We welcome the formation of Class War, the nucleus of a new group in South Asia. These comrades have initially come together through the work of NWBCW South Asia, but increasingly felt the need for a permanent political organisation as their natural next step. Planting the seeds for a future revival of the class is by no means an easy task, but we hope to travel along this road together. Meanwhile, NWBCW South Asia will continue to operate as a joint initiative with other internationalists in the region.⁽¹⁾

Founding Statement of Class War

Capitalism in South Asia is moving along a catastrophic trajectory. Beneath the rhetoric of “economic growth” and “emerging power” lies a reality of deepening immiseration for the majority. From industrial zones to agrarian hinterlands, society is being fractured by ecological destruction, communal sectarianism, and intensified exploitation of labor. The ruling class fragmented into rival nation-states and political factions offers only permanent crisis and the growing danger of generalized war.

The working class remains politically disarmed. The traditional “Left,” ranging from parliamentary Stalinism to Maoist insurgency, has reached a historical dead end. By binding workers to nationalism, bourgeois democracy, or the myth of “semi-feudalism,” these forces reproduce capitalist rule. They entrench divisions along caste, religion, and region, obscuring the fundamental antagonism between capital and labor.

Class War has been formed to break decisively with these mystifications. We affirm that there is no national solution to proletarian exploitation. Only the political independence of the working class and a return to the uncompromising principles of revolutionary Marxism can confront capital.

We do not proclaim ourselves the party, but a nucleus committed to theoretical clarification and political intervention. The emancipation of the working class must be the task of the workers themselves, organized internationally. As sympathizers of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, we work to root the traditions of the Communist Left in South Asia as part of the struggle for world revolution.

To clarify our orientation, Class War advances the following platform:

1. Capitalist society is experiencing crisis everywhere, and this is how it manifests in South Asia, where it confronts an insoluble crisis driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This fundamental contradiction obstructs the accumulation process and compels capital to offset its declining profitability through intensified exploitation of labor and nature. The consequences of this obstructed valorization are evident in accelerating ecological destruction and the agrarian distress driving farmers to suicide. Furthermore, these deepening economic contradictions inevitably drag the region into wider imperialist conflicts as global powers compete to secure the remaining resources and markets necessary for their survival.
2. We base ourselves on proletarian internationalism and reject support for any nation-state, whether existing or aspiring. National liberation movements can no longer serve working class interests in the contemporary imperialist epoch. We oppose all nationalist projects including but not limited to Kashmiri separatism, Khalistan advocacy, Tamil Eelam advocacy, Baloch nationalism and North-Eastern insurgencies, recognizing these as bourgeois programs that divide the working class along territorial lines. We equally oppose Hindu nationalism, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, Bengali nationalism, regional chauvinisms, and communal politics, understanding these as instruments through which the ruling class fragments proletarian unity and directs workers' struggles into dead ends that serve competing capitalist factions.
3. The working class constitutes the only revolutionary class capable of abolishing capitalism. Revolutionary transformation requires the independent struggle of workers outside of trade unions, parliamentary institutions, and NGO frameworks. Instead, through the formation of autonomous class organs, including workplace committees, general assemblies, strike committees, and workers' councils that can dismantle capitalist relations and construct socialist society.
4. A successful revolution must be international in scope, requiring a world revolution for its consolidation. Victory necessitates that the revolutionary minority within the working class organizes itself, understood not as a government-in-waiting but as an organ within and of the class itself. A revolutionary organization must exist beforehand to defend the communist programme and intervene in daily struggles, but this revolutionary organization only becomes a revolutionary party when it is accepted by the working class as its political reference during mass struggle. The party comes from within the working class and its struggles, and its rise is parallel with that of the general combative consciousness of the class which no amount of voluntarism or short-term tactical shifts can accelerate. It intervenes within the councils as an organised force, never above them, struggling within them to advance the programme. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a genuine proletarian revolution and remains an international source of inspiration as the beginning of an aborted world revolutionary wave.
5. The isolation of the Russian Revolution to a single country, following the defeat of revolutionary movements elsewhere, led inevitably to the betrayal of its socialist content and the emergence of state capitalism under increasingly centralized bureaucratic control, demonstrating that socialism cannot be constructed in one country alone.
6. Trade unions throughout South Asia have been thoroughly integrated into the capitalist state apparatus and no longer function as fighting organizations of the working class. Although unions comprise of workers and claim to defend their interests, they operate exclusively within capitalism's framework and serve primarily to discipline labor and prevent independent working class action. We reject strategies aimed at capturing unions for revolutionary purposes or transforming them into revolutionary instruments.
7. We reject parliamentarism and electoral participation categorically, as parliament forms an integral component of the bourgeois state machinery that cannot be utilized in proletarian struggle. Electoral politics, whether pursued by parliamentary left parties or Stalinist organizations, serves only to channel working class militancy into dead ends and reinforce illusions in bourgeois democracy.
8. We oppose all forms of popular front, united front, or coalition politics that involve class collaboration or the dilution of revolutionary principles. Historical experience demonstrates conclusively that whenever the working class or its revolutionary vanguard has entered popular fronts, anti-fascist fronts, or national democratic fronts with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois forces, such alliances have strengthened capitalism, regardless of stated intentions.
9. South Asia's agrarian economies have undergone capitalist transformation. The countryside is characterized not by semi-feudal relations but by capitalist class differentiation, petty commodity production, generalized wage labor, and market domination. The semi-feudal thesis propagated by Maoist and Naxalite movements misrepresents capitalist agrarian relations as feudal remnants, thereby legitimizing petty-bourgeois peasant rebellions rather than independent working class struggle. Small and marginal farmers function primarily as a rural semi-proletariat, combining subsistence agriculture with wage work, while a minority of capitalist farmers dominate production through mechanization and labor exploitation. Naxalism's strategy of peasant-based guerrilla warfare represents a nationalist and petty-bourgeois political program incompatible with proletarian internationalism and incapable of transcending capitalist relations.
10. We fight for the unity of the working class against all divisions imposed by capitalist society along lines of caste, religion, region, language, ethnicity, and gender. The caste system, while possessing pre-capitalist origins, has been thoroughly incorporated into and transformed by South Asian capitalism as a mechanism for labor segmentation, wage depression, and the prevention of class solidarity. We oppose caste oppression as part of the struggle against capitalist exploitation itself, recognizing that Dalit liberation cannot be achieved through representation within the existing state but it requires the abolition of the entire system of class society.
11. The former Soviet Union, and present day China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam are not socialist societies, but state-capitalist regimes characterized by bureaucratic exploitation of the working class. These systems cannot be defended by workers and do not represent models for emancipation. Similarly, the parliamentary left in South Asia including the CPI, CPM, JVP, and Awami League function as managers of capitalism at state level and obstacles to genuine working class independence.

We stand as sympathizers of the Internationalist Communist Tendency and work toward establishing a formal section of the ICT in South Asia, contributing to the international struggle for proletarian revolution and the construction of a worldwide communist society.

Notes:

(1) NWBCW South Asia can be contacted through their website, as well as Instagram and Twitter/X.