Only worker peasant rule can ensure prosperity and security for all!
Build a united political front against the bourgeoisie and the capitalist imperialist system!
Call of the Communist Ghadar Party of India to Workers on May Day, 2009
Comrade Workers!
Only worker peasant rule can ensure prosperity and security for all!Build a united political front against the bourgeoisie and the capitalist imperialist system!
Call of the Communist Ghadar Party of India to Workers on May Day, 2009
Comrade Workers!
We are preparing for the May Day celebrations this year in the context of an unprecedented crisis of capitalism on the world scale. Lakhs of workers are losing jobs every month in the US, China, India and all over the world. Peasants and small producers are facing high debt and insecurity of livelihood as a result of the steep rise and fall in commodity prices in 2008, caused by speculation in futures markets. More and more people all over the world can see that capitalism cannot provide for all. The class struggle between workers and capitalists has been intensifying on the world scale.
What has led to the deep global economic crisis? Who is responsible? What is the solution? The bourgeoisie is trying its best to cover up the truth that capitalism is a crisis-ridden system. Unprecedented levels of global exploitation and plunder, to satisfy the unlimited greed of a wealthy minority, is responsible for the problem. The loot and plunder has left the toiling masses with too little purchasing power to buy what the capitalists want to sell. The bursting of artificial bubbles in stock markets, commodities and real estate have wiped out the savings of many middle class families and a section of working people who invested in mutual funds.
Bourgeois economists in India, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh, like to blame the ‘west’ for the crisis, and pretend to be innocent victims. This is far from the truth. Succesive governments have deliberately pursued a course of increasing integration of the Indian economy with the global imperialist economy. This has been done to advance the imperialist aims of the Indian big bourgeoise. The Tatas, Ambanis and other Indian corporate giants have been in the forefront of those who expanded their wealth very rapidly and enhanced their global status in recent decades. Indian big capitalists as well as their government are not victims of the global crisis; they are part of the problem.
Fall in consumer spending in the US and Europe has led to production cut backs and shut downs in various export oriented sectors of production in India, including readymade garments, gems and jewellery, leather products, etc. Decline in the production of readymade garments led to cut back in cloth production, which in turn has led to decline in demand for cotton, affecting the cotton growing peasants in various parts of the country. Thus, there is a chain reaction, with different sectors pulling each other down. Loss of jobs for lakhs of workers in exporting units has led to decline in demand for all the commodities that those workers and peasants would have bought if they had not lost their livelihood.
The process of production is highly socialized and spread globally across continents, while ownership of the means of production remains private. This is the main source of repeated crises. Private greed blocks the way to harmonise production with the consumption needs of the masses. For instance, the readymade garments sector could be reoriented to produce clothes for our own people, saving lakhs of jobs. However, capitalist factory owners do not want any cut in profits, nor do the banks that want to lend only where maximum returns are assured.
If social production was oriented to fulfill the needs of all members of society, then there would be no crisis, nor such massive unemployment. There is so much more to be produced if all our people are to be adequately fed, clothed, sheltered and provided with quality electricity and water supply, education and health care services, etc. So many pairs of additional hands need to be employed. The reason it is not happening today is because the means of production are in the hands of capitalists who decide when to invest, how much and in which sectors, according to what they think will fetch maximum profits for themselves.
The working class cannot and must not accept the capitalist logic that what is spent to keep the working people well fed, educated and in good health, is a “recurring cost” that must be cut down to a minimum. The material values that get consumed by the working people are investments that enhance the productive capacity of the country. We, the working people, are the most important productive force of society. What is extracted from us by the owners of capital in the form of private profit, interest and rent, are actually the “recurring cost” – the real drain on the economy, which needs to be cut down to a minimum and completely eliminated.
We, the working people, need to gain collective control over the gifts of Nature as well as the social means of production such as plant and machinery created by human labour. We must become the rulers of India, and establish a new state power that would protect and maintain our rule. Only then can we ensure the extended reproduction of society without any crisis, along with prosperity and protection for every member of society. Only worker-peasant rule can ensure prosperity and security for all!
Comrade Workers!
May Day this year is coming in the midst of the process of electing the 15th Lok Sabha. . Through these elections, the ruling bourgeois class is hoping to install another capitalist government with a 5-year term, to forge further ahead on the path of enriching the big capitalists and enabling them to join the most elite club of big imperialist powers of the world.
As part of the election campaign, the bourgeoisie is carrying out sustained propaganda about the terrorist threat. The bourgeoisie has been using its preferred weapon of terrorism and state terrorism to smash our unity and paralyse our struggle. For over 25 years, we have been at the receiving end of the state organised communal terror of ruling class parties like Congress and BJP carried out with full backing of state apparatus in Delhi, Punjab, Assam, UP, Kashmir, Maharashtra, Gujarat and all across India. We have been at the receiving end of fascist army and police rule, of draconian laws like AFSPA, TADA, POTA, UAPA, Chattisgarh Public Safetey Act, etc which the bourgeoisie justifies in the name of "defending unity and territorial integrity" from Naxalites, extremists, terrorists, separatists and insurgents. The ruling bourgeoisie has perfected the method of training and deploying various terrorist groups to carry out monstrous attacks on people, and then justifying stepped up state terorism against the people fighitng for their rights, in the name of 'countering terrorism'.
The bourgeoise and its political parties are using these elections to make workers and peasants give up our united resistance to the capitalist offensive and get divided along the lines of inter-capitalist and inter-party rivalry and along lines of religion, caste and region. It wants workers and peasants to debate whether Advani or Manmohan Singh will be a better Prime Minister for the capitalists! We must not get diverted.
Workers and peasants need and want a change in the economic and political system itself – not merely a change of parties and faces in government. We need to step up the struggle against the attacks on our livelihood and rights, which the bourgeoisie is planning to escalate. There is need for workers to unite as a class, wage one united and well organized struggle to halt the imperialist drive of the Indian bourgeoisie.
We need to change the orientation of the economy. From being geared to enrich the capitalist class, it must be reorganized to fulfill all basic needs of those who toil to produce the wealth. We need to change the nature of the Indian state. In place of this instrument of colonial style plunder by capitalists, we need a state which is an instrument for the toiling majority to rule and ensure that their livelihood is secure. We need a state that would provide constitutional guarantee and enforcing mechanisms for the Right to Work and the Right to Livelihood.
The immediate practical step is to build a united political front against the bourgeoisie and against the capitalist-imperialist system. An alliance of workers and peasants must be the backbone of such an anti-capitalist front. Such an alliance has to be forged from below, with the active participation of workers' unions and peasants' associations; and also from above, through the struggle to restore the unity of communists on a revolutionary and principled basis. This means that communist workers, irrespective of which party they militate in, must consciously and consistently fight for the political unity of the class organisations against the capitalist system and the capitalist program. At the same time, communist workers must expose and isolate all those in communist movement who are blocking the development of the anti capitalist united political front and the road to worker-peasant rule, by creating illussions about any new or old bourgeois front.
Comrade Workers!
Come, let us use the occasion of May Day to raise the level of political discussion among workers and their leaders on the alternative to capitalism and the Westminster model of democracy. Let us reject the illusion of a middle path, and of any new or old bourgeois front that would allegedly be kind to the workers and peasants. Let us build political unity around the program of worker-peasant rule and of socialist reorientation of the economy.
Come, let us prepare to become the masters of India!
India belongs to us, not to the criminal and parasitic capitalist class and its imperialist allies!