communicated to other sections, unity in action when decided in consistency with the programmatic understanding, the right of minorities to question the majority, the right to act separately when decisions contradict the basic programme, regular publications, conferences, meetings including virtual meetings, etc. are some common practices.
‘Workers of the World Unite’ is not a mere slogan for chanting but for practising internationalism. We therefore conclude with our wish to obtain the status of a ‘permanent observer’ of the Fourth International. We shall also strive to collaborate with like-minded organisations all over the world.
★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭
No comments:
Post a Comment