10th Conference · I (A) and I (B)
Economic and political situation
International crisis since 2008; far-right reaction; war and de-dollarisation; the third NDA term; Labour Codes, BNS and the National Monetisation Pipeline.
General Secretary’s report to the 10th National Conference, Thiruvananthapuram, 10–12 March 2025. Summary of the booklet circulated to delegates.
Dear delegates
The 9th National Conference was held on 13–15 October 2022 in Chandigarh. After almost two and a half years the federation met on 10–12 March 2025 at Thiruvananthapuram to hold the 10th National Conference.
The interim period was a learning experience. The organisation tried to reorient itself and strengthen the movement. Those efforts were not sufficient. Attacks have been transforming rapidly: private players directing profit-oriented changes in technology, policy and workforce composition, and privatisation expanding through multiple routes.
The General Secretary’s report was presented in three parts, each in two booklets. Part I takes the international and national economic and political situation. Part II, not reproduced here in full, covers the energy scenario. Part III covers organisation, struggles and future tasks.
I (A) — International situation
World politics has been in extreme turmoil. The rise of far-right forces in Europe and the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency are treated in the report as reactionary expressions of anger against the neoliberal-bourgeois-democratic system, in the absence of a strong organised Left.
The world capitalist system has been in crisis since 2008. For the first time a crisis has spread across economic, political, societal, cultural, moral, institutional and ecological life. EEFI’s constitutional aim — to transform Indian society toward a socialist egalitarian order — requires a concrete understanding of that crisis.
World Bank figures cited in the report: average GDP growth 3.22 percent in 1991–2007, 2.72 percent in 2008–2018, and around 2.40 percent after the pandemic. FDI fell from 2.41 trillion dollars in 2021 to 0.87 trillion in 2023. The rate of profit shows a cycle of seven to eight years, with crunches in 1983, 1992, 2000, 2008 and 2015.
How capital recovers — and who pays
The report lists five established capitalist exits from crisis. First among them is war and geopolitical destabilisation: Palestine after fifteen months of killing; US military funding to Israel of 3.8 billion dollars in each of 2023 and 2024; NATO expansion in Ukraine; the fall of Assad in Syria; and sharpening inter-imperialist contradiction.
The US dollar and financial sanctions remain instruments of hegemony. US national debt rose from about 10.7 trillion dollars in 2008 to over 33 trillion by 2023. Dollar reserves of other countries have fallen below 50 percent. Chinese sovereign lending rose from 333 billion dollars in 2012 to 952 billion in 2022.
New branches of industry are opened to restore profit: the internet after 2000, green energy after 2008, vaccines in 2020–21, and now artificial intelligence. The Magnificent Seven US firms hold around 12 trillion dollars in market capital. DeepSeek-R1, launched in January 2025, undercut that speculation: Nvidia lost 600 billion dollars in market value in days.
Productivity growth and monopoly merger waves shift the burden onto labour in the global South. With 21 percent of world population, the global North holds 69 percent of private wealth. Resistance is also rising — the Alliance of Sahel States leaving ECOWAS; talk of a lithium grouping among Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil.
I (B) — National situation
The NDA formed the government for a third term. The BJP did not win an absolute majority on its own. The report reads that result, especially in the Hindi heartland, as the effect of farmer-led resistance and of movements of students, youth, women, Dalits, Adivasis and other oppressed sections. Livelihood, placed at the centre of politics, can stall the corporate-communal nexus.
There is no room for complacency. The third term is described as more desperate than the earlier two: a rush to notify the Labour Codes; the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita already enacted; privatisation through the National Monetisation Pipeline in electricity, telecom, mines, railways, highways, ports and docks; communal attacks on minorities; and the working people pushed below subsistence.
Corporate profitability reached a fifteen-year peak in FY24. The Nifty 500 profit-to-GDP ratio rose from 2.1 percent in FY2003 to 4.8 percent in FY2024. Investment still does not show “animal spirit”. After 1991 the income share of the top 1 percent overtook that of the bottom 50 percent around 2004; the top 10 percent now take nearly 60 percent of national income.