For the first time since 1977, our Party heads no state government. The Assembly elections have dealt us serious setbacks in Keralam and in West Bengal, the BJP has won on a communal and divisive campaign. Since 1991, the ideological offensive against us has been continuously parroting that socialism is dead. Our reply in this condition must be to boldly present the socialist alternative which is rooted in the actual aspirations of the Indian people and in the actual crisis of the capitalist order.

ASPIRATIONS OF INDIAN PEOPLE VS. FALSE PROPAGANDA

What were the expectations of the Indian people from Independence? The masses expected an end to poverty and exploitation, access to land, food, fair wages, housing, education, health care, employment. Freedom from casteism and communal hatred. However, 79 years later, these aspirations remain unfulfilled for the vast majority. The bourgeois-landlord order, now in its neoliberal phase and yoked to the Manuvadi Hindutva project, hasn’t answered them and can’t answer them. It’s these aspirations of the workers, the peasants, the agricultural labourers, the minorities, the dalits, the adivasis, the women, the youth, and the students, that constitute the living material of the socialist project in India.

There’s a false propaganda that tries to portray that socialism is a foreign import, a 19th-century European idea transplanted to Indian soil, and that it collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Every part of this claim is wrong. The aspiration for an egalitarian society is as old as class society itself. Some version of it exists in the folklores of all societies. In Keralam, every child knows the festival of Onam and the legend of Mahabali. According to the Onappattu, when Maveli ruled the land, all human beings were equal. What’s this if not the people’s memory of a classless ideal, projected backward into a golden age? Born in 1809 into an oppressed caste in Travancore, Ayya Vaikunda Swamikal organised the Samatva Samajam in 1836. He was nine years elder to Karl Marx and his society of equals predated the Communist Manifesto by 12 years. Similar social conditions of oppression generate similar aspirations for emancipation, in Travancore as in the Rhineland. Clearly, the struggle for equality is not at all a European export.

SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM AND SOVIET UNION

Two major contributions of Karl Marx raised socialism from utopia to science. These were the materialist conception of history, and the understanding of capitalist exploitation through surplus value. The programme of scientific socialism was based on those contributions, and it has been updated at every major turn of history. In 1872, on the basis of the Paris Commune’s 72 days of revolutionary experience and due to other reasons, Marx and Engels publicly declared that they would have written the Communist Manifesto differently, had they been writing it then. At the same time, they affirmed that the basic understanding remained correct. The founders of scientific socialism themselves declared that their own document was partially obsolete. In 1875, Marx subjected the Gotha Programme to a withering critique. But he fought within the movement to correct it, and his critique educated the entire subsequent generation.

Similarly, Lenin broke with Kautsky (who was understood as the most learned Marxist of his age) because Kautsky treated the formulas of one epoch as eternal truths. Kautsky’s dogmatism became betrayal when it counterposed the letter of Marxism to the living revolution. The Soviet Union transformed a backward, war-ravaged, largely illiterate peasant country into a mighty industrial power where unemployment was eliminated and universal free education and health care were established. Angus Maddison recorded that Soviet economic growth between 1913 and 1965 was the fastest in the world. And all this happened in the teeth of unrelenting hostility that included armed intervention by fourteen states, encirclement, embargo, and then the fascist invasion.

Yet in 1989-91, the Soviet Union and the East European socialist states collapsed. Our 14^th Congress at Madras analysed their collapse. Contrary to Marx’s expectation, Socialism was built in countries that were capitalistically backward. The productive forces were raised at breakneck speed under hostile encirclement. The Soviet model chose extreme reliance on the state sector, forced collectivisation, and highly centralised planning. It achieved extensive industrialisation and progress, but then began to falter. Distortions accumulated in the political sphere including bureaucratic centralism, erosion of socialist democracy, merger of party and state, violations of socialist legality etc. The party substituted itself for the state. The working people, in whose name power was exercised, were progressively excluded from its actual exercise.

In the international sphere too, erroneous assessments were made. The 1957 and 1960 conferences declared that capitalism was in terminal disintegration. This was a gross underestimation of capitalism’s capacity to adapt and develop the productive forces. Capitalism harnessed the scientific and technological developments whereas the Soviet model failed to do so even after the remarkable triumphs in space science etc, especially in the civilian domain. The lesson from the Soviet experience was that Socialism has to be built by the conscious activity of the working people of each country, on the soil of each country’s own conditions.

PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY IN INDIA

That leads us to India. Our Programme adheres firmly to the aim of building socialism, to progress towards communism. But it doesn’t place socialist revolution as the immediate task. Why not? Because capitalism in India was superimposed upon pre-capitalist society. Neither the British colonialists nor the Indian big bourgeoisie smashed the pre-capitalist order. Landlordism was preserved and transformed. The institution of caste was integrated into the new capitalist order. Therefore, the basic tasks of the democratic revolution such as radical agrarian reform, destruction of caste oppression, liberation from foreign finance capital and domestic monopoly etc remain unfinished. Hence, our present stage is the people’s democratic revolution which is anti-feudal, anti-imperialist, anti-monopoly, and democratic. It has to be led by the working class. And its leadership ensures that the revolution will pass over to socialist transformation.

People’s Democracy is the Indian road to socialism. We also know that there is no Chinese wall dividing the two! The heart of the strategy is the alliance of classes. The enemy is the bourgeois-landlord ruling combine headed by the big bourgeoisie, and increasingly allied with foreign finance capital. The leader of the people’s struggle for emancipation is the working class. The core and basis of the front is the firm alliance of the working class and the peasantry. Within the peasantry, our basic allies are agricultural labourers and poor peasants. Middle peasants are reliable allies. Rich peasants are vacillating – they benefit from bourgeois-landlord policies yet are squeezed by monopoly traders – and at particular junctures can be brought into the front.

What will People’s Democracy do concretely? Abolition of landlordism through radical land reforms. Land free of cost to agricultural labourers and poor peasants. Elimination of monopolies. A strengthened and democratised public sector. A living wage. Equal rights for women including inheritance. A genuinely secular state. Free and compulsory education and health care. Real autonomy for the states. Proportional representation and the right to recall. Every one of these measures answers a felt aspiration of a definite class or section and the correspondence between our programme and aspiration is what makes the front possible.

BUILDING SOCIALISM

Now let’s turn to what will be specific about building socialism in India. First, the revolution must walk on two legs – class struggle and the struggle for social justice. Caste has become integrated with the capitalist order itself. The landlord and the moneylender are usually of the dominant castes; the agricultural labourer is overwhelmingly dalit. Crimes against Scheduled Castes rose 13 per cent between 2021 and 2022. Socialism in India must mean the abolition of both class exploitation and caste oppression. Neither struggle can wait upon the other.

Second, the emancipation of women. Socialism in India can come into being only when patriarchy is eliminated along with caste. We will end the sexual division of labour, establish a democratic family code, institute socially organised child care, guarantee equal pay, and act with severity against every form of violence against women.

Third, democracy. India has had more than seven decades of parliamentary democracy. Under socialism in India, democracy will be expressed through a multi-party system under a socialist constitution. Popular assemblies at every level with powers over administration and economy. Proportional representation. The right to recall. Federalism with equal powers for all states. A democratic language policy founded on equality of all national languages.

Fourth, the environment. The world faces an environmental crisis that threatens life on the planet, and the predatory nature of capitalism is its primary cause. In India we’ve already lived the consequences in the form of floods, landslides, cyclones on both coasts, extremely poisoned air in our cities. Our socialism will integrate economic development with ecological balance as a basic principle of all planning.

Fifth, technology. Artificial intelligence under capitalist control is taking away jobs, concentrating power in a handful of monopolies, and saturating society with surveillance. A socialist India will fight data imperialism, build publicly owned digital platforms, replace the privatised intellectual property regime with a knowledge commons, and direct the use of technologies like AI for social welfare.

Sixth, the agrarian transformation. The agrarian question remains the foremost national question. Socialism must raise the productivity of labour many times over and it must reap the advantages of scale and of modern science in agriculture. But the transition to collective forms will be undertaken only by making the small peasants realise that their material advance lies in collective production.

TASKS BEFORE US

What then, are the tasks before us? First, the idea of Socialism as an alternative should be taken with conviction to the whole Party and beyond. Every state committee must organise party education on socialism in Indian conditions. We must produce popular material in all our languages that a factory worker, peasant and a college student can read and understand.

Second, connect the vision to daily struggles. The socialist alternative will become a material force when the fight for MSP is linked to the vision of cooperative agriculture, when the fight against the Labour Codes is linked to workers’ power in production, when the fight against caste atrocity is linked to a casteless society and when the defence of rivers and forests is linked to planned, ecological development.

Third, build the instrument. Between the aspiration and the socialist future stands the people’s democratic revolution, and between us and the revolution stands the present relationship of forces. The line of the 24^th Congress is to build the independent strength of the Party, revive the Left, rally all Left and democratic forces around a Left and Democratic Programme, fight the BJP-RSS as the principal danger, and carry out rectification honestly.

Fourth, make patient efforts to mobilise all sections of society into the fold of the democratic movement, especially those who are religious minded but are willing to be part of the livelihoods related struggles and progressive movements. Reactionary forces – more so in a country like India with high religiosity – frighten them with the canard that communists are anti-religion. We cannot and should not allow believers to fall into the hands of communal and extremist forces misusing religion.

Fifth, hold fast to the method. Concrete analysis of concrete conditions. The mass line. Democratic centralism with living inner-party democracy. Proletarian internationalism with independent judgement. Revolutionary optimism grounded in material analysis.

Our people have carried the dream of equality for a very long time. It has fallen to our Party to convert the dream into a programme, the programme into a movement, and the movement into a new society. That’s what it means when we say that socialism is the alternative; socialism in Indian conditions, socialism in the 21^st century. Onwards and upwards!