How the Communist Party of India (Marxist) built the highest human development in India through land reform, universal literacy, public healthcare, and mass mobilisation — proving that communist governance works
Every anticommunist argument eventually arrives at the same claim: communism does not work. The experience of Kerala, a state of 35 million people on the south-western coast of India, demolishes this claim with the force of material fact.
Kerala has the highest Human Development Index (HDI) of any Indian state. Its literacy rate stands at approximately 96% — compared to the national average of 74%. Its infant mortality rate is the lowest in India, comparable to that of developed capitalist countries and far below the Indian national average. Life expectancy at birth exceeds 75 years, the highest in the country. Maternal mortality is a fraction of the national figure. Access to primary healthcare is near-universal. Gender parity in education has been achieved.
These achievements were not produced by capitalist growth. Kerala’s per capita income has historically been below the Indian average. It has no great industrial base, no Silicon Valley, no financial centre. What Kerala has is a history of communist governance, class struggle, and radical social reform stretching back more than seven decades — a history in which the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its predecessors mobilised the working class, the peasantry, and the oppressed castes to transform society from below.
The “Kerala Model” of development is the most powerful refutation available to those who claim that human welfare requires capitalist accumulation. It demonstrates that when the surplus is directed toward social need rather than private profit — when the state serves the working class rather than the bourgeoisie — even a poor society can achieve outcomes that the richest capitalist nations struggle to match. This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of scientific socialism applied to the concrete conditions of a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society.
“The Kerala experience shows that a society need not wait for overall economic development to provide its people with the most basic necessities of a civilised life — education, health, food security, and social dignity.”
— E.M.S. NamboodiripadOn 5 April 1957, the Communist Party of India won the general elections in the newly formed state of Kerala, establishing one of the first democratically elected communist governments anywhere in the world. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, a Brahmin who had rejected his caste privilege to dedicate his life to the communist movement, became Chief Minister. The significance of this event cannot be overstated.
Kerala in 1957 was a society marked by extreme feudal oppression. The caste system permeated every aspect of life. Landlords — many of them upper-caste Namboodiri Brahmins and Nair aristocrats — owned vast estates worked by tenant farmers and agricultural labourers who lived in conditions of near-serfdom. Lower-caste and Dalit communities faced not merely economic exploitation but ritual humiliation: they were forbidden to walk on certain roads, to draw water from public wells, to enter temples, even to cover their upper bodies. Women of lower castes were subjected to the mula karam — a “breast tax” imposed by upper-caste landlords. This was not ancient history; these practices persisted well into the twentieth century.
The communist movement in Kerala drew its strength from the intersection of class exploitation and caste oppression. The party organised not only industrial workers but agricultural labourers, tenant farmers, toddy tappers, coir workers, cashew workers, and the most oppressed sections of the Dalit and backward-caste communities. The communists understood what the Congress party, dominated by the national bourgeoisie, refused to accept: that the caste system was not a cultural relic to be reformed away by moral persuasion, but a material system of exploitation rooted in the feudal mode of production. To abolish caste required abolishing the economic relations that sustained it — above all, feudal landlordism.
The 1957 government moved immediately on three fronts: land reform, education, and labour rights. Within two years, it had introduced the Kerala Agrarian Relations Bill — the most radical land reform legislation in Indian history — along with the Education Bill, which brought private schools under public oversight and guaranteed teachers’ rights and wages. The response from the propertied classes was swift and vicious.
The “Liberation Struggle” (Vimochana Samaram) of 1959 was a counter-revolutionary movement organised by the Congress party, the Catholic Church, the Nair Service Society, and feudal landlords to overthrow the democratically elected communist government. They used communal agitation, school closures, and manufactured disorder to provoke central government intervention. In July 1959, Prime Minister Nehru dismissed the Kerala government under Article 356 of the Indian Constitution — the first time a democratically elected state government was dismissed in Indian history. This demonstrated the bourgeois state’s willingness to override democracy itself when communist governance threatens property relations.
The most revolutionary achievement of communist governance in Kerala was land reform. The Kerala Land Reforms Act, finally passed in its definitive form in 1969 under E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s second government, was the most comprehensive and effectively implemented land reform in Indian history. Its consequences were profound and irreversible.
The Act abolished feudal landlordism. It imposed a ceiling on land ownership, confiscated excess land, and redistributed it to tenant farmers and agricultural labourers. Approximately 1.5 million tenant families received ownership of the land they worked. The jenmi system — the feudal landlord system that had dominated Kerala for centuries, under which Namboodiri Brahmins and other upper-caste landlords extracted rent from tenants who had no security of tenure — was dismantled root and branch.
This was not a gradual reform. It was the conscious destruction of a class. The feudal landlord class of Kerala was expropriated. Their economic power was broken. And with their economic power went their social and political power — the power to enforce caste hierarchy, to demand deference and servitude, to control the lives of millions of working people. Land reform in Kerala was simultaneously an act of agrarian revolution and an act of caste annihilation.
The contrast with the rest of India is instructive. The Indian Constitution of 1950 promised land reform. The Congress governments that ruled most Indian states passed land reform legislation. But in state after state, the reforms were sabotaged by the very landlord classes they were supposed to target. Landlords evaded ceiling laws by transferring land to relatives, registering it under fictitious names, or simply bribing officials. In Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and other states of the Hindi belt, feudal relations persisted well into the twenty-first century, perpetuating caste oppression and rural immiseration. Only in Kerala, where a communist government backed by an organised mass movement of peasants and workers enforced the reforms from below, was land reform actually carried out.
The lesson is clear: land reform cannot be achieved through legislation alone. It requires the organised political power of the exploited classes. The landlords will resist with every weapon at their disposal — legal obstruction, bribery, communal violence, appeals to the central government. Only a vanguard party rooted in the masses, backed by militant trade unions and peasant organisations, can overcome this resistance. Kerala proved this. The rest of India proved the negative: where the communists were weak, the landlords won.
“The land reform in Kerala was not a gift from above. It was won by decades of struggle — by the peasant unions, the agricultural labourers’ unions, the communist party, and the mass organisations of the working people. Every acre of land redistributed was land taken from a class that resisted with all its power.”
— E.M.S. Namboodiripad, The Communist Party in KeralaKerala’s achievement of near-universal literacy is one of the most remarkable educational transformations in modern history. In 1951, Kerala’s literacy rate was approximately 47% — high by Indian standards but far from universal. By 1991, it had reached 90%. Today it exceeds 96%. In 1990, Ernakulam district became the first district in India to be declared fully literate — a milestone achieved not by government decree but by a mass campaign of popular mobilisation.
The roots of Kerala’s literacy revolution lie in the social reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which challenged the Brahminical monopoly on knowledge. But it was the communist movement that transformed education from a privilege of the few into a right of the many. The Education Bill of 1957 brought private schools — many of them run by the Church and upper-caste organisations as instruments of social control — under public regulation. It guaranteed teachers fair wages and working conditions, ended the arbitrary power of private school managements, and established the principle that education was a public good, not a commodity.
The Kerala Shastra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP) — the People’s Science Movement — played a decisive role in transforming Kerala’s educational culture. Founded in 1962, the KSSP was a mass organisation of scientists, teachers, writers, and cultural workers committed to bringing scientific knowledge to the common people. Its motto — Shastra Sahithyam Janaganathinte (“Science and literature for social revolution”) — expressed the Marxist understanding that knowledge is not neutral but must be placed in the service of the oppressed.
The KSSP organised the Total Literacy Campaign (Saksharatha Samithi) of 1989–91, which mobilised over 350,000 volunteers to teach adults across the state to read and write. The campaign used innovative pedagogical methods drawn from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and adapted to Malayali conditions. It was not a top-down bureaucratic programme but a mass movement — a demonstration of what becomes possible when the energy of the people is unleashed for social transformation rather than private accumulation.
The KSSP demonstrates the Marxist-Leninist principle that scientific knowledge must serve the people. Unlike bourgeois science, which is privatised, commodified, and deployed for profit, the People’s Science Movement brought knowledge directly to the masses — not as charity but as a weapon of class emancipation. Literacy in Kerala was not a gift; it was a conquest.
Kerala’s healthcare system is one of the most effective in the developing world. The state has achieved health outcomes comparable to those of advanced capitalist countries at a fraction of the cost — a demonstration that human health depends not on capitalist wealth but on the social organisation of resources.
The foundation of Kerala’s healthcare system is the network of primary health centres (PHCs) established across the state, ensuring that basic healthcare is available within reach of every village and panchayat. This decentralised system of preventive and primary care, combined with public hospitals at district and state levels, has produced results that put the privatised, profit-driven healthcare systems of capitalist countries to shame.
Kerala was the first Indian state to eradicate smallpox, polio, and neonatal tetanus. Its immunisation coverage consistently exceeds 90%. Infant mortality, which stood at approximately 120 per 1,000 live births at independence, has fallen to around 7 per 1,000 — comparable to the United States and far below the Indian national average of approximately 28. Maternal mortality is similarly among the lowest in India. Life expectancy exceeds 75 years, the highest in the country.
Kerala’s response to public health emergencies has demonstrated the superiority of its model. During the Nipah virus outbreaks of 2018 and 2019, Kerala’s public health system identified, contained, and eliminated the virus with a speed and efficiency that drew international admiration. The state’s response to COVID-19 — rapid testing, contact tracing, decentralised quarantine facilities, community kitchens to feed those in isolation, and transparent public communication — was initially the most effective in India and was studied internationally as a model of pandemic response.
The contrast with capitalist healthcare models is stark. In the United States, the richest country in the world, life expectancy has been declining. Infant mortality is higher than in Kerala. Tens of millions lack health insurance. Medical bankruptcy is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. The American healthcare system spends more per capita than any other country on earth and produces worse outcomes than a state in the global South with a fraction of its income. This is not an anomaly. It is the predictable result of subordinating healthcare to the profit motive. Kerala proves the alternative: when healthcare is organised as a public good rather than a commodity, when the state serves the people rather than the pharmaceutical corporations, even a poor society can keep its people healthy. For more on this comparison, see our analysis of healthcare and socialism.
The “Kerala Model of development” entered the global vocabulary through the work of development economists in the 1970s and 1980s. Its central finding was simple but devastating to bourgeois ideology: Kerala had achieved first-world levels of human development on a third-world income. High literacy, low infant mortality, long life expectancy, low population growth, gender parity — all the indicators that bourgeois development theory claimed required sustained capitalist growth — were present in Kerala without that growth.
This finding struck at the heart of the dominant ideology of “development” promoted by the World Bank, the IMF, and the imperialist powers. That ideology held — and still holds — that human welfare is a consequence of GDP growth, that GDP growth requires capitalist accumulation, and that capitalist accumulation requires the “opening” of economies to foreign capital, the privatisation of public assets, the deregulation of labour markets, and the subordination of social spending to “fiscal discipline.” Kerala refuted every element of this chain. Its people were healthier, better educated, and longer-lived than those of states with far higher per capita incomes — because the surplus, such as it was, was directed toward social need rather than private profit.
The Kerala Model demonstrates the core thesis of Marxist political economy: that the question is never simply how much a society produces, but for whom it produces and how the product is distributed. A society that produces enormous wealth but concentrates it in the hands of a few will have worse outcomes for the majority than a poorer society that distributes its resources according to need. Capitalism produces wealth; socialism produces welfare. Kerala is the proof.
Kerala’s social achievements did not fall from the sky. They were won through decades of organised class struggle, in which the trade union movement played a central and indispensable role. Kerala has the highest trade union density in India, and the relationship between party, unions, and mass organisations provides a concrete demonstration of democratic centralism in practice.
The Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), affiliated with the CPI(M), is the largest trade union federation in Kerala. But the trade union movement extends far beyond the formal industrial sector. Agricultural workers — the backbone of the communist movement in Kerala — are organised through the Kerala State Karshaka Thozhilali Union (KSKTU), one of the largest agricultural workers’ unions in the world. Coir workers, cashew workers, beedi (cigarette) workers, toddy tappers, headload workers, domestic workers — sections of the working class that in most countries remain unorganised and invisible — have strong unions in Kerala.
The coir industry provides a characteristic example. Coir — fibre extracted from coconut husks — is a traditional industry in Kerala employing hundreds of thousands of workers, the vast majority of them women. Before unionisation, coir workers laboured in appalling conditions for starvation wages. The communist-led unions organised these workers, won minimum wages, secured social security benefits, and transformed the conditions of an entire industry. The same story was repeated in the cashew industry, where women workers in processing factories were organised by communist unions and won rights and protections that workers in similar industries elsewhere in India could only dream of.
The toddy tappers — workers who climb coconut palms to extract palm sap — illustrate the intersection of class and caste struggle. Toddy tapping is a dangerous occupation traditionally performed by members of the Ezhava caste, one of the largest backward-caste communities in Kerala. The communist movement organised toddy tappers into a powerful union that fought not only for better wages and safety standards but against caste discrimination. The transformation of the Ezhava community from a despised and exploited caste into a politically conscious and organised force is inseparable from the work of the communist party and its trade unions.
The headload workers of Kerala — porters who carry heavy loads on their heads in markets and warehouses — deserve special mention. In no other state in India are headload workers unionised. In Kerala, they have a powerful union that has won regulated working hours, minimum wages, and pension rights. The sight of organised headload workers refusing to carry loads above the regulated weight, enforcing rest periods, and collecting pension contributions is a daily demonstration of what trade union power means for the dignity and material conditions of the most exploited workers.
Kerala’s communist movement was forged in armed struggle. The Punnapra-Vayalar uprising of October 1946 was one of the most significant working-class insurrections in Indian history — and one of the most neglected in bourgeois historiography.
The uprising took place in the princely state of Travancore, then ruled by the autocratic Dewan (Prime Minister) Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar. As Indian independence approached, the Dewan attempted to declare Travancore an independent state — a move that would have preserved the feudal-monarchical order and the power of the landlord class, while keeping the state outside the Indian Union and available for neo-colonial exploitation by the departing British.
The Communist Party of India in Travancore organised massive resistance. Workers in the coir factories of Alleppey (Alappuzha) and the surrounding areas rose in revolt. In Punnapra and Vayalar, workers established barricades, formed armed defence squads, and fought pitched battles against the Dewan’s military forces. The uprising was suppressed with considerable brutality — hundreds of workers were killed — but it achieved its political objective. The Dewan’s plan for an independent Travancore was abandoned, and the state was integrated into the Indian Union.
The Punnapra-Vayalar uprising demonstrated that the working class in Kerala was prepared not merely to vote for communism but to fight for it. The martyrs of Punnapra-Vayalar — workers who died with red flags in their hands — remain central to the political consciousness of the Malayali working class. Every year, 22 October is commemorated as Punnapra-Vayalar Day, a reminder that the rights and gains of the working class were won not through the goodwill of the ruling class but through sacrifice and struggle.
The temple entry movement was another arena where communist-led forces challenged the social order. The struggle for the right of lower-caste and Dalit people to enter Hindu temples — from which they had been excluded for centuries — was both a fight against caste oppression and a challenge to the material interests of the upper-caste landlords who controlled temple lands and resources. The communists understood that the fight against caste was inseparable from the fight against class: the temple was both a religious institution and an economic one, and the exclusion of lower castes served the material interests of the ruling feudal order.
“The workers of Punnapra and Vayalar laid down their lives not for a piece of land or a rise in wages, but for the liberation of the working people from the rule of the Dewan and the landlords. They fought as a class, and they died as a class.”
— A.K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the PeopleKerala’s achievements in women’s empowerment are inseparable from its communist history. The state has the highest female literacy rate in India (approximately 94%), the highest female life expectancy, and the lowest gender gap in education. Women participate actively in politics, local governance, and the workforce. The sex ratio favours women — a rarity in India, where the national sex ratio reflects the systematic devaluation of female life through sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and the neglect of girls’ health and nutrition.
Kerala’s matrilineal traditions — particularly the marumakkathayam (matrilineal inheritance) system practised by the Nair community and some other groups — provided a pre-existing cultural basis for women’s relatively higher status. Under this system, property descended through the female line, and the taravad (ancestral home) was managed by the eldest woman. However, matrilineality should not be romanticised: it coexisted with patriarchal authority in many forms, and it was largely confined to certain caste groups.
The communist movement built upon and transformed this heritage. By organising women workers in the coir, cashew, beedi, and agricultural sectors, the party brought millions of working-class women into political life. The women’s organisations affiliated with the CPI(M) — particularly the Janathipathya Mahila Association (JMA) — organised campaigns for women’s rights, against dowry, against domestic violence, and for equal wages. The Marxist-feminist understanding that women’s liberation is inseparable from class liberation found concrete expression in Kerala’s communist movement.
The People’s Plan Campaign of 1996 (discussed below) reserved one-third of plan expenditure for projects benefiting women, and mandated women’s participation in local planning bodies. The Kudumbashree programme, launched in 1998 under the Left Democratic Front government, organised 4.5 million women into neighbourhood self-help groups focused on microenterprise, savings, and community development. While Kudumbashree has been criticised for its microfinance elements, it represents one of the largest women’s participatory networks in the world and has provided a material basis for women’s collective action at the grassroots level.
In 1996, the Left Democratic Front government led by E.K. Nayanar launched the People’s Plan Campaign (Janakeeya Asoothranam) — one of the most ambitious experiments in democratic decentralisation and participatory planning ever attempted. The campaign devolved 35–40% of the state’s plan budget directly to local self-government institutions (panchayats and municipalities), and established a system of participatory planning in which ordinary citizens would directly determine how public resources were allocated in their communities.
The process worked through a series of stages. Gram sabhas (village assemblies) open to all citizens identified local needs and priorities. Development seminars, attended by elected representatives, technical experts, and ordinary citizens, translated these priorities into concrete project proposals. Task forces prepared detailed plans. District planning committees coordinated plans across localities. At every stage, the emphasis was on mass participation — on drawing the broadest possible section of the population into the planning process.
Over 100,000 volunteers were trained in planning methodology. Thousands of local plans were prepared and implemented. The campaign achieved significant results: roads, drinking water systems, housing, sanitation, agricultural infrastructure, and public health facilities were built across the state according to priorities determined by the people who would use them, not by bureaucrats in the state capital.
The People’s Plan Campaign was a practical demonstration of what socialist planning could look like — not the caricature of a central committee dictating production targets, but a living, democratic process in which the producers and consumers of public goods determined their own priorities through collective deliberation. It was not without contradictions: bureaucratic resistance, technical capacity gaps, and the constraints of operating within the Indian federal system all limited its effectiveness. But as a demonstration of the mass line in practice — of the principle that the party must learn from the masses in order to lead them — the People’s Plan Campaign remains one of the most important experiments in democratic governance in the modern world.
The People’s Plan Campaign refutes the bourgeois claim that planning means bureaucratic tyranny. In Kerala, planning meant the opposite: the radical democratisation of decision-making, the empowerment of ordinary citizens over their own communities, and the subordination of technical expertise to popular will. This is what Marxist-Leninists mean by socialist democracy — not the formal democracy of bourgeois elections, but the substantive democracy of working people controlling the resources that shape their lives.
A Marxist-Leninist analysis of Kerala must be honest about the contradictions and limitations of the Kerala Model. To celebrate achievements without examining contradictions would be idealism, not materialism. Kerala’s experience contains vital lessons precisely because it reveals both what communist governance can achieve within a bourgeois state framework and why that framework must ultimately be transcended.
The remittance economy. Since the 1970s, Kerala’s economy has been heavily dependent on remittances from Malayali workers in the Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. At its peak, remittances from the Gulf constituted approximately one-third of Kerala’s state domestic product. This created a paradox: a state governed by communists was sustained economically by the export of its labour power to some of the most reactionary, theocratic, anti-worker regimes on earth. Gulf migration enabled consumption and investment in Kerala but also created new class divisions, inflated land and housing prices, and fostered a culture of consumerism at odds with the state’s socialist traditions.
The limits of reformism within the Indian federal system. Kerala operates within the constitutional framework of the Indian Union. It cannot nationalise major industries, cannot control monetary policy, cannot impose tariffs or control capital flows, and is subject to the fiscal constraints imposed by the central government. The CPI(M) administers a state government within a bourgeois state — it does not hold state power in the Marxist-Leninist sense. The central government retains the power to dismiss state governments (as it did in 1959), to override state legislation, and to starve states of funds. This structural constraint means that the Kerala Model, however impressive, remains a model of what can be achieved within capitalism, not a model of socialism.
BJP/RSS communalism. Kerala faces a growing threat from Hindutva communalism promoted by the BJP and its parent organisation, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh). The RSS has systematically targeted Kerala for “saffronisation,” seeking to polarise the state along religious lines, to undermine the class-based politics of the communist movement, and to replace class consciousness with communal identity. The BJP’s national government has used central agencies, financial pressure, and media campaigns against the Left government. The communal threat is real: it aims to destroy precisely the class unity across religious and caste lines that is the foundation of Kerala’s progressive politics.
Unemployment and the educated. Despite its high literacy and educational standards, Kerala has historically suffered from high unemployment, particularly among educated youth. The absence of a strong industrial base means that Kerala produces more graduates than its economy can absorb — hence the massive outmigration to the Gulf and to other Indian states. This is a structural problem that cannot be solved at the state level; it reflects the broader failure of capitalist development in India and the constraints of operating within a semi-colonial economy subordinated to imperialist interests.
Environmental contradictions. Kerala’s development has not been without environmental costs. Quarrying, sand mining, encroachment on forest land, and the conversion of paddy fields have caused ecological damage. The catastrophic floods of 2018 and 2019 were exacerbated by unregulated development in ecologically sensitive areas. The communist movement has had to grapple with the tension between development and ecological sustainability — a contradiction that can only be fully resolved through socialist planning that subordinates production to human need and ecological limits, rather than to the anarchy of the market.
What does Kerala prove? And what are its limits? These questions are essential for any serious Marxist-Leninist assessment.
Kerala proves that communist governance works. When communists hold power — even the limited power of a state government within a bourgeois federation — they produce outcomes that are measurably, demonstrably, overwhelmingly superior to those produced by bourgeois governance. Higher literacy, lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy, greater gender equality, stronger trade unions, more effective public healthcare, more equitable land distribution — on every indicator that measures the actual welfare of working people, Kerala outperforms its capitalist-governed counterparts. This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of directing resources toward human need rather than private profit.
Kerala proves that class struggle is the motor of progress. Kerala’s achievements were not gifts from enlightened rulers. They were won through decades of militant class struggle — through peasant uprisings, workers’ strikes, anti-caste movements, and revolutionary organisation. Every gain was resisted by the propertied classes and had to be fought for, defended, and deepened through continued mobilisation. The Kerala experience confirms the Marxist thesis that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.
Kerala proves that caste oppression and class exploitation are inseparable. The communist movement in Kerala succeeded precisely because it understood that caste is not a cultural relic but a material system rooted in feudal and semi-feudal relations of production. By attacking the economic foundations of caste — landlordism, bonded labour, the monopoly of upper castes on education and resources — the communists achieved more for caste annihilation than any amount of liberal moralising or constitutional provision. This lesson is of universal significance for communist movements in societies stratified by race, caste, ethnicity, or other forms of ascriptive hierarchy.
But Kerala also reveals the limits of reformism. The Kerala Model remains a model of reform within capitalism, not a model of socialist revolution. The CPI(M) in Kerala administers a bourgeois state apparatus; it does not smash it and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat. The means of production have not been socialised. Private capital continues to dominate the economy. The working class exercises influence through the party and unions, but it does not hold state power. The contradictions of the remittance economy, the constraints of the federal system, the persistence of unemployment, and the growing communal threat all demonstrate that even the most progressive reforms within capitalism cannot resolve the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.
Kerala is both an inspiration and a warning. It shows what communists can achieve even under the most unfavourable conditions. And it shows that partial victories, however valuable, are no substitute for the revolutionary transformation of society. The task of Marxist-Leninists is not to replicate the Kerala Model but to learn from it — to take what is valid and apply it, while understanding that the ultimate goal is not better governance within capitalism but the abolition of capitalism itself and the construction of a socialist society in which the full potential of the Kerala experience can finally be realised.
Kerala proves that communist governance produces superior outcomes for the working class. Understanding both its achievements and its limitations is essential for the revolutionary programme.