THE CITU Working Committee met on 17–19 July 2026 at Comrade Debanjan Chakraborty Manch (CMPDI Hall) and Comrade Bishnu Mohanty Nagar (Ranchi), six and a half months after the 18th Conference (31 December 2025–4 January 2026). While the Conference's theoretical propositions have only been strengthened since then, the practical situation has thrown up entirely new challenges, making this meeting particularly important. It was attended by 36 of the 41 Office Bearers and 109 of the 125 Working Committee members, reflecting how seriously the entire Committee grasped its significance.

A new phase of struggle has started to emerge before us. The 12 February General Strike unleashed enormous energy among working people, followed by historic upsurges of young contract workers in Northern India, who’s strikes in factory after factory, compelled state governments to hurriedly raise minimum wages. The student movement that followed has shaken the system, brought the Modi government to the negotiating table, broken the shackles of fear, and unleashed the political imagination of students in struggle.

In this rapidly changing situation, the CITU Working Committee reviewed its work, assessed its strengths and lacunae, and charted the future course of the organisation and the movement. The Working Committee reiterated that capitalism has entered a systemic crisis rooted in the structural limitations of the neoliberal regime, extending beyond economics into politics, society, culture, democratic institutions, and the environment.

Neoliberalism has produced stagnation and unemployment alongside the simultaneous existence of underconsumption and overproduction by creating unprecedented inequality. Globalisation has strengthened capital's bargaining power and weakened labour everywhere - stagnant wages prevail in developed countries as capital relocates production, while vast reserve armies of labour trap workers in developing countries. Productivity and profits continue to rise, but wages do not; demand remains weak, and capitalism is trapped in a cycle of overproduction, slow growth, and unemployment. Neoliberalism itself blocks the remedy, as global finance capital opposes both increased public spending and higher taxation of the rich. Capitalism today has no solution to this crisis within its own neoliberal framework.

Unable to resolve its economic crisis, capitalism turns increasingly towards authoritarianism. The rise of far-right and neo-fascist forces is capitalism's political response to stagnation. Monopoly capital supports these forces because they divert popular anger through ultra-nationalism, communalism, racism, and hatred of minorities, while simultaneously attacking democratic rights, trade unions, intellectuals, and the Left.

Unlike the fascism of the 1930s, today's neo-fascism cannot overcome economic stagnation, as it remains tied to the same neoliberal policies and the dominance of finance capital. Global capitalism now survives by intensifying imperialist wars for monopoly profits; investing in high-profit technologies with limited employment potential; cutting costs and closing smaller enterprises through intensified competition; and shifting the burden of the crisis onto workers through retrenchment, wage cuts, work intensification, and the weakening of labour rights. All four tendencies are visible in the new phase of US imperialism's recolonisation of the Global South through wars, unequal trade, sanctions, and financial pressure to secure markets and strategic interests while shifting the burden of the crisis onto workers, peasants, and small producers.

While an intense debate continues on whether artificial intelligence (AI) can resolve capitalism's crisis, the facts present a different picture. Since 2025, profits have been concentrated overwhelmingly in a handful of corporations -Nvidia and hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. The boom rests on circular cross-investment, rising corporate debt, and dependence on equity markets. Returns remain low, losses continue to mount, and private credit exposure has expanded rapidly. A slowdown could trigger a major financial crisis, wiping out trillions in wealth and pushing the world towards recession. The AI model places enormous pressure on electricity, land, and water while generating limited employment. Under capitalism, its gains primarily reduce employment and intensify exploitation, thereby deepening capitalism's contradictions and exhibiting the characteristics of a speculative bubble rather than resolving the underlying crisis.

US imperialism shifts its crisis onto countries like India, while the Modi government passes that burden onto the people in order to serve corporate houses. India's neoliberal model, dependent on imported energy, volatile finance, and suppressed demand, reflects this in the depreciation of the rupee, depletion of foreign exchange reserves, current account pressures, and a persistent trade deficit. Industrial growth remains uneven, employment generation is weak, and "Make in India" has failed to build labour-intensive industries. Even better-paid workers face declining real incomes, dampening consumption and exposing the continuing contradictions of Indian capitalism.

Household debt has reached record highs, savings have declined, and inflation in food, fuel, housing, healthcare, and education has forced workers into debt to meet their basic needs. The government has made major concessions to the US on agriculture, energy security, and strategic policy, thereby deepening India's exposure to oil price shocks, while responding to tariff wars with further tax cuts, incentives, and customs duty exemptions for corporates. Monopoly capital continues to centralise wealth and shift its burden onto MSMEs; the governments continue to reduce social spending and wages and privatising public services.

Farmers are being pushed out of agriculture through electricity price hikes, the Seed Bill, and free trade agreements (FTAs). Agricultural workers face the withdrawal of guaranteed 100 days’ jobs. The Labour Codes - described even in the Economic Survey as a shock absorber for the economy - seek to weaken labour protections, reduce inspections, extend working hours, and undermine trade union rights, thereby depressing wages across both the organised and unorganised sectors. The ruling class tries to manage growing distress through communal polarisation, diverting attention from livelihood issues. Our defence of communal harmony is, therefore, inseparable from our struggle against cuts in social-sector spending, privatisation and monetisation, and for the defence of public sector utilities.

Wages, incomes, and employment are central to this struggle. As imperialism and its Indian allies shift the systemic crisis onto the people, every struggle to defend the producing classes strikes a blow against this vulnerable system. It is the task of CITU to link day-to-day struggles with this broader perspective, breaking away from the routinism, tokenism, and defeatism that have made the organisation stagnant in imagination, movement, and numbers.

Our task has two components: first, the expansion and consolidation of the organisation, both quantitatively and qualitatively; and second, the advancement of struggles in terms of their number, spread, and militancy by reaching the unreached and regularly reaching our own members with a political and ideological understanding of the rapidly emerging challenges. This must elevate united class interventions into militant and combative action rather than routine programmes. We have decided that, within the next three years, our membership should reach one crore, with priority being given to strategic sectors and modern manufacturing and service industries. We must modernise the organisation, raise the level of militancy, organise young and women workers, build resistance from below at the factory level, push the crisis upwards through organised struggles, and bring the peasantry into the movement at the grassroots.

This organisational reorientation is to be accompanied with a concrete calendar of struggles. On the Labour Codes, now notified along with their Rules, our three-pronged strategy is to protect our unions under the new Industrial Relations Code, resist the anti-worker provisions at the shop-floor level, and pressure the State Governments through massive multi-day mobilisations - to be completed by October 2026 - for state-level amendments. Along with this, we will formulate common national demands for CPSUs, build industry-level struggles around them, and continue our resistance until the anti-worker provisions are withdrawn; certainly, the Labour Codes, in their present form, are unfit for implementation.

Meanwhile, the Workers-Farmers' National Convention was held on 29 July 2026 at Talkatora Stadium, New Delhi. This will be followed by joint workers' and farmers' conventions at the state and district levels during August–October. On 10 August 2026, following the launch of the campaign on Quit India Day (9 August) under the slogan "Save India – Save the People of India," massive Jail Bharo movement will be organised across the country.

A one-day token strike of plant-based workers, particularly across northern India's industrial belt, will be organised on a suitable date in November around the demands of minimum wages, statutory benefits, working hours, and working conditions. It can serve as an important initiative to directly reach this vast, largely unorganised and unreached section of the working class.

Drawing upon the strength of our largest mobilising section, CITU will organise a coordinated national Delhi Chalo of scheme workers on 6 October 2026. This will be followed by a multi-day Mahapadav in Delhi. All these programmes will culminate in a massive nationwide strike - the first all-India strike after the implementation of the Labour Codes.

One movement can ignite a thousand more. Every factory struggle disrupts globally integrated value chains and the global network of capital. In that sense, every struggle against capital is also part of the broader anti-imperialist struggle. The working class must assert itself as a class, imagine alternatives, and emerge as a distinguished political force in society. The Working Committee resolved to unite the North with the South, the organised with the unorganised and scheme workers, the struggle for livelihood with the struggle against communal division, and the Indian working class with the international working class. Above all, the Working Committee resolved to build CITU into the organisational weapon that the modern Indian working class needs and deserves.