On October 17, in the face of mass protest by workers and youth, the Hindu fascist government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was forced to release Abhijeet Dipke from detention. Dipke is the founder of the upstart liberal Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which has moved millions across the country to protest the anti-Muslim racism, unemployment, and inequality of the vicious Modi regime (Guardian, 10/21).
Unfortunately, for now, this movement is strictly wedded to reform. It views the government’s racist and sexist attacks as affronts to the myth of “democracy,” not essential aspects of capitalism in crisis. By and large, the demonstrators have yet to see that there are no lesser evils in the bosses’ elections—only evil.
R. Palme Dutt, a British communist leader and theoretician in the years leading up to World War II, wrote that fascism is “the characteristic instrument of finance-capital… in the most highly developed industrial countries when the stage of the crisis and of the class struggle requires it” (Fascism and Social Revolution). In other words, the rise of global fascism, from India and China to France and Germany to Israel and the U.S., is driven by the contradictions within global capitalism. These bosses need to discipline their own ranks while using nationalism, racism, and sexism to divide the working class, suppress fightback, and build their imperialist armies for World War III.
But the capitalists’ naked attacks are not going unchecked. Working-class rage is spreading. France has been engulfed by mass student-led protests, and India’s rulers have barricaded much of New Delhi, the country’s capital, as they terrorize protestors and arrest thousands (UNHR, 10/20). To transform these courageous struggles from dead-end electoralism and reform into a revolutionary movement that ends capitalism for good, workers and youth need communist leadership and a fighting revolutionary party: Progressive Labor Party.
Fascism is no bug in the system
In recent weeks, the CJP and other opposition groups have mobilized rallies and marches to counter a racist government program called the “Special Intensive Revision,” or SIR, which has stripped an estimated 130 million workers from the voting rolls. As part of a strategy to favor Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Muslim and other oppressed workers have been targeted (France24, 10/16).
The political climate in India, the world’s most populous country and its largest “democracy,” reflects a broader lurch toward fascism. Modi and his BJP, in power for more than a decade, have consolidated their rule by scapegoating Muslim workers, tribal communities, and the lower castes known as Dalit.
Between 2014 and 2024, racist mobs lynched 1,743 workers, most of them Muslim or Dalit, in the dairy, cattle, and leather trades (Frontline, 10/6). In 2022 and 2023, much like their Israeli Zionazi counterparts, state-sanctioned Hindu fascists called on “bulldozer justice,” to displace 740,000 Muslim workers (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 4/2024).
Despite the BJP’s broad base of support, an embarrassing showing in the 2024 national elections exposed its potential vulnerability (CNBC, 6/4/24). The intensifying campaign to restrict voter eligibility mirrors racist efforts by the Donald Trump-led wing of the U.S. ruling class to rig and destabilize elections for their own benefit while targeting and terrorizing Black and Latin workers.
In periods of relative stability, the capitalist rulers prefer to use liberal democracy and elections to pacify workers and obscure the bosses’ ruthless exploitation. But when the profit system is inevitably rocked by the latest boom-and-bust crisis, and workers rebel against worsening conditions, the mask comes off. The brutal core of the bosses’ class dictatorship is shown for all to see. The only solution to the system’s violent decay is to build mass working-class fightback under communist leadership. As Russia and China showed in the great revolutions of the twentieth century, only communism can smash fascism.
CJP leadership undermines righteous anger of masses
The Cockroach Janta Party emerged online this spring as a satirical response to a top judge’s characterization of unemployed youth as “cockroaches.” It evolved into mass protests this past summer that forced the resignation of the country’s top education minister (New York Times, 8/25). While we are inspired by the militancy of masses of honest workers and youth, the liberal nationalist ideas of the CJP leadership are toxic for our class. The day he was arrested, Dipke had called on protestors to unfurl a giant Indian national flag (Independent, 10/17). This is the same flag that adorns the uniforms of the fascist Indian police, the flag saluted by the fascist Modi government and the corrupt Indian ruling class.
The Cockroach movement can easily be co-opted by India’s rival capitalist parties, including the Congress Party and the fake-left Communist Party of India, whose bosses want to remove Modi and exploit workers for their own profits. The workers of India, like all workers of the world, need a different kind of party—one that represents the international working class and its fight to overthrow capitalism once and for all.
Crush parasitic capitalist system
From Paris to New Delhi, workers and youth are growing conscious of their massive potential power to alter the course of history. The international working class deserves far more than the next set of reformist politicians, the stooges and leeches who are tied to the needs of capitalism and the slide into fascist terror and imperialist war. To truly change the world, we need to crush this rotten capitalist system with communist revolution.
Communism means a society without money, the basis of exploitation, the theft of workers’ labor. It means shedding the shackles of race, gender, nationality, and religion, which serve only to divide our class. It means sharing the abundance that workers create. It means using our technologies to advance all of humanity, not just the rapacious billionaires hellbent on our destruction. Dare to struggle, dare to win! Join PLP!
