Nepal: When Revolutionary Betrayal Meets Popular Uprising
Guest post by Kunal Chattopadhyay
This month’s four-part series on Nepal concludes with this article by Kunal Chattopadhyay, a veteran leader of the Indian section of the Fourth International. The series contains:
Why Cliff & Kidron's "International Socialism" Tradition Gets Permanent Revolution Wrong
The Case Study of Nepal: What Jacques Valier in 1975 Reveals About Permanent Revolution Today
This post: Current Crisis Analysis: The Final Collapse of the "Communist" Parliamentary Project
This is our first guest post. Would you like to see more guest posts? Or not? Please take our reader survey: https://redmole.substack.com/survey/4040274
The September 2025 Outburst: Beyond Right-Wing Conspiracy
The September 2025 popular uprising in Nepal has been dismissed by some as "simply or chiefly a right-wing conspiracy." This analysis needs to be clearly rejected. While reactionary forces undoubtedly seek to exploit popular anger, the fundamental driver of mass discontent lies in the systematic betrayal by Nepal's so-called "Communist" parties over nearly two decades of parliamentary rule.
The numbers tell the story of this betrayal starkly: Since 2008, left parties have never been fully out of power. There have been 14 governments, none completing their full term. Ten times, "Communists" have been Prime Minister—Prachanda three times, Oli four times, with Baburam Bhattarai, Madhav Kumar Nepal, and Jhala Nath Khanal each serving once. The left rode to power on great popular expectations but systematically betrayed them through repression, corruption, and using governmental power for petty gains.
The Economic Reality Behind Popular Anger
Nepal remains the poorest country in South Asia, with a per capita GDP of around US$1,400. The employment crisis has reached catastrophic proportions: unemployment increased from 11.4% in 2017-18 to 12.6% in 2022-23, with youth unemployment even higher. As the National Statistics Office reported in July 2025, underemployment is "even more prevalent, especially among those aged 15-24," forcing young Nepalis to seek work abroad.
The Migration Economy: Approximately 3.5 million Nepalis—14% of the population—work as migrant workers, primarily in Malaysia and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. These workers, engaged in semi-skilled and unskilled labor on building sites, factories, and domestic work, send home around US$4 billion annually, comprising 28% of Nepal's GDP. Economic inequality has increased dramatically under "Communist" governance, creating the objective conditions for mass uprising.
The tragedy is not just economic but political: the very parties that once promised to organize these international workers as a revolutionary force have instead managed their exploitation as a source of remittances to sustain a corrupt parliamentary system.
The Turn of 2022: Early Warning Signs Ignored
Popular anger first manifested clearly in the 2022 Kathmandu Municipal elections, where Balen Shah—a rapper and engineer running as an independent—demolished establishment candidates. Shah polled over 61,000 votes while his main rivals from the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML each received little over 38,000. His campaign focused on practical issues: waste management, traffic control, public service delivery, anti-corruption, and cultural heritage preservation.
Shah's victory represented more than protest politics—it became "a challenge to routine politics" and "a rejection of what was perceived as communist politics." Significantly, Shah emerged as a voice against the established political setup itself, not merely against particular parties.
However, since traditional political parties still won mayoral posts across the country, this danger signal was systematically ignored by the "Communist" leadership, who continued their parliamentary musical chairs.
The Parliamentary Merry-Go-Round: 2022-2025
The 2022 parliamentary elections revealed the continuing fragmentation of Nepal's political landscape. The CPN-UML won 44 seats, Nepali Congress 57, and CPN (Maoist Centre) 18 out of 275 total seats. Initially, Deuba and Prachanda formed a five-party alliance, but Prachanda broke away after the elections to become Prime Minister with support from various parties, including monarchist and Hindu nationalist formations.
What followed exemplified the complete bankruptcy of "Communist" parliamentary strategy: musical chairs sometimes including the Nepali Congress, sometimes the CPN-UML, but always prioritizing power-sharing over any coherent political program. On July 12, 2024, Prachanda lost a confidence vote, and Oli formed the last government before the September 2025 outburst.
The Pattern of Betrayal: This governmental instability wasn't accidental but structural. None of these "Communist" parties, whatever their documents and party flags proclaimed, have been engaged in genuine class struggle. Instead, they've perfected the art of coalition management while abandoning every principle that brought them to power.
The International Working Class Betrayed
Our earlier analysis demonstrated how Nepal's 3.5 million international workers represent a globally distributed proletariat with revolutionary potential far exceeding their domestic political weight. The tragedy of the September 2025 uprising is that this international working class—economically sustaining the country through remittances—has been systematically excluded from political organization by the very "Communist" parties that should have been organizing them.
As we noted: "Revolutionary potential lies not in concentrated heavy industry but in politically conscious workers occupying strategic economic positions—whether in Nepal's limited industrial sectors or the international labour circuits that sustain the domestic economy."
The CPN (Maoist) and CPN-UML have done exactly the opposite. Rather than organizing Nepal's international proletariat as a revolutionary force, they've treated migrant workers as individual remittance-senders whose exploitation helps sustain a corrupt parliamentary system. This represents perhaps the most fundamental betrayal of permanent revolution strategy: abandoning the working class that exists for the parliamentary institutions that don't serve working-class interests.
The Incomplete Land Revolution
Even on the basic democratic tasks that "Communist" governments claimed to prioritize, their record reveals systematic betrayal rather than deflected permanent revolution. While the Haliya bonded labor system was officially abolished in 2008 and some state landlordism reformed, "the traditional system of private landlordism and limited tenant rights remains, with little enforcement of land reform laws and inadequate support for freed labourers."
Residues of old landlordism have combined with support for Special Economic Zones, Indian company land encroachment, and other neoliberal assaults. This represents co-optation rather than any genuine revolutionary transformation, even within the limited framework of bourgeois democratic tasks.
The CPN (Maoist)'s fiscal policy for 2024/25 exemplifies this betrayal: prioritizing "targeted economic growth rate, maintaining low inflation, and attracting private-sector investment"—standard bourgeois government policies that directly contradict everything the People's War claimed to represent.
The Collapse of Revolutionary Organizations
The electoral trajectory of the CPN (Maoist) tells the story of systematic organizational decline accompanying political betrayal. Once the largest political force, earning the greatest share of seats in the 2008 Constituent Assembly election, its support has steadily collapsed: 15.21% in 2013, 13.66% in 2017, and just 11.13% in the November 2022 elections.
This decline isn't merely electoral but organizational. The party's abandonment of revolutionary principles and embrace of parliamentary opportunism has been accompanied by the collapse of internal democratic structure and the rise of bureaucratic management. Prachanda's recent warnings of "street protests" are seen by political analysts as empty threats and desperate attempts to "re-establish a lost connection with the people."
The Bureaucratic Transformation: The CPN (Maoist) leadership implemented what the analysis correctly identifies as "a patronage system to buy the silence of its base, which had been abandoned by the party, and simultaneously shielded the leaders from legal repercussions." This represents classic bourgeois political trade-offs, not revolutionary practice.
International Context: Learning from Regional Precedents
Nepal's trajectory mirrors other movements that abandoned revolutionary strategy for parliamentary accommodation. The analysis points to crucial regional precedents:
India's Naxalites: Despite fighting a "people's war" aimed at establishing rural "people's governments," the movement fragmented and was suppressed by state counter-insurgency.
Sri Lanka's JVP: After conducting two armed uprisings for socialist transformation, the party entered mainstream democratic politics, "abandoned some of its original Marxist policies," and "reconciled with other democratic groups."
These precedents demonstrate that the CPN (Maoist)'s trajectory wasn't unique but followed a pattern: revolutionary movements that abandon working-class independence for parliamentary accommodation inevitably become vehicles for bourgeois politics, regardless of their radical origins.
The Current Revolutionary Situation
The September 2025 uprising occurs within a context that Fourth International analysis would recognize as potentially revolutionary. The widespread public discontent, fueled by government failure, unemployment, and mass migration, has created anti-establishment sentiment that transcends traditional party boundaries.
The Danger and the Opportunity: Reactionary monarchist and populist forces are currently exploiting this sentiment, "falsely presenting the restoration of the monarchy or Hindu nationalism as a solution." However, the same conditions that enable reactionary exploitation also create possibilities for authentic revolutionary intervention.
The crucial factor is the absence of genuine revolutionary leadership. The document notes "a clear absence of an existing, formal section of the Fourth International or a similar principled Trotskyist organization within Nepal." This political vacuum, however, "is not an obstacle but a historical mandate for revolutionary intervention."
Strategic Lessons for International Revolutionary Strategy
The Nepal crisis validates every argument we've made about the impossibility of achieving revolutionary transformation through parliamentary accommodation. The "Communist" parties' nearly two-decade rule has produced neither revolutionary transformation nor effective democratic reform—instead creating conditions for potential counter-revolution.
The International Dimension: Most crucially, Nepal demonstrates why isolated national revolutionary strategies inevitably fail. Even if authentic revolutionary leadership emerges in Nepal, success requires international coordination with working-class movements across South Asia and beyond.
The 3.5 million Nepalese workers in Gulf states and Malaysia provide exactly the international connections necessary for such coordination. Revolutionary organizations should organize these workers not as individual migrants but as components of international working-class power capable of supporting revolutionary transformation across national boundaries.
Climate Crisis Urgency: Environmental destruction adds revolutionary urgency that parliamentary gradualism cannot address. Himalayan glacial melt threatens water security for 2 billion people across South Asia, requiring coordinated regional development that only international revolutionary strategy can achieve.
The Historical Mandate
Nepal's September 2025 uprising represents both the final bankruptcy of "Communist" parliamentary strategy and the opening for authentic revolutionary intervention. The conditions exist for building revolutionary leadership based on permanent revolution principles: connecting immediate democratic demands to socialist transformation while organizing internationally from the outset.
The alternative to seizing this opportunity isn't stable parliamentary democracy but continued oscillation between corrupt "Communist" rule and potential reactionary counter-revolution. The monarchist and Hindu nationalist forces currently exploiting popular anger represent the logical endpoint of the "Communist" parties' strategic failure.
The Choice: Contemporary revolutionaries face the same strategic decision that confronted the CPN (Maoist) leadership after 2006. Build authentic working-class organization capable of completing democratic tasks through socialist transformation, or accept "realistic" accommodation that inevitably serves bourgeois interests while opening space for reactionary alternatives.
Nepal's international working class provides the foundation for the first path. Climate crisis creates the urgency. The September 2025 uprising demonstrates the popular readiness. The question is whether revolutionary organizations will provide the international coordination and working-class leadership these conditions demand.
The stakes remain what they were in 1906: permanent revolution as the strategic framework for working-class leadership in contemporary struggles, or continued cycles of revolutionary betrayal that create conditions for barbarism. Nepal's crisis is the world's crisis—the response must be equally international.
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