This argument stems from two main causes:

1. A lack of understanding of Marxist socialism and how it differs from utopian socialism.

2. A lack of imaginative power and hopelessness.

Let us try and dissect both of these phenomena.

1. Misunderstanding the Meaning of “Socialism”

“Socialism is when the Government Does Stuff”

Socialism is often understood as a system where the state does everything, controls the market and serves the people. This idea of socialism has been deliberately made into the popular understanding of the term. It is one reason why many believe countries like India to have been “socialist” before 1991, because the state exercised significant control over licensing and ran certain industries and undertakings.

The economic failures of such a system are then pointed to as evidence of the “failure of socialism” itself. The argument becomes simple: the government controlled the economy, the economy performed poorly, therefore socialism failed.

However, this understanding only looks at what the state does. It does not ask who controls the state.

The fact that the state regulates the market, owns certain industries or controls parts of production does not by itself change the class character of society. What matters is which class holds power and therefore determines how production, distribution and consumption are organised.

A capitalist state can regulate markets, own enterprises and intervene heavily in the economy without ceasing to be a capitalist state. The question, therefore, is not simply how much the state controls. It is which class controls the state and whose interests that control serves.

To understand the character of any economic system, we must therefore begin by asking: Who is the ruling class?

“Socialism is when State Keeps a Check on Ruling Class”

The idea of an egalitarian, mutually cooperative society has existed long before Marx and Engels. Early thinkers observed the new, unique problems growing out of individualism under capitalism and envisioned a better world. The solution, according to them, was morally persuading the capitalist class into giving up their power and everyone coming together for a better world. They saw the state as the paragon of righteousness, an institution that could keep a check on capitalist excesses and take care of society.

However, this turns the idea of socialism into a matter of morality. It creates a scenario which naively makes out the individual capitalists to be the bad guys and the state to be the good actor who can keep their bad behaviour in check through consciousness and morals alone. This worldview assumes the state can and will act against the interest of capital and convince the ruling class to act against their own perceived interests.

But can state act against the interests of the ruling class?

The state historically has always been under the control of the ruling class of a system. Under slavery, it belonged to the slaveowners; under feudalism, it belonged to kings and landlords; and under capitalism, it belongs to the capitalists. While seemingly kept above the society, the state is in fact part of a society and stems from it. As history suggests, its primary function is to keep a check on the opposing forces to the ruling class and to protect the status quo.

The final days of feudalism is a witness to this. The feudal state, for centuries, attempted to suppress the budding capitalist class. Many battles were fought between the capitalists and the feudal state, as the latter attempted to block the expansion of capitalism. However, in the end, as productive forces took shape and became fully incompatible with the relations of production under feudalism, the feudal state and society had to be broken down—and so it did.

As a recent example, in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, the US government effectively bailed out the capitalist class and preserved the existing market system which had caused the crisis in the first place, while the vast majority of ordinary working class people around the globe faced foreclosures, unemployment, and prolonged economic hardship.

Under capitalism, the state doesn’t just protect the capitalist class at times of crisis but routinely aids its preservation and expansion through legislation, coercion or direct state force. Moreover, the state relies not only on coercion but cultivation of consent through cultural, educational and political institutions. An easily observable contemporary example is the deployment of security forces by the Indian state to secure raw resources by crushing people’s resistance, for e.g. in Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, which are then handed over to private firms, to be sold for profit.

Therefore, it is naïve to assume that in a capitalist society, the state would act as a barrier to capitalist powers; in reality, this is the antithesis of the state’s role in such a system.

For now it would be enough to conclude that the popular idea of socialism, one rooted in morality and hinging on the consciousness of the State, is utopian, because such a thought is not rooted in any material reality.

What Do Marxists Mean by Socialism?

Marxist socialism takes a different, or rather the opposite, approach. It strays away from the idealist notion of the state as a noble institution, or as Hegel put it, the “march of God on earth”.

Marxism understood the class basis of the state by studying its historical function and its emergence alongside class divisions. It is then understood that only with the dissolution of classes does the necessity for an institution such as the State begin to wither away. This final stage is called communism.

It also understood, however, that before the transition to a classless society, a socialist state has to exist, wherein the state represents the actual majority class—the class that produces for society instead of feeding off the work of others. At this stage, the working class, through the State, can build the conditions necessary for the transition towards a communist society.

In this form of socialism, political power is placed in the hands of the working class, whose interests lie in transforming the conditions of production and eventually abolishing the class divisions that make the State necessary. The socialist state therefore serves as a means through which the working class can advance towards a classless society.

Marxist socialism, which is both dialectical and materialist in nature, does not strive towards this goal on the basis of morality or any other abstract concept alone.

Through the scientific framework of dialectical materialism, Marxism shows the contradictions that led to the decay of slave-based society and feudalism. Similarly, it also identifies the fundamental contradiction under capitalism: the social nature of production and the private appropriation of its results.

This means that while capitalism has developed the productive forces at an immense rate, it has also produced an incompatibility between those productive forces and the relations within which people produce. Production has become social on a massive scale, but ownership of the means of production remains private.

From these contradictions emerge several interconnected problems—exploitation of labour, recurring economic crises, alienation of workers, extreme wealth inequality, increasing commodification of all aspects of human life and perpetual violence, whether actual or potential. These contradictions, as Marxists understand, cannot be resolved without a complete transformation of the system. This requires the overthrow of bourgeois class rule and the establishment of a socialist society.

Thus, unlike utopian socialism, which expects existing class relations to remain intact while expecting the state to undertake tasks contrary to the interests of the ruling class, Marxists understand socialism as the political and economic transformation of those very class relations. It is through this transformation that the conditions for a communist society can be created.

2. The Problem of Imagination

The distinction of Marxist Socialism from other utopian ideas of an egalitarian society is an essential one, however, even with this differentiation, there lies the problem of imagination. Socialism or communism seems utopian and imaginary for the same reasons capitalism might have seemed utopian during the times when humans hunted animals to survive, or when production took place through slaves, or when a serf toiled day and night just for their subsistence.

The idea of an advanced system seems impossible to imagine when we live in an outdated one. Part of this is natural, for it is difficult to imagine something that you have not seen, especially when it seems diametrically opposed to what you do see around you. As Mark Fisher famously noted in Capitalist Realism, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

While our inability to imagine constitutes part of the problem, the other part lies in the system itself. Capitalism, like all previous systems, has normalised its own conditions while portraying any alternative as dangerous, unrealistic, or impossible. Despite widescale evidence of its crises, corruption and contradictions, capitalism presents the existing order as the only natural and viable way to organize society.

One of the tools in its pocket is the examples of socialist experiments that were “unsuccessful” and “totalitarian”. Capitalists make huge investments in running the propaganda machine against them, obscuring two important facts:

• Socialist governance produced positive results at a scale that the capitalist system never has been able to, especially in terms of the improvement of the lives of the people.

• These systems were subjected to sustained covert and overt intervention, sanctions, coups, economic isolation, or military pressure from Western capitalist powers, preventing them from developing under conditions free from external hostility

An insidious aspect of capitalism is accommodation of its own criticism. Films, television, literature, and social media routinely depict corporate greed, corrupt politicians, exploitative bosses, and environmental destruction. However, these critiques often do not threaten capitalism itself because they stop short of entertaining the idea of a credible systemic alternative. The audience is encouraged to recognize the flaws of the system while assuming that no fundamentally different social order is feasible.

People may complain about the existence of inequality and exploitation, however, they continue believing these are simply unavoidable features of reality rather than products of a particular economic system. Therefore, even when these issues are seen as systemic and institutionalised, the solution for them is understood to exist under the liberal framework of painstakingly slow reforms, within the larger system. Under capitalism, the critique of the system could be scathing, the denouncements, radical, but the accepted prescription never seems to escape the inadequate bounds of liberalism. Anything questioning the validity of the system itself is either discarded as something too unrealistic, too radical or at worst too dangerous to engage with. Capitalism therefore, does not have to claim to be the best, but merely the least bad and additionally, the only shield protecting us from the “totalitarian” nightmare that is communism.

Through its fear-mongering, misinformation, and control over media and education, the current system actively kills our imagination, fostering a belief that the existing order is natural, permanent, and without alternative. This erodes our ability to analyse our present living conditions in the context of human history.

Capitalism emerged to challenge and ultimately overthrow feudal exploitation as the market economy began to develop. Driven by advances in technology, expanding trade, and improvements in communication and travel, it unleashed productive forces on a scale no previous system had achieved.

Despite such advancements under this system, our society continues to structure itself around an artificial cause—profit, instead of a real cause—human needs.

Humanity has the means to feed everyone, yet millions remain hungry.

An abundant labour force and unprecedented automation capabilities exist, yet millions remain unemployed.

Scientific and technological progress has advanced at an extraordinary pace, yet countless people continue to struggle to meet even their most basic needs.

This is neither natural nor normal. Capitalism has conditioned our minds into normalizing these conditions. When we look at it from a critical perspective, doing away with the restriction of our imagination to our immediate reality, there remains no logical reason for us to not dismantle the capitalist system that continues to propagate misery and exploitation for its growth.

A New World Must Come

A new world is not only possible but it must be brought about with urgency, for a contradictory system continues to push the society towards its ruin and possible extinction every passing second.

Imagine if human beings had never shifted to cooking food on fire despite the discovery of it. Or if society had never adopted agriculture despite finding its production capabilities. Humankind would probably not have survived long enough for you to be reading this.

The case remains the same with Capitalism. While it has outlived its historical role, Capitalism continues to hinder the possibility of a better world, through economic exploitation, state power, and ideological domination. This has to be broken and just like all previous other systems, it will be achieved by the ordinary people living in the system.

For a new world to come forth, we have to do away, not only with the idealistic claims of utopia but also with the scepticism of the material possibility of a different and better future.

Vladimir Lenin said that the “doctrine of the state serves to justify social privilege, the existence of exploitation, the existence of capitalism”. Thus, it becomes crucial to scientifically understand the theory and doctrine of state: what it is, how it came to be, its evolution over time, and how it operates in various forms and ways.

In a fundamental sense, the state exists to enforce a class division in society. State is a historical system through which one class of people decides to set apart and exert control over other classes using means of coercion and violence. As social hierarchies got complex and rigid over time, leading to the concentration of power in society, the tools and mechanisms of the state evolved to normalise these hierarchies and their consequent exploitation. As long as there exists a division of society, and conflicts between classes, the state will exist as a system of control to maintain the interests of the ruling class.

Historical Evolution of State

All stages of development of human societies are essentially characterised by their productive forces and relations of production. Productive forces of society consist of the various instruments of production across history that have been used by people to produce material value using the experience and expertise they possess. Thus, the various epochs of human development are distinguished not by what was produced but rather by how material wealth was produced. From primitive stone tools to modern day factories, the productive forces reflect the relationship of people to the objects and forces of nature used for the production of material wealth.

The productive forces also come to determine production relations, i.e., social connections and relations formed between people in the process of the production of material wealth. Who owns the means of production (land, raw materials, instruments of production, etc.); what is the position of the various social groups in the production process and their mutual relationship; and how is the material wealth of this production process distributed among people.

The productive forces and and the production relations together constitute a society’s mode of production. Each mode of production forms the economic base of society, the real foundation, from which rises the legal, social, and political structures which govern the forms of social consciousness of that epoch.

In primitive societies, the productive forces were exceedingly low, and the implements of production were extremely primitive, requiring a more collective form of labour. Means of production were collectively owned by small communities and their subsequent material wealth was equally distributed. This meant that there were no classes as such. Power was decentralised in these primitive societies. Order was maintained through customs and traditions, general ties to the community itself, discipline, and authority of the clan elders including men and women. All members of the society in turn exercised practically all its functions.

“The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”

– Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution

The gradual improvement of instruments of production led to production of more surpluses. With the advent of cattle-breeding, large scale agriculture, and systemic farming, a shift began from communal ownership to private ownership. The widespread production and trade of surpluses created a demand for additional labour, leading to the creation of the earliest class division – slaves and slave owners. Slavery became the dominant mode of production. The class of slave owners owned the means of production and slaves were considered a part of it. Slavery emerged as the earliest form of exploitation of humans by fellow humans for surplus production. It was during this epoch that the state first took shape as a mechanism of oppression and exploitation due to the division of society into irreconcilably hostile classes.

A small section of society took over the exercise of functions that were once collectively performed. Kinship was replaced with law, consensus with force, and communal governance with earliest forms of monarchy. Earliest examples of the state’s emergence and functioning can be found in ancient slave owning societies of Rome and Greece. The state developed as a special apparatus that held its power over and above the society to enforce class divisions using violence and subjugation. Territorial control, standing armies, police, prisons, tax authorities, as arms of the state began to emerge.

With increasing development of productive forces, feudalism emerged as the new form of class exploitation for surplus production. It emerged from the disintegration of slave owning society and the break up of village communities. Means of production were now in the hands of feudal lords who then distributed them among their serfs. The exploitation of the peasant serf was the basis of production relations of feudal society. Unlike slaves, peasants had their own lands to work on but still had to work extra to generate surplus for the feudal lords and pay him what can now be seen as an earliest form of rent.

In order to maintain and strengthen their power over the peasants, the landowning class of feudal lords had to rely on the organs of state. Military leaders began to concentrate power, eventually becoming kings-monarchical rulers. Thus emerged the monarchical state with the special power of force and subjection to maintain class antagonisms in this epoch. The peasant had no political right and had to work under the feudal lord for safety and protection in return.

Towards the end of the feudal age, the increasing development of trade and commodity exchange, invention of minted money, and commodification of mode of production ushered in the epoch of capitalism. Now, not only the products of labour, but labour power too became a commodity. Economic power shifted from the landowning class of feudal lords to the new class of capitalists who had consolidated increasing land and wealth during the feudal times.

Older class divisions disappeared and all were regarded equal before the law – but the law protected the private property of the ruling class. This was the period when many of the institutions, such as judiciary, parliament, banking system, that form the part of modern states began to take shape.

Over time, the monetary needs of the modern state became much greater and were being fulfilled by the capitalists who therefore demanded complete service of the state in return. This class nature of the modern bourgeois state can be easily discerned. For example, in most Western countries where parliamentarism was instituted, only the landowning class had the right to vote and represent a population. Even after universal suffrage was brought in under modern democracies, a closer look at how parliaments function in these countries in terms of who the laws are made for and who benefits from such laws – reveals the close bond between the ruling class and the state.

The illusion of liberty, equality, and freedom prevailed in modern societies. Unlike the feudal era, anybody now could own land. Everybody had to go through the same bureaucratic systems. Everyone was equal in the eyes of the law and would be held equally accountable for breaking the laws. And yet countless examples from everyday lives clearly reveal the contradictions between the inherent bourgeois nature of the state and its constant attempt to position itself as a state representing all.

“The methods of violence changed, but whenever there was a state there existed in every society a group of persons who ruled, who commanded, who dominated and who in order to maintain their power possessed an apparatus of physical coercion, an apparatus of violence, with those weapons which corresponded to the technical level of the given epoch.”

– Vladimir Lenin

Modern Nation-State

“The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.”

– Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

With the overthrow of feudalism, and the rise of capitalism and nationalism during the 19th century, the state being granted legitimacy by divine right changed to the state gaining legitimacy by representing a population with a shared ethnic, linguistic, or historic identity. This led to the rise of modern nation states that developed more complex mechanisms to maintain their legitimacy and continue to uphold class divisions and exploitation in society. These institutions and systems indoctrinated a sense of loyalty and subjugation within the subjects of the state who accepted their own exploitation by the ruling class.

One example can be that of Israel. It claims to represent Jewish people using the holocaust as a justification for its existence. When the Israeli state’s borders and legitimacy is threatened because it is a state built on stolen land it reacts in a genocidal manner. It uses media propaganda to victimise themselves and demonise the Palestinian people. The reason the Israeli state is allowed to do what it wants is because it creates surplus value for US and global corporations.

There also exists countries like India, whose people are diverse and have multiple nations within it. To gain legitimacy, the Indian state had to create its identity around its constitution and political framework. Being an Indian is more of a civic identity than a universal one. In a state like this, there are groups of people who challenge the capabilities of the legal and political framework of the state to represent them. Perhaps the clearest example can be found in Kashmir. When Kashmir became part of India, its people did not trust the Indian state to represent them. People of Kashmir have repeatedly questioned the Indian state’s rule over it. The Indian state has always responded to it with force and violence, using every state apparatus to legitimise its rule: through military occupation, abolishing article 370, demonising people of Kashmir through media, and much more.

To understand how the modern Nation-State controls and legitimizes its rule over a population we need to understand the various mechanisms used by the state. Every component of the state exists to increase surplus value for the ruling class. Some of these components include:

• Border: A territory that demarcates an area for the state’s jurisdiction where its authority is absolute.

• Population: A permanent population that creates surplus value within the state borders.

• Central Government: A centralised governing body that creates laws and interacts with other states to create internal and external order.

• Sovereignty: The internal laws, systems, and processes that are independent of foreign state interference.

• Recognition: States recognise each other on the world stage to get into commerce with each other.

• Monopoly of Violence: Only the state has the right to enact violence through apparatus like the police and military.

• Nation: Many nations can exist inside a state. Nation is a cultural and social group of people bound together by shared language, history, and ethnicity. The state chooses to recognise in its laws the nation of people who hold the most public power and appease those people to show that it represents them as a whole.

State apparatus

The state exercises power through the state apparatus, a tool of coercion. These apparatus by means of violence and propaganda convince the working class to agree to their own exploitation. It is hardly noticed because the state is seen as an organisation above society, which makes the coercion invisible and unbiased. State apparatus exist in two forms: ideological and repressive.

Ideological state apparatuses (ISA)

As mentioned earlier, the economic mode of production in a society forms the base upon which the social, legal, political superstructures emerge that shape the social consciousness of that society. These superstructures are controlled by the state to maintain class divisions. This is where the ideological wing of the state comes in. It operates to convince the people of the state’s legitimacy.

Louis Althusser, in his attempt to build on the existing Marxist theory of state proposed the concept of ISA to emphasise on the role of ideology in state apparatus. While some state apparatus, like police, function in the public domain, ideological apparatuses function to maintain the power of the ruling class in the private domain. The principle of repression remains the same, either through physical force or ideological domination.

Apparatuses like education, media, religious institutions, family, legal and political system, dominant cultures, create obedient workers out of the population. They inculcate compliance, discipline, and subjugation by constantly normalising the ideology of oppression by the ruling class as status quo.

The indoctrination of ruling ideology begins the moment a child is born in this society. Heteronormative gender roles are imposed at the get go that end up dictating the confinements of how children will be raised.

Family and Education

ISA dominate the earlier stages of building obedience, subjugation, and conformity. Allegiance to the family, respecting the authority of the elders, being faithful to the family name, and always choosing family relations over other personal relations.

Later, education institutes become places of respecting the authority of teachers. Institutional education devoid of any criticality further reinforces obedience and following the rules. Textbooks lack historicity and politics, never letting students build the ability to question. Ruling ideology permeates in our daily lives through several normalising narratives. In India, meritocracy is one such prominent one. By masking the ideological nature of institutions under the guise of neutrality, we’re made to believe that if we work hard enough, perform well enough, we will be rewarded for it. The same indoctrination follows in workforces where the manager/boss becomes a figure of authority. The narrative of meritocracy continues here as well: hard work will be rewarded with promotion and upward movement.

All throughout, other ISA like media and culture through books, films, music, advertising, reinforce the ideology of obedience, subjugation, compliance, and discipline. The recent rise of hustle culture presents a sharp example of this where utter surrender of your labour power for the ruling class’s profit is being highly rewarded. Normalisation of the same can be found in religion ISA as well, which has historically normalised exploitative ideology by crafting a certain morality that centres on modesty and submissiveness. Similarly, the legal and political system operates to normalise the ruling ideology through the concepts of law is for everyone, we are all equal before the law, and we must all be law abiding citizens.

As we move through these institutions that impose ruling class ideology upon us, we no longer remain autonomous individuals with free will, instead we become subjects of the state. Althusser argued that all ISA contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation. As subjects of ruling class ideology, we are trained with particular know-hows to survive through this system by agreeing to be exploited.

The normalisation of ruling class ideology is such that we fail to see how various apparatuses ultimately serve the ruling class. Institutional education remains inaccessible to a vast majority of classes including Dalits, Adivasis, and many other marginalised/backward communities. This inaccessibility is maintained through the geographical location, medium of education, language, entrance exams, and so on. Parliament is dominated by the bourgeois class who ultimately makes laws that allow for the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class.

“In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission. This last note gives us the meaning of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself’. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection.”

– Louis Althusser

Repressive state apparatuses (RSA)

The oldest and most continuous apparatus of the state has been the one that uses coercion and violence. Repressive state apparatuses include the military, administration, police force, prisons, and courts.

Historically constituted to maintain public order, the police is one of the earliest modes of enforcing the will of the state. During slavery, a special class of people equipped with force were formed to squash any slave uprisings and return runaway slaves to their owners. In the feudal era, constables were controlled by the feudal lords. Similarly courts and judicial systems have always been controlled and governed by the ruling class. The prison system came into existence and developed over time as a means for disciplining and punishing those who challenged the ruling class.

RSA became the most visible manifestation of the state serving the ruling class. Any small or major challenge to the ruling class by the oppressed classes is met with severe police suppression in the name of maintaining order. The recent Jantar Mantar and Jharkhand police brutality is only the latest instance of this. The Delhi High Court on the next day refused to urgently hear a PIL on the excessive force by Delhi Police saying “Don’t drag the court into all of this” revealing yet again that it is an extension of the state.

In the past decade India has seen an increasing usage for police force to protect the interests of the ruling class. The use of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and National Security Act are at an all time high. UAPA came into existence during the Congress era demonstrating the universal function of the state regardless of its face. Trials never begin, pre-trials detentions are extended for years, and bails are repeatedly denied by the court. Workers, Students, Adivasis, Dalits, Farmers, anyone who challenges or even questions the ruling class immediately faces the might of the state.

Parliament becomes the gathering place for all bourgeois classes who come together to create and enact laws that ultimately benefit the ruling class. Judicial proceedings and judgements back such actions. The recent country wide unprecedented degree of disenfranchisement under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is one example that reveals this. All agencies of the state ultimately function with the goal: to maintain class divisions and class oppression.

From A Liberal To A Neoliberal Conception of the State

Liberalism was a force that moulded Western governance, emerging in line with capitalism, post the breakdown of feudalism in Europe. It cultivated the administrative structures around which capitalism flourishes, especially through its imagination of the role of the state.

Each individual, according to liberalism, was inherently equal, hence worthy of equal respect by the State. One such example of birth right equality can be the concept of ‘one person, one vote.’ All individuals existing in the State, regardless of their economic or social affluence, hold the same amount of voting power.

The role of the State, then, becomes that of a neutral arbiter. It must simply create conditions in which equality is ensured, resulting in a harmonious fulfilment of competing interests. To contextualise, the existence of courts to settle disputes, the provision of travel infrastructure such as railways and roads - all form a part of the conditions requisite for equality.

Here, the State’s duty ends at providing aforementioned conditions. Each citizen is entitled to a ‘negative freedom’ – to an absence of external constraints, leaving one to live in the manner they like. This pattern also echoes in the policy of economic liberalism, which advocated for the free-market. The market was assumed to be a self-regulating machine, operating according to a set of impersonal forces – the market forces of supply and demand – that naturally inclined towards economic well-being. The State’s interference was not needed, because the market was a self-correcting entity managed by ‘an invisible hand.’

But when a demand for wider State intervention emerges – which did with the turn of the twentieth century – the State’s role does not stop at an equal distribution of pre-existing rights and entitlements, but extends to that of goods and opportunities to ensure the socio-economic welfare of its citizens. For instance, the provisioning of public education along with reservation policies to ensure inclusion of marginalised communities. This echoes a step towards ‘positive freedom’ – enabling one to live as they would prefer through the State diminishing socio-economic disadvantages. This idea took root after the trust in the invisible hand collapsed owing to the Great Depression and the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Most Western governments started adopting policies to increase aggregate demand, leading to further state intervention. Here, the State’s role expanded to include a broader range of economic and social responsibilities.

However, ever since the 1980s, renewed enthusiasm for the classical liberal economy has arisen, particularly through a free-market revolution which called for a withdrawal of government regulations and subsidies – this was the neoliberal shift, most prominent in the US and the UK. This shift was institutionalised in most international trade and finance bodies, which enforce a neo-liberal agenda onto developing countries today leading to the emergence of a transnational elite.

The most apparent example of this would be the Structural Readjustment Programs offered by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to the countries that approach them during their economic crises. These impose certain economic reforms on the borrowing country as pre-requisites for obtaining loans, which usually include the deregulation of state-owned industries along with their privatisation, devaluation of their domestic currency, opening up the domestic market etc. This is what happened to India during the 1991 liberalisation. Unsurprisingly, the urban elite absorbed its benefits, who in turn formed a part of the global elite, and the Indian economy shifted to meet their interests, as can be gleaned from the meteoric rise of multinational companies in India’s corporate sector, to name an example.

Moreover, the international community now imposes the idea of a ‘democratic State’ – which is the only kind of acceptable political organisation in the internal structure of States. It requires that farcically neutral periodic elections be held for membership in the international community, while ignoring underlying inequities like illiteracy that might affect the outcome. In effect, these superficial democracies are encouraged to bolster transnational capital, since elected representatives are coerced to follow social and economic policies - which are largely neoliberal - legitimised on the international level. The State hence becomes a mechanism through which neoliberalism infiltrates into the domestic sphere, posing deleterious effects for the people it is subject to.

Conclusion

The state came into existence and developed historically to maintain class divisions in society and facilitate the power of the ruling class over the oppressed class through force and exploitation. On one hand, the state and its apparatus function to repress any force that challenges and resists its legitimacy and by extension the legitimacy of the ruling class power in society. On the other hand, the state also normalises the ruling class ideology through everyday discourses that feeds into the legitimacy of the ruling class power.

The state is essentially a group of people who exercise the functions that were in the beginning exercised collectively by all members of society. All functions of the state and its apparatus can be reduced to: surveillance and control of the life of the society in the interests of the ruling class. As long as class conflicts remain, the state will exist to maintain the domination of the ruling class. And the stronger class conflicts become in society, the more coercive the state will become.

“O youth of India! Why do you lie asleep in the slumber of complacency, unaware of the world around you? Rise, open your eyes, and behold—the eastern horizon is already glowing with the crimson light of dawn.” ~Youth, Bhagat Singh

Today, more than ever, the youth are deliberately surrounded by misinformation, hate and shallow political narratives that push them further away from understanding the world around them. To respond to these conditions, the People’s Cultural Forum was started.

We seek to create a space where young people can discuss, question and understand the political, social and cultural realities that shape the world. Through conversations, art, films, literature and cultural activities, we hope to bring politics closer to those who have been pushed away from it. We challenge conservatism, communalism and counter-revolutionary propaganda. We speak of the struggles of all oppressed people.

If you are a student who wishes to move beyond the noise of hyperactive electoral politics and contribute towards building a conscious revolutionary movement, join us.

In past two months, there has been ample discussion around misgovernance, mismanagement and corruption within the authorities and rightly so. But another question that deserves our attention is: Why do papers leak in the first place?

The core issue behind paper leaks is closely tied to the cut-throat competition that has continuously intensified over the years. The more competitive an examination becomes, the greater the incentives for corruption, and the higher the price of a leaked paper.

This competition itself is produced by two simultaneous processes: the extremely limited seats in public educational institutions and government employment on one hand, and the ever-rising cost of education on the other.

Despite repeated promises over decades, public spending on education has never reached even the long-standing target of 6 percent of GDP as recommended by Kothari Commission, instead remaining around 3.5–4.5 percent. At the same time, the cost of education has continued to rise sharply. The education component of the Consumer Price Index has increased by nearly 90 percent since 2013, while private school fees have risen by well over 150 percent in many urban areas.

The contradiction becomes even clearer when we look at the number of available seats. Every year, over 22 lakh students appear for NEET, competing for barely 1.3 lakh MBBS seats, with government seats being only a fraction of these. Similarly, this year, nearly 1.9 lakh students applied for undergraduate admissions in Delhi University this year for just over 71,000 seats. The problem is therefore clearly not a lack of students willing to study. It is that the system deliberately keeps opportunities scarce.

This scarcity exists even where society desperately needs more professionals. India continues to face a severe shortage of doctors, teachers and healthcare workers, yet the number of seats remains limited. Public hospitals remain understaffed, schools continue to function without teachers, and universities struggle with massive faculty shortages.

One argument often presented against increasing educational seats is that there are not enough teachers to teach. Ironically, even the examinations meant to recruit teachers are repeatedly leaked, cancelled or delayed. Across the country, more than 3.5 lakh sanctioned teaching posts remain vacant in school education alone, while central universities have over 5,400 vacant teaching positions and the IITs continue to operate with thousands of faculty posts lying unfilled.

Another argument claims that there is not enough infrastructure. Yet, when it comes to wasteful expenditure, publicity campaigns or prestige projects, resources somehow become available overnight. Between 2020 and 2026 alone, the Union Government spent more than ₹2586 crore on advertisements promoting itself. The Statue of Unity alone cost nearly ₹3000 crore, an amount comparable to establishing multiple IITs and IIMs. The question is not whether resources exist, but whose interests they are used to serve.

The systematic weakening of public education has only increased people’s dependence on private institutions run by large corporate groups and billionaires such as Shiv Nadar, Jindal, Tata, Birla, Ambani and Adani. Over the last decade, the number of private universities has grown by nearly 150 percent, while student enrolment in them has increased by almost 200 percent. Education increasingly functions not as a public necessity but as a profitable business.

The same contradiction exists in employment. We are repeatedly told that there are not enough jobs. Yet even the jobs that already exist are deliberately left vacant. Nearly 8.5 lakh posts in the central government remain unfilled, alongside lakhs of vacancies in schools, hospitals, universities, the armed forces and public sector institutions. Surveys show that 78 percent of young people in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are looking for a government job, while more than half are actively preparing for one. Every cancelled examination and every delayed recruitment keeps another generation of young people trapped in uncertainty.

Logically, a country facing shortages of doctors, teachers, judges and healthcare workers should be educating more people and recruiting more workers. Instead, it does the opposite. It limits education, leaves public posts vacant, and forces millions of young people into an ever more desperate competition for fewer and fewer opportunities.

This contradiction is therefore not accidental. Capitalism constantly speaks of productivity, efficiency and development. Yet, despite having millions of young people willing to study, work and contribute to society, it deliberately keeps education and employment scarce. Society needs more doctors, teachers, engineers, researchers and healthcare workers. The youth are willing to become them. The resources to educate and employ them exist. And yet, the system refuses to do so.

This artificial scarcity serves a purpose.

On one hand, it expands the market for private capital. As public education and employment decline, private schools, universities, coaching centres and hospitals continue to flourish, turning education itself into another commodity from which a handful of billionaires accumulate enormous profits.

On the other hand, the same scarcity produces a vast reserve of desperate labour. Years spent in endless competition force millions of young people to accept whatever work they can find, no matter how exploitative. Whether in call centres yesterday or in today’s rapidly expanding gig economy, workers are compelled to work longer hours, for lower wages and with fewer rights, simply because countless others are waiting to replace them.

The paper leak is therefore not the real crisis. It is merely one symptom of a system built upon manufactured scarcity. The real contradiction is that while society needs more educated people, more skilled workers and more public services than ever before, capitalism can only function by denying these needs. It keeps millions unemployed, underemployed or trapped in endless competition, not because society cannot make use of their labour, but because such scarcity ultimately serves the interests of the ruling class and the imperialists who profit from it.

If we are to seriously fight against paper leaks, the solution cannot be limited to resignations, committee inquiries or stricter policing of examination centres. Such measures may temporarily deal with one incident, but they leave untouched the conditions that produce paper leaks again and again. Before anything else, paper leaks have to be understood as a systemic issue, one rooted in an education and employment system organised around profit rather than social need.

And because the problem is systemic, its solution too has to be systemic. The struggle is therefore not merely for fair examinations, but for an education system organised according to the needs of society, not the interests of capital. It is a struggle for a society where education is not a commodity, where employment is not artificially restricted, and where the productive capacity of millions of young people is developed rather than wasted.

Such a struggle cannot be fought by students alone. The same system that keeps students trapped in endless competition also keeps workers unemployed, peasants indebted, teachers overworked, doctors overburdened and the masses deprived of the most basic necessities. These are not separate struggles but different expressions of the same contradiction. Those who suffer the worst under this system—the working class, poor peasantry and the broad masses—understand its brutality better than anyone else.

Students therefore have a special responsibility. Education is not merely a means to secure one’s own future, but a means to understand society and transform it. The task before students is not simply to demand fairer examinations, but to unite their struggles with those of the workers, peasants and all oppressed sections of society. Only by combining these struggles into a common movement can we put an end not merely to paper leaks, but to the system that repeatedly produces them for the profit of a handful while condemning millions to insecurity, unemployment and despair.

The first step in understanding these problems is to understand that these are not isolated issues. They emerged from a new political and economic approach adopted by capitalism during the final decades of the 20th century. They are, however, explained as unfortunate consequences of globalisation. But in reality, they are part of a broader transformation in global capitalism, called neoliberalism. To understand neoliberalism, however, we must first understand the historical development of capitalism itself.

From Liberalism to Neoliberalism

Every mode of production, whether it is feudalism or capitalism, creates its own political and ideological forms that help sustain it. Just as feudalism relied upon hereditary privilege, monarchy, the divine right of kings and so on, capitalism relied upon liberalism, an ideology that was all for private property, individual liberty, equality and freedom (for both the individual and the market). People like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke solidified these principles and provided the philosophical foundations for the emerging bourgeois class. Because, liberal ideas, which were very revolutionary at the time, were required to dismantle feudal restrictions on trade and property, and to bring about the smooth transition to the capitalist modes of production.

As capitalism developed, the intense competition led to the concentration of capital, where bigger companies bought out or crushed smaller ones, leading to the rise of giant monopolies that controlled entire industries. At the same time, banks and financial institutions became increasingly powerful, and both industrial and financial capital began expanding beyond their own countries in search of cheaper labour, raw materials, new markets and higher profits. In ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism’, Lenin says that this was capitalism at its most developed stage. Instead of simply selling goods abroad, capitalist countries increasingly exported capital itself by investing in and controlling industries, resources and infrastructure in other countries. As a result, competition was no longer just between individual businesses, but also between powerful capitalist states and monopolies competing to dominate markets, resources and territories across the world.

Neoliberalism relates closely to this historical stage of capitalism. It emerged as an ideological and economic strategy through which imperialist capitalism sought to overcome one of its deepest crises and restore the power and profitability of capital. ‘Neo’ in neoliberalism distinguishes it from a simple return to classical liberalism. Liberalism arose during capitalism’s revolutionary phase, helping the bourgeois overthrow the feudal order and establish capitalist society. However, neoliberalism emerged with the purpose of preserving the crumbling imperialist capitalist system. It revived liberal rhetoric about free markets and individual freedom but increasingly centered on the need of productivity and individual success. But what factors led neoliberalism to emerge in the 20th century?

History of Neoliberalism

Between 1950 and the early 1970s, capitalist economies in the West experienced what is often called the “Golden Age of Capitalism”. This was a period of unusually high growth, high profits and rising mass consumption after years of economic depression and devastating wars. Western capitalist countries also focused on public healthcare, education, housing and social welfare. But of course, it did not happen because capitalism is loving and generous. They were political concessions forced upon the capitalist class by an unprecedented international balance of class forces.

For the first time in history, socialism had emerged as a global alternative to capitalism. The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and emerged as a superpower. Socialist governments were successfully established across Eastern Europe, and further the Chinese Revolution of 1949 brought hundreds of millions under a new democratic society, Cuba overthrew a US-backed dictatorship in 1959, anti-colonial and communist movements spread throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, labour unions were strong and workers across the capitalist world organised militant struggles for better wages and conditions.

Faced with the growing appeal of socialist experiments across the world, the capitalist states could no longer rely solely on direct violent repression. They adopted welfare measures to contain class conflicts, and to keep revolutionary movements under the radar. Universal healthcare, public education, subsidised housing, full employment policies and stronger labour protections were therefore not gifts from the capitalist class but concessions that were inevitable due to the strong working-class struggle and the existence of a credible socialist alternative.

This post-war adjustment, represented a temporary compromise between capital and labour. The state intervened extensively in investment, production and welfare, because maintaining social stability had become essential in an era when socialism appeared capable of replacing capitalism altogether. At the same time, a way was needed to continue imperialist exploitation of other countries, without the need of direct colonial control. So, capitalist-imperialist state machines such as the US and Britain built a framework for global ‘economic stability’ through the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, which created the IMF and World Bank as institutions to manage international finance and debt.

After the boom, from 1974 to 1982, the capitalist world again experienced two severe recessions alongside a longer-term crisis of profitability. Inflation, collapsing investment and currency instability hit simultaneously, and most importantly, profit rates declined across nearly every major capitalist economy. Along with the emergence of the socialist states, a significant share of this profit decline resulted from the strengthened bargaining position of labour during the post-war decades. Rising wages, expanding welfare systems and powerful trade unions restricted the share of surplus value available to capital.

So, the very concessions that had once protected capitalism against socialism now appeared as obstacles to profit accumulation. Hence, neoliberalism emerged as the capital’s answer to this crisis. The capitalist class wanted to restore its dominance by dismantling the institutions that had strengthened labour. The state also became an active instrument for reconstructing class power through privatisation, deregulation, attacks on organised labour, financial liberalisation and the global expansion of capital. In other words, neoliberal ideology and neoliberal policies represented the reorganisation of the state and society in the interests of monopoly and finance capital during the imperialist stage of capitalism.

According to David Harvey, Neoliberalism proposes that individuals, and by extension society, function best when markets are given greater freedom and barriers to capital accumulation are removed. It calls for an institutional framework characterised by “strong private property rights, free markets and free trade”, along with state deregulation. If a market does not exist, it must be created, and all human actions must be brought into the domain of the market.

John O’Connor in his ‘Marxism and the Three Movements of Neoliberalism’ identifies three movements that made neoliberalism possible:

Movement One: Recasting the Balance of Class Forces

The first major neoliberal strategy was a direct attack on the power workers had accumulated during the post-war period, and this was enabled by the reconstruction of mass unemployment. During the so-called ‘Golden Age’, full employment and welfare protections had weakened the disciplinary threat of joblessness, where workers had some sort of bargaining power. Neoliberal policies reversed this deliberately, abandoning full employment as a policy goal in two waves, in the early 1980s and early 1990s, in order to rebuild what Marx called the “reserve army of labour”. Unemployment rose from 30 million people across the OECD countries in 1983 to 35 million in 1993.

The previous system of Keynesian fiscal management, where “government intervened through public policies to achieve full employment and price stability”, gave way to monetarism, which prioritised crushing inflation even at the cost of mass unemployment. Conservative parties advocating a free-market system won elections across OECD capitalist countries such as the US, UK, France and Canada, and began implementing this agenda.

The second mechanism was what the political theorist Leo Panitch calls the “New Imperialism”, a renewed assertion of American military and ideological power. This had both a territorial dimension, with intensified Cold War confrontation and military interventions in Lebanon, Libya, Bolivia etc., to suppress revolutionary movements, and a non-territorial dimension, with the global promotion of free-market capitalism through what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’. Acting through the IMF and World Bank, this consensus pressured nations worldwide to open their economies to global investment and cut social spending.

The third mechanism was industrial downsizing, the restructuring of production methods that reduced manufacturing’s share of total OECD employment from 28.7% in 1970 to 21.8% in 1990, eliminating large numbers of low-skill manufacturing jobs in the name of efficiency.

The fourth was the systematic liberalisation of capital flows. Between 1991 and 1999 alone, there were over a thousand changes to laws governing foreign investment worldwide, the vast majority of which reduced restrictions on capital. Capital became freer to move across borders in search of higher profits; and if workers demanded better wages or governments attempted to increase taxes on corporations, businesses could threaten to move their investments elsewhere. The result was that governments became more concerned with keeping investors satisfied than responding to the demands of workers. The recent example can be seen in Kerala, with the ‘Invest Kerala Global Summit’ initiated by the CPI(M)-led government to posit the state as an “investor-friendly” place that does not disrupt the international and national capital flow. Thus, the possibility of capital flight became a powerful weapon against unions and labour movements.

Ideologically too, American military and economic dominance, especially following the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreclosed the possibility that an alternative to capitalism could even exist.

Movement Two: Remaking the Mode of Production

The second neoliberal strategy was a transformation in how capitalist economies produce, appropriate and reproduce value.

Under the post-war system, large-scale Fordist production methods were followed, with factories relying on relatively stable workforces and fixed production systems. Under neoliberalism, this became “lean production”, where companies sought to reduce costs by moving different stages of production across different regions and countries. Instead of maintaining a stable workforce, they depended upon temporary workers, contractors and precarious forms of employment. This “lean production” eliminated any worker behaviour that did not directly generate value while distributing the production process across multiple firms and countries through subcontracting, making it far harder for workers to identify a single employer to organise against.

In terms of how profit is appropriated, the major shift was financialisation. As industrial investment became less reliably profitable, capital increasingly sought returns through speculative financial activity such as stock markets, bonds and debt rather than production. By 1995, international currency transactions reached roughly 1.2 trillion dollars a day and only about 5% of that volume was connected to actual trade or long-term investment. The remaining 95% was pure speculation. The growing importance of finance also transformed everyday life, where housing, education and consumption became tied to debt, and economic life became organised around credit, loans and financial markets.

Since capitalism depended on people buying goods, with reduced wages and rising unemployment, many could no longer afford to consume. And the capitalists’ solution to increase the consumption was the massive expansion of consumer credit. This materialised in the form of credit cards and easier access to loans etc., and allowed people to keep spending even when their incomes could not support it. So, debt became the only way that allowed the working class to survive.

Private sector debt as a share of GDP rose sharply across the G7 countries during this period. In Germany, private sector debt increased from 87% of GDP in 1985 to 100% in 1995, while in Japan it rose from 99% to 124%.

Of course, this debt-driven ‘brilliant’ model, just like every other capitalist endeavour, violently collapsed and resulted in the global financial crisis of 2008.

Movement Three: Reorganising Capital Accumulation

“During state-led monopoly capitalism, the circuit of capital was linked to one particular state, with investment, production, and consumption embedded in the institutions of a domestic economy. With neoliberalism, the circuit of capital is integrated into the world market in differing degrees.”

Instead of investment, production and sales taking place mainly within individual countries, businesses operated across borders, sourcing labour, materials and markets wherever profits were highest. As a result, the world economy became far more interconnected and dependent on global trade and investment.

This created a new kind of competition, not simply between firms, but between nation-states themselves, each restructuring its domestic institutions to attract mobile capital. Investment subsidisation shifted from nationalisation towards privatisation and tax incentives designed to attract foreign capital. Financial systems were deregulated and central banks were granted greater independence from elected governments specifically to prioritise fighting inflation over maintaining employment, a change implemented in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK during this period. Employment relations were restructured through the deliberate decentralisation and weakening of collective bargaining, with union density across the OECD falling from 46% in 1980 to 40% by the mid-1990s. Taxation systems were also restructured to shift the burden away from capital and onto labour, with the average top marginal income tax rate across OECD nations falling by over 12% points between 1986 and 1997, while consumption taxes increased.

So, in this manner, neoliberalism helped reconstruct the balance of power between capital and labour in capital’s favour.

Neoliberalism-Neoimperialism Nexus

Of course, neoliberalism, from its inception, was an international project. And its global imposition relied on a renewed and reorganised form of imperialism. As Michael Parenti argues in ‘Against Empire’, imperialism did not disappear after decolonisation. It merely changed its form. This move, away from direct territorial empire resulted in neoimperialism. Formal political independence was granted to erstwhile colonised nations, but economic control strongly remained in the hands of Western capitalist countries through debt, trade agreements, financial institutions and access to resources. Basically, the “flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere.”

This system relied on the ‘comprador class’, composed of local political and economic elites who opened their countries to foreign capital in exchange for wealth, power and external support. This class of local capitalists, military officers and political leaders became the domestic enforcers of neoliberal restructuring, even while sometimes publicly denouncing imperialism in their rhetoric.

Debt also became an important mechanism of control. By the 1990s, Third World debt had reached nearly $2 trillion. Countries trapped in debt were forced to accept IMF and World Bank terms and conditions in exchange for new loans, including wage freezes, cuts to public services, privatisation and tax concessions for foreign investors. In some cases, such as Paraguay, debt servicing consumed up to 80% of export earnings. The result was a continuous transfer of wealth from the ‘Global South’ to international finance capital.

This restructuring is also not non-violent. When the ‘Global South’ governments attempted to pursue alternative socialist paths of development, they frequently faced economic sanctions, political destabilisation or direct intervention. The toppling of the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile, years-long sanctions on Cuba and violent attacks on Iraq and Libya are among the most prominent examples.

As neoliberalism expanded, this imperialist coercion became less visible. Rather than large-scale military occupations, imperial power operated through proxy wars, debt dependency and international institutions. Organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) represented the culmination of this process. Rules that once had to be imposed through debt pressure or military intervention became embedded within global trade agreements themselves.

Neoliberalism in India

In the Indian context, the reforms commonly known as LPG (Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation), introduced in 1991, are identified as the moment when the state was incorporated into global neoliberalism. Then Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh rolled them out as the solution to the balance-of-payments crisis. Decades of state-controlled economic policies, increased public spending, and reliance on short-term foreign loans were cited as the reason for this crisis. A sizable emergency loan was taken from the IMF, to mitigate it.

Import and export tariffs were lowered along with interest rates, and the Indian rupee was floated and allowed to be market-determined, exposing domestic industries and agriculture to global market volatility. The state also deregulated heavily controlled sectors such as telecommunications, mining and banking, while Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), now subject to far fewer restrictions, became central to the financialisation of the economy.

The reforms also weakened labour protections and accelerated the replacement of permanent employment with contractual and casual labour across sectors such as manufacturing, mining, construction, service sector and telecommunications. Sectors such as commerce, hotel, transportation, money exchange, insurance, real estate, social and personal service are collectively known as the service sector. Today, this sector is majorly made up of the delivery service workers for various digital platforms in urban centers. Workers performed the same high-intensity labour for lower wages, without benefits and with little job security. The transition depended upon maintaining cheap and flexible labour to attract foreign investment and sustain competitiveness within global markets.

Trade liberalisation exposed Indian farmers to global competition and collapsing commodity prices, particularly in crops such as cotton and coffee. At the same time, state policy encouraged a shift from traditional food crops towards export-oriented cash crops dependent on expensive seeds, pesticides, fertilisers and water-intensive cultivation. Crop failures, fluctuating global prices and rising debt pushed many farmers into financial ruin, contributing to the widespread agrarian distress. About 2,50,000 farmers have been recorded to have committed suicide up until the year 2012. The National Crime Records Bureau states that roughly 11,000 farmer suicides continue to be reported annually.

The political climate of the period that followed the reforms resulted in unstable governments, which triggered religious riots and the rapid ghettoisation of muslims. This instability and consequent violence is not a coincidence but it is a direct result of the implementation of neoliberal policies in India. The 1996 general elections produced a fractured mandate leading to 3 different governments and Prime Ministers in less than 2 years. Coalitions, which had become the norm, were weak due to infighting. Election campaigning and party propaganda saw a heavy rise in Hindutva identity politics for public mandate and repeated elections in a few years intensified tensions.

How Neoliberalism Affected/Affects the Working Class

Neoliberalism transformed the market into a model for organising all aspects of life, not merely the economy. Workers came to be treated like commodities, while protections such as unions, welfare and job security were weakened in the name of the globalisation project. Public services such as healthcare, education and housing became privatised, turning citizens into consumers who could access these services only if they could afford them. Public goods were either privatised or commercialised.

To put things in perspective, in the United States, CEOs earned roughly 30 times more than the average worker in 1970. By 2000, they were earning nearly 500 times more. During the same period, the top 0.1% of the US population tripled its share of national income between 1978 and 1999 during the neoliberal turn.

According to Masao Miyoshi, neoliberalism also reshapes how people think by making competition seem natural, celebrating winners as superior and blaming those who struggle as personally responsible for their conditions. As inequality grows and collective institutions weaken, many people turn elsewhere for belonging and support, often through religion or other social groups, not realising that capitalism is the root cause.

David Harvey documents how the proliferation of evangelical Christianity in America, the explosion of religious sects in rural China after economic liberalisation and the growth of gangs and informal economies across Latin America were all consequences of neoliberal restructuring.

Neoliberalism also infiltrated feminist movements by shifting attention from structural inequality to individual representation. For instance, it is a given that “the top 10 richest men in the world own more than the combined wealth of the bottom 3.1 billion people”. Yet, within a neoliberal feminist framework, the concern becomes placing more women among the billionaire class rather than challenging a system where wealth and power remain concentrated through the exploitation of workers, including women.

This is also why corporations are often eager to promote identity politics while sidelining class politics. Unlike race and gender, class consciousness differs because the goal of class struggle is ultimately to remove class divisions altogether. People do not seek to erase their racial or gender identities, but class politics aims to abolish inequalities rooted in economic divisions. Because of this, discussions are frequently diverted towards race and gender while class receives almost no attention. The ruling class benefits from this silence, which is why corporations often support token diversity initiatives while constantly exploiting the workers. Rainbow capitalism during the pride month is also another example.

Conclusion

Capitalism, neoliberalism and imperialism survive not simply through markets, debt or imperial power, but because they convince people that there is no alternative. Breaking that ‘common sense’ is therefore the first task of any revolutionary movement. By studying capitalism, imperialism and class struggle, and by building collective political consciousness among workers, students and the oppressed masses, we seek to transform dissent and frustration into organisation, organisation into resistance, and resistance into the struggle for a new socialist world. Every act of political education is therefore a step towards transforming isolated individuals into a force capable of changing society.

Stonewall was not the first act of queer resistance. Long before 1969, queer communities had been organizing, surviving and fighting against criminalization and social exclusion. But Stonewall became a turning point because it transformed fear into collective defiance. It made visible a movement that refused to remain hidden.

In the early hours of 28 June 1969, police stormed the Stonewall Inn in New York City during what they expected would be another routine raid on a queer bar. For decades, queer and trans people had been subjected to police harassment, arbitrary arrests and public humiliation simply for existing. But that night, the patrons refused to quietly comply. As people were dragged into police vans, those gathered outside fought back, transforming a police raid into days of collective resistance. Among those who became enduring symbols of the uprising were Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé DeLarverie, alongside countless other trans people, drag performers, lesbians, gay people, sex workers and homeless queer youth whose names history has too often forgotten.

A year later, on 28 June 1970, thousands returned to Christopher Street to commemorate the uprising in what became the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march. That march laid the foundation for Pride celebrations across the world. Pride Month traces its roots to this act of collective resistance, not to corporate campaigns or state approval. It grew out of the fight against police violence, criminalization and the denial of the right to exist freely. Remembering Stonewall is not just about looking back at history. It is about carrying forward the struggle for queer liberation that remains unfinished. We must also consider in concrete terms, What does queer liberation require and what does it entail?

The Case for India: Hindutva Fascist Attack on Trans People

More than five decades after Stonewall, the struggle for queer liberation remains unfinished.

In India, repression has taken shape through growing attacks on transgender rights under the Hindutva regime where legal recognition is increasingly accompanied by surveillance, bureaucratic control and the erosion of self-identification. The proposed amendments to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act have been met with strong resistance from trans communities. Rather than safeguarding transgender rights, the amendments remove the right to self-identify and deepen state control over gender recognition all while sidelining the voices of the very communities they claim to protect. Criminalization rather than “protection.” The Hindutva fascist state has attacked transgender people’s very existence.

The questions raised by Stonewall remain deeply relevant today. The uprising was not only a response to police brutality but also to a state that claimed the authority to decide whose identities were legitimate and whose lives could be regulated. More than five decades later, queer and trans communities in India continue to confront similar struggles, even if they take different forms.

At a time when Hindutva politics seeks to enforce rigid ideas of gender, family and nation, such measures are not isolated policy decisions. They form part of a broader project of disciplining bodies and narrowing the space for those who challenge normative identities.

This is why Pride in India cannot be reduced to a celebration of visibility alone. Visibility without dignity, autonomy and material rights is never enough. Pride emerged from resistance to a system that sought to regulate bodies, identities and the very possibility of queer existence. That struggle continues wherever states, institutions and dominant ideologies attempt to dictate who people are allowed to be.

To honour Stonewall, then, is not simply to remember a rebellion from 1969. It is to recognise that queer liberation remains impossible without struggling against fascism which seeks to discipline bodies and suppress difference to maintain its control. Pride must not be a marketing campaign or a symbolic celebration. It is a reminder that liberation has always been won through collective militant struggle, and that the fight remains unfinished.

Pride Must Carry Forward Anti-Fascist Politics

Pride is perceived as a celebration, a festival to celebrate gender diversity and the acceptance of all genders that face systemic oppression. It allows queers to connect with each other, to feel seen and heard, accepted by their community. This in itself is not a problem, it is necessary and gives hope to many closeted queers as well. But the question is, what exactly are we celebrating? If pride parades are conducted and organized as celebrations alone in a corporate manner, we are very much disconnected from the roots of pride. Roots which we should not only return to but push further, move beyond to incorporate anti-fascist politics. Large scale onslaughts on trans rights and broadly queer rights are being carried out by various countries’ governments including India as we have seen. What is the common thread that connects these governments? Be it India or the USA, It is that they are fascist in nature.

The Hindutva fascist onslaught is not just on queer people, it is carried out on the entirety of India’s toiling and oppressed masses be it dalits, muslims, adivasis and working class as a whole. Defeating fascism hence also requires being rooted in the masses, such is its scale that this or that community’s spontaneous struggles cannot achieve any lasting victory. And such must be the nature of anti-fascist politics. An ideological clarity must be there among anti-fascist forces that a united front that does away with the limitations of electoral politics is the need of the hour. Cowards in parliament may have you believing otherwise but the fight against fascism is on the streets and mobilizing people through politicization and organization.

Recent Ken Betwa and Odisha Protests

The Ken-Betwa project has been in news for the resistance it is facing from the tribals in Madhya Pradesh. On 8th April, 2026, hundreds of tribal farmers, led mostly by women, staged a chita andolan (pyre protest) sending the message that the project is akin to a pyre for them. The Ken-Betwa river linking project would lead to nearly 10 villages being completely submerged, and more than 20 villages being displaced. The project will submerge vast patches of precious forest land, including core areas of the Panna Tiger Reserve. The locals in the affected area are primarily Adivasis belonging to Gond and Kol tribes. The project poses an existential threat for these communities as it will push them away from their ancestral villages, forcing them to abandon their traditional means of livelihood, inseparably linked to forest and rivers.

They have demanded “land for land” and “village for village” resettlement in the same habitat so that they can preserve their cultural and traditional ways of life. However, the government’s rehabilitation plan is majorly inadequate and leaves out several eligible villagers from compensation. The villagers are also anguished over the lack of transparency in informing them about the project, its impact, and its compensation. They even allege that gram sabha permissions were taken in an opaque manner. When these factors accumulated and led to the villagers protesting against the project, it was met with severe police retaliation, including the arrest of activists leading the movement.

A similar story of people resisting development bulldozed upon their lives was seen in Odisha’s Rayagada and Kalahandi districts. Since 2023, locals protesting against London-based company Vedanta’s Sijimali bauxite mining project have repeatedly been facing state repression. A similar pattern followed where fake gram sabha consents were obtained using fictitious residents and forged signatures to divert forest land to Vedanta for bauxite mining. In April 2026, violence broke out when the locals were protesting against the construction of a road linking the project site to the state highway. A large team of armed police personnel was deployed to round up villagers opposing the road construction and arresting a local community leader. The bauxite mining project not only comes at a severe ecological cost but also poses an existential threat for the local tribal communities who fear for the traditional ways of lives dependent on these forest lands.

The Colonial Legacy

The story has been the same since pre-independence in these resource rich areas. The state aiding the capitalist class to extract and exploit land and resources belonging to the indigenous communities leading to their displacement, environmental degradation, and the loss of traditional livelihoods.

The idea of economic development as we see it today, has its origins in colonialism and capitalism. Colonialism as a system emerged and developed on the exploitation of land, resources, and people in distant territories. Natural resources in these colonies became fodder for industrialisation in Britain, France, and the rest of Europe, eventually leading to the rise of capitalism. The colonialists created and enforced the notion of development in these colonies, whereby development emerged as a universally beneficial phenomena. Across all colonies, it was the indigenous communities who were at the forefront, bearing the cost of these exploitations, and continue to do so in the present neocolonial age as well.

Indigenous communities across the world hold themselves as the first inhabitants of land. They don’t exert ownership over land but instead regard themselves as stewards of land. This leads them to have a non-transactional relationship where land for them is not a profit making commodity but rather a sacred entity central to their existence. Land, forest, and nature are the cornerstone of indigenous livelihoods, belief systems, identity, and ancestry. This is an antithesis to the colonialist and capitalist relation with land and nature which is more about private ownership and exploitation for profit. And thus development since colonial times has been an existential threat for indigenous communities, including the Adivasis and Tribals of India.

The imposition of ‘development’ was central to the legitimizing of a colonial system. Exploitation and destruction of all kinds during colonial times were “recognized and justified under the ambit of developmental projects” (Varughese and Mukherjee, 2024). All forms of power, from physical to institutional to administrative, were exerted by the colonizers to “civilize” their colonies. In India, one of the earliest major developmental projects was the railways. It was projected as the greatest collective good brought to India by the colonizer becoming the strongest legitimizer of the development narrative.

The creation and massive expansion of railways was the biggest driving force behind the depletion of forests in India. The colonial government created several laws and policies to have unrestricted access to forest areas primarily inhabited by the Adivasi community. And by design none of these laws and policies were in the favour of Adivasis. Such laws legitimised bypassing of ancestral claims to land, a legacy that continued in postcolonial India as well.

Post colonial India

As a newly independent country, economic growth became a key indicator of progress, and infrastructural development became the centre of this pursuit. A series of extractive mining, hydel power, and industrial projects were set up. Hydel projects came to the forefront, reinforcing the development narrative as ‘temples of modern India’. The postcolonial state continued to legitimize the discourse of development, which again alienated Tribal and Adivasi communities, perpetuating the colonial cycle.

The pattern that we notice in the recent Ken-Betwa project has remained the same throughout. Mega development projects get pushed despite threats of submergence of hundreds of villages and forced displacement of thousands of people without adequate rehabilitation and resettlement packages. Every attempt by the local Adivasi and Tribal communities to resist these development projects has been met with severe state brutality.

For instance, the Koel-Karo hydel project proposed to construct two dams along Koel and Karo rivers in Jharkhand. As per the surveys done by the locals, the project would have submerged 256 villages, 55000 acres of land, and 27000 acres of forest land. The local Adivasis opposed the project, for it not only meant a threat to their land and livelihoods, but would also submerge their sacred groves and ancestral burial places. Committees were formed by Adivasis to collectivize their protest and oppose the state. The strategy worked successfully to delay the project. But in 2001, the protest took a violent turn when police open fired on a peaceful gathering of more than 2000 Adivasis and Tribals. Eventually the project was shelved due to the sustained efforts of Koel Karo Jan Sangthan and the fierce resistance and sacrifice of Adivasis and Tribals.

The imposition and bulldozing of development has been more perverse and blatant in the past few years. The human and environmental impact of such projects is severely overlooked while their projected benefits are overexaggerated. The biggest example can be seen with the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the most controversial development project. It was one of the biggest hydel projects in the world which was allowed without adequate environmental impact assessment and exaggerated benefits, eventually leading to nothing but ecological damage and massive human displacement.

Moreover the colonial legacy continues as the postcolonial state continues to use state apparatuses to sanction these projects that profit the capitalist class. A detailed analysis published in Article 14 reported that the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL), India’s apex wildlife body, approved 97% of developmental and commercial projects within protected Areas, ‘eco sensitive zones’ & wildlife corridors, most of which were granted in unconstitutional and illegal ways over 12 years. These clearances ignore voices of scientists and affected communities, threatening India’s remaining wild habitats and ecological security.

Most recently, The Great Nicobar Project represented the sharpest contradictions in answering the question of whose land and whose development. The mega infrastructure project is being pushed by the state with all might despite its potential to create irreversible biodiversity damage, including threat to several endangered species, while completely uprooting entire indigenous tribes. Scientists and experts are calling this project an ecocide, and yet despite all opposition the project is in the final stages of statutory clearances. Here again, the state applied its force by gagging scientists to give favourable reports for the project’s environmental clearance.

The Nicobarese tribe, one of the original inhabitants of the land, vehemently opposed the project, stating that they were misled by the administration to provide their consent. And yet the large parts of tribal reserves are set to be denotified. The Shompen tribe, another indigenous tribe, is at a far greater threat. With barely 230 members, they have largely remained uncontacted throughout history and with their limited interactions have expressed to remain undisturbed. This project could be a potential death sentence for them. Nicobarese tribals have argued that the so-called development project is disrespectful of indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, beliefs, practices, and tribal rights and laws that have ensured human nature coexistence for centuries.

Accumulation by Dispossession

Karl Marx in his theory of capitalism explained how force, theft, and appropriation of indigenous land and dispossession of indigenous communities was necessary to set the preconditions for capitalist accumulation. He defined this phenomena as “primitive accumulation”, calling it the “original sin” of Political Economy. Marx saw primitive accumulation as having three major aspects: the removal of peasants from the land by land enclosures and the abrogation of customary rights, so they no longer had direct access to or control over the material means of production; the creation by this means of a class of landless labourers, who became wage labourers under capitalism, and who migrated to the towns where they emerged as an industrial proletariat; enormous concentration and centralization of wealth as the means of production (initially through the control of the land) monopolized by fewer and fewer individuals (Foster and Clark, 2004). This can be observed through the example of Nicobarese tribals, who are currently at the risk of losing their ancestral land, and are forced to work as daily wage labourers.

Rosa Luxemburg in her The Accumulation of Capital, explains how capitalism would not have been able to survive without appropriation of “non-capitalist means of productions” making colonialism an inevitable step for capitalism’s survival: the expansion of market beyond home country, accumulation, exploitation, and appropriation of indigenous land and resources to find outlets for surplus. And so, accumulation by dispossession always remains a key feature of capitalism. David Harvey, another critical Marxist thinker, explained how mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession changed in a neocolonial system. Privatization of public services into profit-making enterprises: water, education, health care; the use of the international credit system (especially the IMF/World Bank) as a means of forcibly transferring wealth from the Global South to the economies of the North; the use of intellectual property rights to commodify what was once knowledge held in common (for instance, monopolization of seed banks); the displacement of locals from their lands for development projects.

Michael Levian, adds another layer to the process of accumulation by dispossession. He emphasizes the extra-economic character of this process. He calls the state a “land broker state” which employs coercive powers for forcible transfer of agrarian land to capital for industrial and commercial development (Levien, 2011). The history of development projects in India is a clear testament to this.

Conclusion

Capitalism and Colonialism has fundamentally changed human relation with land. Private ownership of land and privatized means of production not only turned direct producers of land, ones who safeguarded and nurtured the land for centuries, into wage labourers but also alienated them from their own land. For indigenous communities, the loss is not merely of their land, but also of their indigenous identities. Capitalism and Colonialism as systems of power managed to thrive by eradicating indigenous systems of knowledge and relations with land. This has been a violent and traumatic process for all indigenous communities across the world, including Adivasis and Tribals in India.

And that is why despite the continuous force towards alienation, Adivasis and Tribals have remained at the forefront of resisting these development projects as continued dispersal of their duty of safeguarding land. Capitalism turned land and nature from a sacred entity to a mere commodity for exploitation. The revolutionary proletariat has to merge the struggle against labour exploitation with struggle against land exploitation. For it is the land, the rivers, the forest, that sustain us, nurture us, and ensure our survival. And the answer to our alienation lies in our re-connection with land and nature. We’re not owners of land but mere custodians.

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the world by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the world. They are only its possessors, its beneficiaries, and, like good heads of the house, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.

– Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3

Further Readings

• Development-induced dispossession: Adivasi existence in the milieu of contemporary Indian texts in translation

  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03166-3

• Accumulation by dispossession

  https://isreview.org/issue/95/accumulation-dispossession/index.html

• Forest Rights Act Enables State Control of Land and Denies Most Adivasis and Forest Dwellers Land Rights

  https://www.epw.in/engage/article/forest-rights-act-state-appropriation-land-rights

• On the Great Nicobar island, why the future is fearful

  https://scroll.in/article/1075116/on-the-great-nicobar-island-why-the-future-is-fearful

• Adivasis as Ecological Warriors: Colonial Laws and Post-Colonial Adivasi Resistance in India’s Jharkhand

  https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/8/4/130

• Defying Courts, Ignoring Science—How India’s Wildlife Board Became A Rubber Stamp For Projects In Protected Areas

  https://article-14.com/post/defying-courts-ignoring-science-how-india-s-wildlife-board-became-a-rubber-stamp-for-projects-in-protected-areas-69dc5ec8efdb8

Che Guevara is one of the most well recognized faces of revolutions worldwide. But before he became a symbol, he was Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, born on June 14th 1928 in Argentina. He was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family of Spanish, Basque and Irish descent. His class privilege allowed him to access the best of education, from his school years to his higher studies. Although Che suffered from asthma, he excelled as an athlete through his childhood and adulthood.

Che’s parents exposed him to left-wing politics at a young age. Developing a lifelong literary interest, Che studied Marx, Engels and Lenin. He also enjoyed Sartre and Camus, Nehru and Nietzsche, Kafka and Frost, Quiroga and Dario. His knowledge and interest in a wide variety of fields led the CIA to remark, “Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino”.

Che excelled in school and went on to study medicine in 1948, earning him the title of Doctor by 1953. During his studies, he took a year off and embarked on a motorcycle journey with his friend, Alberto Granado. Unlike a typical “summer break trip”, Che’s journey would come to completely change the way he viewed the world and his role in it. We can trace this transformation in his memoir The Motorcycle Diaries.

His 8000 km long journey took him through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Miami. His final destination on this journey saw him volunteer at a Peruvian leprosy village. Part of this journey was on a motorcycle, and when it broke down they continued hitchhiking the rest of the way. He felt profound empathy for a continent riddled with poverty and suffering created by American imperialism.

“I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.”

The Motorcycle diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey, 1952

At this point, he went to Guatemala and witnessed the land reform campaign by the recently elected democratic socialist, Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz re-distributed lands largely owned by the American United Fruits Company to the poor, landless peasants. It was here that he earned the moniker “Che” and decided to stay and aid Arbenz’s initiatives. However, he would soon have to flee Guatemala, following the CIA backed coup of the Arbenz government. Che had now directly seen the fate of those who tried to stand up to western capitalist powers. This convinced him that the United States would never let a progressive leftist government flourish peacefully. In Guatemala, Che had met Hilda Gadea, who helped solidify his Marxist beliefs, and later became his first wife.

Che soon moved to Mexico in exile, where he crossed paths with Fidel Castro among other Cuban exiles. Cuba at the time was under the U.S. backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista ran a deeply corrupt and brutal regime and ensured through violence that Cuba’s economy remained in the grasp of the US and the Cuban elite class. Castro was on the run following the 26th July attack on the Moncado Barracks in attempts to overthrow Batista. This inspired the name of the guerilla army that would lead the Cuban revolution movement, the 26th of July movement, or M-26-7 for short. Castro planned to return to Cuba to start another rebellion. With a desire to aid his new-found comrades, Guevara initially came along as the force’s doctor, but he also subsequently trained in weapons use, and became one of Castro’s most-trusted aides.

In late 1956, a tiny guerilla force landed on the shores of Cuba and were ambushed immediately by Batista’s awaiting army. Only 22 of them survived the violent exchange. These survivors managed to recruit, educate and train enough peasants and proletariates to create a formidable army over the course of 3 years. During this time, Guevara found that a majority of people were illiterate, there were no schools, no electricity, and little access to healthcare. He established schools to teach the illiterate to read and write, factories to produce grenades and ovens to bake bread. He also founded a newspaper to spread information, health clinics to provide people healthcare, and workshops to teach military strategies. Guevara became a popular figure amongst the peasantry who were all too eager to aid the rebellion. Guevara was soon made second in command to Castro.

In 1959, Che personally commanded the decisive victory at Santa Clara on new year’s eve, despite being outnumbered 10:1. Shortly after, Batista fled the country and the rebel army captured the capital. As Cuba welcomed its liberators, its population demanded justice following the years of brutalization under the dictatorship. Nearly twenty thousand Cubans were killed by the regime during revolutionary warfare. A tribunal was formed to try the captured Batista’s officers who had perpetrated the worst of repressions.

During his early years in Cuba, Guevara met Aleida March, a Cuban revolutionary, whom he married in mid-1959, following a divorce with his first wife. Earlier this year, he also began to write “Guerilla Warfare”, a military handbook for revolutionary fighters.

In the following years, Che held many important government positions, overseeing massive land reforms while being the president of the National Bank, as well as Cuba’s Finance Minister. He also led an incredibly successful literacy program that turned Cuba’s literacy rate from 60% to over 90% in the span of a year. During the now infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, the U.S. committed several strategic errors ending in its failure. However, it was also clear that the U.S., and by extension the Western imperialist powers, would continue to try and destabilize revolutions everywhere.

During his time in the Cuban government Guevara visited many nations worldwide in hopes of forming diplomatic ties with the Eastern bloc after strict sanctions by the U.S. He was instrumental in establishing Cuba’s diplomatic ties with the U.S.S.R. However, the fallout after the Cuban Missile crisis left him rather disillusioned with the Soviets and their intent.

In 1965, Che wrote a farewell letter to Castro, denouncing his public positions and Cuban citizenship to continue his fight for revolutionary cause elsewhere. Che then travelled to the newly independent Congo to fight alongside the socialists in an ongoing civil war against the U.S. backed counter-revolutionary forces. This venture had many setbacks. In his Congo diaries, he cited a combination of incompetence, infighting and a lack of will among the Congolese rebels as reasons for the revolt’s failure. Disheartened after 7 months of continued efforts, and a deterioration of his own health, Che returned to Cuba for some time during which his whereabouts were unknown.

Eventually, in 1967, Che reached Bolivia with a small force in attempts of yet another revolution. While they saw some initial success, the Bolivian dictator René Barrientos, with U.S. support and overwhelming force, crushed the rebellion before it could grow any further. In addition, the local Bolivian rebel groups betrayed Guevara’s group, leaving them vulnerable and isolated. After months of continued fighting, Guevara’s group of about a dozen guerillas was attacked by nearly 2000 Bolivian soldiers. In the end, Che Guevara was captured and quickly executed by the direct orders of Barrientos. Months prior, Guevara had written his own epitaph –

“Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons.”

Such was the life and death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Though decades have passed since his death, the spirit of the Marxist revolutionary continues to echo through liberation struggles across the world.

Yet the campaign to tarnish his legacy has proven equally enduring. For generations, powerful Western media institutions have sought to reduce him to a caricature, and continue to malign the revolutionary meaning of his life.

Why does one man, long dead, still inspire such hostility among the arbiters of capitalism? The answer lies not only in the bitterness of those whose privileges and empires of exploitation were challenged by the Cuban Revolution, but also in a more unsettling truth: despite every attempt to bury his memory, Che continues to ignite the imagination of revolutionaries around the world.

“Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”

Che Guevara’s final letter to his children, 1965

Sources

https://time.com/archive/6807354/cuba-castros-brain/

https://touringinstability.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/che-guevaras-letter-to-his-children-grow-up-as-good-revolutionaries/

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/ernesto-the-untold-story-of-hemingway-in-revolutionary-cuba-by-andrew-feldman

https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/04/01.htm

Anderson, J.L. (1997) Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press.

Guevara, E. (1995) The Motorcycle Diaries. London: Verso Books.

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Through her sharp political insights, Anuradha Gandhy reflects on the intersections of patriarchy, caste, class, and revolutionary struggle. The booklet is about the increasing importance of women in any revolutionary movement accompanied with many accounts of women from across India's tribal and adivasi communities who have led and succeeded in establishing many strong revolutionary movements which stand even today as an inspiration and a guiding light for us all.

Access the booklet here

That reflection is worth sitting with today, on his birth anniversary, not as an exercise in nostalgia but as an act of orientation. The factors that shaped Hồ Chí Minh’s life, colonialism, the dispossession of the peasantry, the solidarity of oppressed peoples across borders, and the effort by those in power to make resistance feel naive or futile, have not disappeared. They have only changed their form.

Hồ Chí Minh left Vietnam in 1911 as a young man working as a cook helper aboard a ship, and did not return for the next three decades. Working and living in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, he was confronted with the same structure everywhere: a few living in extraordinary comfort off the labour and dispossession of the many. In the United States, standing before the Statue of Liberty, he wrote that the light above Liberty’s head spread across the blue sky, while at her feet, Black people were being trampled. The empire that proclaimed freedom most loudly was built on the most systematic oppression.

In Harlem, he learnt of the struggle of working-class Black Americans. In France, he wrote for newspapers, exposed colonial abuses in Indochina, and helped found the French Communist Party. In 1919, he arrived at the Versailles Peace Conference carrying a petition calling for basic rights and self-determination for the Vietnamese people. He was ignored. The architects of the postwar order had no interest in extending its promises to those they were still colonising. The lesson he learnt was that justice was not something the powerful would grant voluntarily.

It was Lenin’s Theses on the Colonial Question that gave him the theoretical framework to bind all of this together. He recalled later that when he first read it, he wept with joy, not because it was a beautiful document in the abstract, but because it answered the question he had been carrying: how do the struggles of colonized peoples and the struggles of workers in the imperial centres belong to the same movement?

The distinction between patriotism and nationalism at the heart of Hồ Chí Minh’s thought and politics, and it is worth being precise about it, because the confusion between the two is one of the most effective tools the right has always used to co-opt popular feeling. Nationalism, in his view, is the belief that prioritizes one’s own nation over others: it transforms pride into arrogance, unity into exclusion, and love of country into a justification for dominating or dismissing the struggles of others. Patriotism is something different. It is a deep, grounded love for one’s people and homeland that does not require the diminishment of anyone else to sustain itself. A patriot fights for the dignity of her people because she loves them. A nationalist fights against others because he fears them.

In his own words, published in the Nhan Dan newspaper in 1960:

“Initially, it was patriotism, not yet communism, that made me believe in Lenin, believe in the Third International. Step by step, in the struggle, while studying Marxism-Leninism and engaging in practical work, I gradually came to understand that only socialism, only communism could liberate the oppressed nations and the working people worldwide from slavery.”

The sequence matters greatly. He did not begin with an ideology and then find a people to apply it to. He began with his people, and through the discipline of studying their conditions rigorously and honestly, arrived at the tools capable of changing them. This is what we mean when we talk about political education being inseparable from political practice. Theory that is not rooted in material conditions is decoration. Practice that is not sharpened by theory is energy without direction.

When Hồ Chí Minh returned to Vietnam in 1941 after three decades away, he was fifty-one years old and had spent much of his adult life in exile, in hiding, or in prison. British colonial authorities had imprisoned him in Hong Kong from 1931 to 1933. The Kuomintang had imprisoned him in China from 1942 to 1943, during which time he wrote his prison poetry collection, Nhat Ky Trong Tu (Prison Diary).

What he built was the Viet Minh, the League for the Independence of Vietnam. This was a united front: communists, nationalists, peasants, workers, and intellectuals, organised under a single anti-colonial programme. Its strength wasn’t ideological uniformity but political clarity about the immediate objective, combined with genuine mass engagement. The August Revolution of 1945, which swept the Viet Minh to power with overwhelming popular support, was the fruit of years of unglamorous, painstaking organising in villages, forests, factories, and schools.

On September 2, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh stood in Ba Dinh Square before half a million people and read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. He opened by quoting Jefferson. He quoted the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. These were not surface-level gestures of admiration for the imperial powers. It was a deliberate and strategic attempt to turn the ideological language of the oppressor on itself, showcasing to the world that Vietnam was not requesting rights it did not inherently deserve. It was staking a claim to them, in words that no Western government could deny without exposing its own hypocrisy.

Even after independence was declared, he pursued negotiations with France through 1945 and 1946, seeking a path to autonomy that might avoid the cost of full-scale war. He understood that armed struggle was not a goal but a tool, and that the lives of the people he was fighting for were not abstractions to be spent casually.

“And such a fight it would be if things were looked at with a narrow mind, solely from the angle of material strength and in their present state. Indeed, against the enemy’s airplanes and artillery we had only bamboo sticks. But our Party is a Marxist-Leninist one. We look not only at the present but also to the future and have firm confidence in the spirit and strength of the masses of the nation. Therefore, we resolutely told those wavering and pessimistic people:

Yes, it’s now grasshopper versus elephant,
But tomorrow the elephant will collapse.

Facts have shown that the colonialist ‘elephant’ is getting out of breath while our army has grown up into a powerful tiger.”

— Ho Chi Minh, Political Report to the Second National Congress of the Vietnam Workers’ Party (1951)

Following a victorious defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 against the French colonial forces, the Lao Dong Party with Ho Chi Minh at the helm gained governance over North Vietnam. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam became the official name, with Hanoi as its capital. Cut off from the agricultural wealth of the south, the party’s leaders found themselves reliant on Soviet and Chinese aid and resources, which ultimately catalyzed the consolidation of revolutionary authority in DRV by presenting a framework within which to conduct simultaneous revolutions; anti-imperialism externally, and anti-feudalism internally, while addressing the peasant question.

As Truong Chinh had argued, the worker-peasant alliance and the redistribution of land were not separate from the anti-imperialist struggle but its necessary material foundation. Within this framework, land reform was not just a task to be carried out in parallel with national liberation, but rather the very foundation upon which to construct a sustained, mass-based resistance.

By 1959, North Vietnam was drawn back into armed conflict against the US-backed South Vietnam. At the Third Congress of the Lao Dong Party in 1960, Ho Chi Minh ceded the Secretary-General position to Lê Duẩn, withdrawing from daily political activity and adopting a figurehead position. He died on September 2, 1969, the same date he had proclaimed Vietnamese independence twenty-four years before, leaving behind a lasting legacy of the interconnectedness of national liberation and international working-class struggles.

He wrote:

“The revolutionary struggle of the workers in capitalist countries directly assists the oppressed nations in self-liberation because that struggle strikes at the heart of the oppressors. Meanwhile, the revolutionary struggle of colonial and semi-colonial nations directly aids the working class of capitalist countries in the struggle against the ruling classes to free themselves from the yoke of capitalism. The harmony of the struggles against imperialism ensures victory for the colonial and semi-colonial nations and for the working class in capitalist countries.”

This was not merely a dream. Throughout Vietnam’s struggle against American aggression, it was manifested clearly. A remarkable international coalition arose around Vietnam, consisting of socialist governments, liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, labor unions, students, artists, and everyday individuals in Western Europe and the United States. Anti-war movements in America engaged millions in political activism who had not previously been politically active. Washington was forced to change course not simply because its military campaign was failing, but because the political consequences of continuing it, at home and across the world, had grown beyond what any government could absorb.

In the streets of West Bengal and across the country, people marched carrying a slogan that has outlasted the war:

Amar naam, tomar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam.

My name, your name, Vietnam.

It was not charity extended to distant people. It was recognition: the peasant being bombed in the Mekong Delta and the worker facing dispossession in a Calcutta slum were facing the same system, the same class logic, and the same structures of power.

Hồ Chí Minh’s life offers no comfortable shortcuts and no easy inspiration. He organized across thirty years of exile, imprisonment, and clandestine work before the revolution he had dedicated himself to succeeded. He read and studied rigorously, but he did not mistake study for action, nor action for a substitute for study.

For those of us committed to political education, cultural work, and integration with the masses as the three pillars of building a genuine movement, his life is instructive precisely because he held all three together without allowing any one of them to become a substitute for the others. He wrote poetry in prison and organized workers in factories and negotiated with colonial governments and led armed resistance. The revolutionary, as he understood it, is not a single type. The movement needs all of it.

His distinction between patriotism and nationalism is urgently relevant today, as right-wing forces across the world weaponize love of country to justify crushing the very people who constitute that country. To love one’s people is to fight for their housing, their wages, their children’s futures, their freedom from exploitation.

Ho Chi Minh’s legacy was not upheld by his successor Le Duan, whose revisionist clique later led by General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh launched “Doi moi” (Renovation) in 1986 which were reforms to the Vietnamese economy that led it to a similar road as Deng’s reforms in China, to capitalism. Because of this, the people of modern day Vietnam continue to suffer from capitalist exploitation under a state that serves Imperialist powers and strives to be one itself and has betrayed them long ago. In place of a sustained socialist mobilization of the economy came increased foreign investment through international investment alliances, the majority of it in raw manufacturing sectors, inevitably worsening environmental and social conditions.

“During the period of socialist revolution, the Party has to be stronger than ever. It is impossible to transform a society if the Party members don’t remould themselves and improve themselves. The socialist revolution demands that Party members and cadres have a firm class stand and high socialist consciousness, that they thoroughly rid themselves of the influence of the ideology of the exploiting classes, wipe out individualism and educate themselves in collectivism.”

– Ho Chi Minh, September 1957

Sources

• https://woodsmokeblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/the-path-which-led-me-to-leninism.pdf

• https://www.wisdomlib.org/cities/xom-chin-86930

• https://tapchiqptd.vn/en/events-and-comments/rejecting-the-argument-that-in-essence-ho-chi-minhs-ideology-is-nationalism/20819.html

• https://timesheadline.in/en/2025/05/01/amar-naam-tomar-naam-vietnam/

• https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/42284/internationalism-in-vietnam-then-and-now

• Tran, T.T.M. (2024). Confucianism and Hồ Chí Minh’s Thought. Amazonia Investiga, 13(83), 24-35. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2024.83.11.2

• https://origins.osu.edu/review/ho-chi-minh-biography

• https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1960/04/x01.htm

• https://www.cfr.org/articles/remembering-ho-chi-minhs-1945-declaration-vietnams-independence

• https://web.archive.org/web/20250318173029/https://anti-imperialist-action-ireland.com/blog/2021/05/25/vietnamese-maoists-speak/

• An Outline History Of The Viet Nam Workers’ Party (1930 – 1975), Foreign Languages Publishing House, Hanoi, 1976

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The climate catastrophe is a unique phenomenon because although it is a public crisis, almost every solution offered to it is private. Air conditioners and refrigerators are private solutions to the public heatwave, water geysers and room heaters are private solutions to the public freezing conditions. This naturally means that the population gets divided into people who are privileged enough to afford these private solutions, and people who are not. In India, this divide both emerges from and reinforces the existing separation between the generally wealthy, upper-caste classes and the generally poorer, lower-caste ones.

In those privileged enough to be inside the insulated bubble of private solutions, there is a strange detachment and (perhaps more sinisterly) an apathy towards those who are outside the bubble. I say indifference and not ignorance because I believe it is not simply a lack of knowledge or a lack of information. There are enough headlines shouting about entire slums being flooded away, enough photos of homeless men sleeping on frigid footpaths in the dead of night, enough stories about delivery workers collapsing on duty in the scorching heat. There is a constant stream of evidence of the crisis and the suffering it causes, and yet, the response remains weak. It is, then, not ignorance, but a failure of empathy produced by two forces: the normalisation of violence against those outside the bubble, and the normalisation of the climate catastrophe itself. We must examine these in detail.

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[1] We live in a society where the constant suffering of the poor has become as normal and natural for the privileged class as walking or breathing. Those outside the bubble are usually the same people whose suffering has been so normalised and trivialised, and the apathy to their suffering due to the climate crisis is simply an extension of this already-existing apathy to their general suffering. One reason for this is that people inside the bubble have been thoroughly convinced that those who are suffering are suffering because of themselves. Their misery is understood not as the consequence of a systemic flaw, but of an individual one. Their condition is blamed on their poor choices, their way of life, their conduct, and if that fails, the concept of karma is conveniently invoked to blame their suffering on sins they must have committed in their past lives. Those who are suffering, then, are deservedly suffering because they are lazy, uneducated, stupid, or simply sinful, and must themselves shoulder the responsibility to alleviate their misery. This not only absolves the privileged of responsibility, but allows them to pat themselves on the back for being intelligent, hardworking, and capable people who earned their comfort.

The natural consequence of this framework is simple: the underprivileged are methodically treated as the ‘other’, they are seen less and less as individuals with dignity and aspirations, and more and more as an abstract statistical mass of people who share the same conditions and characteristic features. Once people are reduced to an abstract mass, individual lives cease to carry emotional weight or meaning. A headline about a dozen labourers perishing due to the heat in different parts of the country does not then invoke empathy in the privileged reader, he does not think of them as twelve individual lives, he sees them simply as a small portion in the great mass of the ‘other’ people. Their suffering becomes statistical rather than human, and thus the homogenisation of the poor underprivileged class normalises their suffering.

[2] The other central factor is the normalisation of climate collapse itself. Under capitalism, nature is not merely commodified; that commodification is internalised so deeply that ecological destruction itself begins to appear inevitable and obvious. There is either complete detachment, where the view of nature purely as a resource for extraction is so ingrained that the crisis is seen as something trivial not worth deliberating or reflecting upon, or there is a quiet acceptance of ecological destruction as the unavoidable cost of development.

The climate crisis is then not experienced as a contradiction of the system, but as a byproduct of growth and progress. As is often the case, capitalism normalises catastrophe by presenting it as an economic necessity. It must be noted that both these options are available only to the section privileged enough to be insulated from the crisis. Those who bear the brunt of it, the daily wage workers, the displaced indigenous communities, the migrant labourers who are forced to exist as refugees in their own country, do not enjoy the privilege of choosing between accepting their conditions as the ‘cost of development’ after a lengthy discussion on the trade-off between production growth and climate action and ignoring the crisis altogether.

It would be naive to talk about the normalisation of the climate crisis without talking about the role of the Indian government. First-world industrialisation caused disproportionate historical emissions, the devastating consequences of which are still being borne by countries in the global south. And yet, governments avoids any structural confrontation. India, like most post-colonial countries, seeks foreign investment and GDP growth, which often comes at the cost of suppressing environmental resistance within the country and weakening labour and ecological protections in order to increase the ‘ease of doing business’ in the country. Climate discourse, therefore, becomes nationalist in nature, and making a case for the protection of the environment in the face of economic growth is seen as an anti-developmental stance.

However, we should also be careful not to flatten India into simply a victim of Western imperialism. India itself is one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, and the same argument of economic growth is given by the government when domestic industrialisation is challenged within the country. The climate crisis is often downplayed or plainly denied. Indigenous lands, protected regions, riverbanks, and fertile farmlands are routinely handed over to industrialists and corporations to build infrastructure projects or start mining operations, and resistance from those affected and displaced is brutally repressed.

These two central factors, in my opinion, are the backbone of the apathy mechanism. They blend together to form a unique concoction that allows the privileged class to be indifferent towards the suffering of the underprivileged class in the furious face of the climate catastrophe.

Another argument that I find fascinating is one that Rob Nixon makes in his seminal work ‘Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor’. He defines the concept of ‘slow violence’ as violence that occurs gradually and out of sight rather than spectacularly or instantaneously. He says that since modern media systems are built around spectacle, people struggle to emotionally register violence when it lacks spectacle; but climate destruction is attritional. A climate catastrophe doesn’t feel violent in the same way a bomb blast or a mass shooting does, and so it is often overlooked, even though it causes much more harm and loss over time than spectacular violence. Nixon frames apathy not merely as individual failure, but as socially produced.

This is, however, not to say that there is no questioning and opposition from the privileged class. Resistance from inside the bubble is born sometimes out of genuine concern and sometimes out of guilt, but there are two structural flaws in this defiance.

The first is that since the privileged class already sees the underprivileged one as the (often inferior) ‘other’, it already presupposes its own superiority, and the only way it can then resist the indifference is by imagining itself as the saviour of these victims who are, even at their best, nothing more than objects of charity. Even when it is armed with compassion and intention, the privileged class fails to see the underprivileged as political subjects capable of independent resistance and agency.

The second flaw is its inability, or unwillingness, to recognise the climate catastrophe as a structural feature of capitalism rather than an accidental deviation from it. The crisis is treated as an unfortunate excess, a side effect of an otherwise functional system, instead of as the inevitable consequence of an economic order built upon endless extraction, production, and consumption. Capitalism requires perpetual growth to sustain itself, and perpetual growth necessarily demands the perpetual exploitation of nature. Ecological destruction is therefore not an anomaly within the system, but an inevitable outcome.

Once the crisis is separated from the system that produces it, responsibility itself becomes individualised. The question is no longer why corporations, industries, and states are permitted to devastate ecosystems in pursuit of profit, but whether individuals are ‘doing their part’ to deal with the crisis. Climate politics is transformed from collective political struggle into personal moral conduct, and the burden of solving a structural crisis is shifted onto isolated individuals, while the structures responsible for the crisis remain fundamentally unchallenged.

A fascinating natural consequence of this individualisation is an obsession with ethical consumption as the primary means of resistance. Green products, electric cars, sustainable brands, energy-efficient appliances, and eco-conscious lifestyles are presented as solutions capable of resolving ecological collapse. The same market logic that created the catastrophe is touted as its solution. This is not to say that such actions are entirely meaningless, but they remain deeply inadequate because they operate within the very framework that produced the crisis in the first place. Consumption itself is repackaged as activism and political action is reduced to mere purchasing decisions. Capitalism manages to contain climate anxiety without it ever reaching a point where the system or the privileged class itself is confronted.

In this sense, much of mainstream environmentalism functions less as a challenge to capitalism and more as a mechanism for managing guilt or concern within it. One is encouraged to simply consume differently rather than question why endless consumption is treated as necessary at all.

Outside of mainstream discourse, however, genuine confrontational resistance has always existed. From indigenous communities resisting mining projects and deforestation, to workers striking against lethal labour conditions, to farmers protesting land acquisition and displacement, those most exposed to climate catastrophe have long endured it not as a future crisis, but as a present condition of life under capitalism. Their struggle has never simply been for survival within the existing order, but against the order itself that treats their survival like an afterthought.

The task, then, is not merely to force the privileged to acknowledge suffering, nor to persuade them into more ethical forms of consumption. It is to rupture the bubble entirely: to destroy the conditions that allow catastrophe to be experienced differently across class lines, and to build collective resistance against the economic system that depends upon this unequal suffering to sustain itself. As of today, 95 out of the 100 hottest cities in the world are in India. Soon, much of our country will be rendered uninhabitable. The fire is no longer on the horizon; it’s already here, consuming in its wrath those deemed disposable first, creeping slowly up into everything — the fire this time.

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Malcolm was born into poverty in Nebraska, and entered the foster care system at age 14. He was a bright student at school until he was subjected to dropping out due to the mistreatment and racial discrimination he faced. An anecdote that he recounted many times was that of being brushed off by a teacher for aspiring to become a lawyer who asked him to “use his hands” rather than his mind. He then lived with his sister in Boston and soon earned the nickname “Detroit Red”, for leading a group of petty criminals in the area. This led to his eventual imprisonment for robbery from the years 1946 to 1952. It was here, as a person failed by the systems he was born into, that he became radical through self-education of the realities of life in his country. The library and debate class were his training ground.

He spent time with his brother Reginald, who was also imprisoned at the same time and was a member of the Nation of Islam in Detroit. The Nation of Islam (NOI), founded in 1930, was a political movement and organisation that made the large-scale self-determination of African-Americans, in a hostile United States, possible. By the mid-1960s, it united all African-Americans under the basis that their ancestors, and by extension them, were brought into the American continent against their will. They had built a self-sustaining economic base that connected local businesses like bakeries, barbershops and the like. The organization’s thousands of acres of farmland supplied food produce to their grocery chains in various urban Black neighbourhoods. They propagated elements like discipline, inspired by Islam, along with Black Nationalism that helped incarcerated Black men, by instilling in them a new sense of purpose. A health conscious diet and swearing off of alcohol, drugs and tobacco was promoted along the same vein to help rehabilitation of many.

After his release in 1952, Malcolm joined the Nation of Islam and replaced his surname “Little” to “X”, as was customary for the members and followers. Their surnames were reminders of their ties to the white slaveholders of their ancestors. The organization and its principles provided a reliable structure to a historically oppressed people, whose experience with the state was through discrimination and state-sponsored violence.

Malcolm helped open various temples and lead them in the cities of New York, Philadelphia and Boston during the Nation’s strongest period of influence. He founded and standardised the distribution of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. He served as the first minister of Temple No. 11 in Boston, as the chief minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem. It was during this time that his speeches, part of his work as a leader at the Nation, raised him to great popularity and impact within the movement. In 1961, he was appointed as the national representative of the Nation of Islam.

While many of his daily speeches went unrecorded, about 50 have been well-documented and written about. He stated that the identity of the black individual is that of an ex-slave or second class citizen and recognised that “land is the basis for freedom, justice and equality”. This would require a struggle of “the landless against the landlord”. Another core tenet was against integration of black people and communities into the American nation, saying “any time you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourselves”; and the need was to build a separate institution for black people. This is also reflected in the statement that he is best known for: “by any means necessary”, alluding to the idea that armed self-defence against violence that is always being committed against black people systemically shouldn’t be denounced.

He reached thousands, thanks to his relatability and public oratory skills. While this raised him to a figurehead stature, the same popularity was exploited by the state to discredit him in a broader attempt to squelch any possibility of future civil uprisings. The media habitually decontextualized his statements to paint Malcolm as an extremist and “terrorist” calling for violence, and often pitted him against other leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. who was working on uniting African-Americans through a deliberately non-violent movement.

It is crucial to understand that while both were leaders in the civil rights movements at the same time period, they were speaking to a different audience. While Malcolm lived and worked with communities in the Northern United States, King was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and his activist milestone was in Montgomery, Alabama that resonated with the South. The specific civic conditions for a black person in these regions informed the stances that these leaders took. The state’s public sanitising of King and dramatic villanising of Malcolm simultaneously, to this day, serves only the state – whose ultimate goal is to keep the oppressed docile and denied of rights.

In 1964, Malcolm was asked to leave the Nation of Islam as a result of the rising tensions and ideological differences between him and then Nation leader Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm’s mentor and guide. He travelled to various countries in the Middle East and Africa, and founded the OAAU. He met with political leaders from different backgrounds like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré and Milton Obote among others. Apart from them, he also met with students, revolutionary figures, poets like Maya Angelou and Harun Rashid and representatives of different liberation movements. He returned to the States to find himself under constant threat of assassination, while giving speeches to reflect his evolving political stance.

His philosophy widened to include a recognition of an oppressed people of another system that operated at the global level, imperialism. What he had experienced at home was reflected in different forms in different realities across the globe, in previously colonized regions. At OAAU, he aimed to unite the African diaspora across the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, to create a Pan-African identity and to organise against exploitative systems globally. Along with this came a recognition that oppression as a mechanism takes different forms and that all the different kinds of oppressed are facing similar struggles. He called for an “oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter”. When asked what political and economic system he wanted, he said “I don’t know…all of the countries that are emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don’t think it’s an accident.” And that “you can’t have capitalism without racism”.

His assassination at age 39, while preparing for a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, made his ideas and speeches immortal. He fore-fronted racial discrimination as a tool systemically embedded in the essential functioning of the capitalist and imperialist apparatus. The nation-state relies on discrimination, segregation, oppression on the basis of differences in religious beliefs, race, and other factors used by the oppressed to identify themselves with, for the uninhibited functioning of oppression leading to exploitation. His personal and political evolution, reflected in his work, make these aspects of imperialism very clear.

In 2024, his daughters and estate sued various factions of the United States government for withholding information about his death. The 2021 ruling that heavily compensated and exonerated two of the three men that were arrested for his assasination, on the basis of wrongful convictions, has made this possible.

On his 101st birth anniversary, let us not only remember him for all that he did and spoke about, but also for everything that his journey has attested to.

References

• Malcolm X, Britannica (last edited 2025)

• Nation of Islam, Britannica (last edited 2026)

• George Breitman and Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statement (1965)

• George Novack, “Malcolm X, Black Nationalism and Socialism.”, International Socialist Review, Vol.28 No.4, July-August 1967, pp.43-51

• Fritz H. Pointer, Marxism and Nationalism in Black Revolutionary Movements - USA, Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 1971

• Ray Smith, Malcolm X, 40 years after the death of a revolutionary (2005)

• Milton Allimandi, Malcolm X at 100: He Embraced Socialism and Class Struggle toward end of life (2025)

• Niki Popli, Why Malcolm X’s Family Is Suing the FBI, NYPD, and CIA 58 Years After His Death, Time (2023)

• Barry Shephard, The revolutionary legacy of Malcolm X, The Red Flag (2015)

• Nafeesa Mohmmad, The Nation of Islam’s Economic Program, 1934-1975, Black Past (2020)

• Omar Suleiman, Malcolm X is still misunderstood – and misused, Al Jazeera (2020)

“We are taught to treat our despair as a natural law of existence. But what if our helplessness is a manufactured illusion, and history is blindly awaiting our conscious effort to change its course?”

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845

The importance of a single human being, the weight of human existence, and the ultimate “meaning of life” have long been subjects of intense study, conflict, and discussion among philosophers. At some point in our lives, we all encounter these questions in our own personal ways. We either find a fleeting, personal sense of purpose, or we find ourselves perpetually conflicted, forever searching for a motive.

Looking back across the billions of years of our existence and the vast expanse of time, we must ask ourselves: are we the first generation to stand face-to-face with this hollow silence, or have all our ancestors found themselves equally lost on this path? In the grander scheme of things, we are not truly alone—there are seven billion of us coexisting on this planet. Yet, when we encounter the deeper reality of our world, we find ourselves feeling profoundly hollowed and darkened. A life left without a clear aim or direction feels like a tragic waste of everything existence has to offer, which is why we so earnestly crave a motive—a genuine sense of meaning for the life with which we have been graced.

What is most remarkable is that despite the thousands of years humanity has survived on this planet, we have still not made peace with our own mortality. However, this deep-seated restlessness is driven less by our biological nature and far more by the external, material factors that define our world today: the structural lagging behind, the constant sense of loss, the daily struggle, the endless disappointments, the artificial scarcity, the hunger, and the pain. These miseries are not natural laws, yet they remain a brutal reality for the majority of the population. Even though our world produces more than enough abundance to sustain everyone, most people are forced to live without it.

This hopelessness and restlessness are not permanent features of human nature; they have an historical origin. The historical advent of private ownership, the emergence of human slavery, and the subsequent division of society into competing classes mandated these conditions of despair. It was precisely to soothe this systemic pain that humanity turned toward religion. Religion sowed the seeds of belief in an immortal, divine entity who guides our paths, demanding that we show good, patient endurance in this life while awaiting a distant, heavenly bliss. This theological framework successfully manufactured a state of ignorance, encouraging people to look away from their real-world oppression by reasoning that their suffering was merely the result of karma or a deity’s divine plan. As Karl Marx famously observed in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

The dominant philosophical thought of any given era was similarly driven by the prevailing material conditions and class relations of the time. Even when the intentions of past philosophers were entirely sincere and not designed to intentionally fool an audience, their ideas were innocently bounded by the limited tools and resources available in their respective historical periods. They created abstract systems simply to soothe the troubled thoughts of an oppressed populace. As Friedrich Engels explained in Anti-Dühring, we cannot understand ideas in a vacuum; we must look to the economic foundations that produce them:

“The economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period.”

Idealist Fever

The horrifying conditions of today’s world demand an immense amount of effort, rigorous thinking, active work, and constant attention from those of us who are not yet on the receiving end of the mass destruction, brutal oppression, and suffocating, unlivable conditions to which others are being subjected elsewhere in the world. Yet, the “many”—those who enjoy relative safety—seem to have forgotten their connection to this suffering. They have become comfortable ignoring global atrocities, failing to realize that they are not mere spectators. In the structural movement of history, even the act of “merely spectating” is a choice that actively impacts how events unfold and dictates where the world is heading.

When we analyze the hollowed, individualistic lives that modern capitalism deliberately manufactures, we are looking at the systematic destruction of our collective responsibility toward the rest of the world. Capitalism operates by executing a murder of the pure human will, destroying our capacity to understand how and where humanity is capable of intervening to change the world’s course of action. This idleness is a material choice with material consequences. The world is not a distant object to be passively watched from afar.

We must collectively realize that historical change does not happen on its own, nor is it confined to some “natural” turn of events. History is not a self-running machine. Humans are the only conscious, physical beings capable of contributing to the course of events. Therefore, our mere idleness acts as a heavy weight that actively holds back the transformative change that collective action would otherwise bring about. Our ignorance and passivity do not freeze the world in a neutral, stationary state; instead, they serve as a silent endorsement, allowing the negative changes and systemic violence of capitalism to keep taking place unchecked.

As Emile Burns writes in What is Marxism?, this passive posture is the hallmark of the absolute pacifist who denies the material reality of power:

“The completely logical pacifist ignores the real world around him; it is a matter of no importance to him that in reality... non-resistance to force brings more force, more aggression and brutality. The fundamental basis of such absolute pacifism is an idealist view of the world, a disbelief in external reality.”

Burns argues that absolute pacifism constitutes an idealist, detached view of reality that ignores the concrete, physical force operating in the world. By ignoring that resistance is an undeniable, material fact of modern life, the pacifist fails to recognize that non-resistance merely allows aggression to continue. Ultimately, this approach stems from a denial of external reality—a failure to see how the world actually works.

Conscience in the Making

Contrary to the idealist point of view, the materialist perspective recognizes that the surrounding environment and human consciousness exist in a state of constant, dynamic interplay; they actively shape and transform one another. Human thought is not a passive mirror that merely reflects nature, nor are human beings helpless objects adrift in a pre-determined world. In Thesis III of the Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx directly exposed the fatal flaw of any philosophy that treats human beings as completely passive products of their surroundings:

“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.”

With this intervention, Marx rejects the passive surrender of waiting for a superior force, an external savior, or a “Great Man” to step forward and deliver social change. He places the weight of history squarely on the shoulders of the collective populace. Our environment does not simply hand us the conditions for a better world on a silver platter; rather, we, as conscious physical beings, bear the immediate responsibility of analyzing what is happening around us and organizing intentional, physical interventions.

This is the core definition of Revolutionary Practice: as the working class fights to change its physical conditions, the very act of engaging in that struggle fundamentally transforms who they are. Their subjective consciousness changes because they are actively reshaping their material reality. As Emile Burns reinforces in What is Marxism?:

“Man does not only observe external Nature: he changes it, and himself with it.”

This active relationship is not a novel concept; it is the definitive story of human survival on this planet. Humanity has always navigated its circumstances by using the unique combination of a conscious brain, a physical body, and collective labor. We do not look at a forest as an unchangeable landscape; we actively cut wood, build fires, cultivate fields, and plant seeds. Human senses and human intellect are not sharpest when we sit back in quiet contemplation, but when we are actively working, building, and transforming the physical matter around us.

Yet, in the modern world, this essential conscious effort is being systematically choked. The material conditions of capitalism subject the population to a relentless barrage of “rat race” propaganda, which instills a deep sense of hopelessness and manufactured ignorance. This propaganda relies on the systemic lie that the current order is permanent—the illusion that “as it was, so it will always be.” This mindset acts as a suffocating barrier to the development of both the individual and society.

Worse still, the infection of this passivity is not restricted to the openly indifferent; it breathes directly within the revolutionary movement itself in the forms of revisionism and reformism. When political movements seek comfortable alliances with hollow liberal systems, they reveal that their consciousness has surrendered. They stop acting as historical agents of change and become passive observers once more, attempting to adjust the existing machinery rather than dismantle it.

To shatter this paralysis, we must break away from “mechanical” materialism, which views humans as passive clay completely molded by external forces. Dialectical Materialism restores human consciousness to its proper role as an active participant in history. As V.I. Lenin argued in his Philosophical Notebooks :

“The consciousness of the human being not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.”

Without an understanding of the laws of change, well-intentioned conscious effort inevitably collapses into despair. When individuals work for years without witnessing an immediate, fundamental overhaul of society, they fall into the trap of feeling that their personal sacrifices are entirely wasted. Dialectical Materialism cures this exhaustion by proving that what looks like a period of “smooth, slow development” is actually the phase where revolutionary energy is quietly accumulating beneath the surface.

A movement armed with this scientific theory does not throw up its hands during periods of apparent stagnation; it understands that the material contradictions are building toward an inevitable, explosive rupture. By grounding our choices in this methodology, conscious effort ceases to be an emotional, hollow reaction to systemic pain and transforms into a calculated, scientific intervention. It rescues the human will from the capitalist trap by proving that structural change is not an idealist fantasy, but an absolute law of the universe.

The Breaking Point

To understand how human consciousness breaks out of its modern paralysis, we must look to the fundamental laws governing reality itself. The capitalist worldview relies on a specific delusion: that change is always smooth, linear, and gradual. It tells us that history moves in a straight, predictable line, ensuring that today will look like yesterday, and tomorrow will look like today. This is a deliberate lie designed to induce hopelessness, trapping the individual in an eternal present where resistance feels mathematically impossible.

Dialectical materialism shatters this illusion by revealing that development is never a simple, uninterrupted climb. As Emile Burns notes in What is Marxism?, physical and social reality is “broken at certain points in a very sharp way.” A process appears completely stable and gradual for a long period—a quality merely increasing or decreasing numerically—until it hits a critical, invisible threshold known as a “nodal point.” At this threshold, a sudden, explosive break occurs, and the entire character of reality is fundamentally transformed.

To comprehend this “mind-breaking” law, we look to the physical behavior of water. If you apply heat to water, its temperature rises. This is a purely quantitative change; the amount of heat increases, but the water remains water. It retains all its liquid properties, its appearance, and its behavior. A mechanical observer, watching this process, would foolishly assume that the water will simply go on heating forever while remaining a liquid.

However, at 100°C (212ºF), a sudden, violent rupture takes place. The water completely changes its qualities. The linear process is shattered; it is no longer water, but steam. The same law applies in reverse: reduce the temperature, and the liquid remains liquid until it hits 0°C (32ºF), where it instantly hardens into solid ice. This is what Friedrich Engels identifies in Dialectics of Nature as the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. In chemistry, this law is absolute: adding or subtracting a single atom completely changes the character of the molecular result.

In human society, this exact same law dictates the movement of history, rendering the “rat race” propaganda of capitalism obsolete. Gradual economic and social shifts take place over long stretches of time without causing any visible, fundamental changes in the character of the system. To the passive spectator, society appears stationary. But beneath the surface, hidden from plain sight, the quantitative pressures are building. Then, a sharp break takes place. A revolution erupts; the old form of society is entirely destroyed, and a new mode of existence comes into being.

This qualitative leap is demonstrated by the historic death of the feudal order and the subsequent birth of capitalism. Under feudalism, production was strictly localized. Peasants worked the land and handed over a mandated portion of their crop directly to their lords; production was for survival, not for exchange. However, within the very pores of this rigid feudal matrix, a new quantitative element began to accumulate: the buying and selling of surplus products.

As Burns notes, this process was initially slow and unnoticeable. Small-scale trade gradually led to the growth of independent towns, which in turn led to the production of goods specifically for the market. Over centuries, these small, numerical shifts—a merchant trading here, a private workshop opening there—silently built up a new class: the bourgeoisie.

As this rising class grew, it developed entirely new “productive forces”—industrial machinery, massive factories, and an urgent requirement for a mobile, propertyless workforce that could sell its labor freely. The old feudal property relations, with their rigid system of serfdom and restrictive town guilds, became a physical barrier—a suffocating chain. They were completely incompatible with the new economic reality. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explain in the Communist Manifesto:

“The feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.”

The absolute historical “boiling point” was reached when the rising capitalist class could no longer breathe within the constraints of the old feudal container. The quantitative accumulation of economic power transformed into a qualitative explosion—an era of social revolution, such as the French Revolution. The old feudal character of society was completely obliterated in a sharp break. This was not a mere rotation of kings or political leaders; it was a total, structural transformation of the mode of production. Capitalist society took the place of feudalism and initiated an entirely new, tempestuous development. As Karl Marx argued in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production... Then begins an era of social revolution.”

The Inevitable Revolution

If the transformation of quantity into quality explains how the revolutionary break looks, the fourth law of dialectics explains why it is inevitable. It reveals the internal motor that drives all historical change. The idealist propaganda of the ruling class seeks to present capitalist society as a harmonious, unified whole, suggesting that if individuals simply work hard, the system functions for everyone. Dialectical materialism explodes this myth by showing that nothing in reality is a simple monolith. Everything in existence is composite, fractured, and of a dual character. Everything contains within its own structure an unresolvable conflict of opposites.

Every entity, system, or society has within it features that are actively developing and becoming more dominant, alongside features that are decaying, passing away, and becoming less dominant. One internal force is always expanding, while the other is desperately resisting that expansion. It is the relentless struggle between these opposites—the fight of the rising factor to destroy the domination of the old, and the struggle of the dominant factor to prevent the new factor from born—which constitutes the actual content of the entire process of change. This internal friction is the sole reason why systems eventually hit their boiling point and fracture in a violent break. As Mao Zedong argued in On Contradiction:

“The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing.”

This internal motor operates with absolute clarity within human history. At each historical stage, society has been split into antagonistic classes, one of which was developing in the womb of the old world, and one of which was declining at the top of it. This was the case under feudalism, where capitalism developed “in the germ” and, as it grew, came into a direct, unresolvable collision with the nobility. It is the exact same case in our current capitalist period. Capitalist society is not all of one kind; it is split in half by its own internal contradiction. As the capitalist class develops its wealth, it is materially compelled to develop its own opposite: the working class, the rising factor that “has the future in its hands.”

The conflict between these classes is not an accidental glitch in the system; it is the organic, defining features of capitalism itself. The capitalists must exploit the workers to generate profit, and the workers must resist that exploitation to survive. This systemic friction develops over time, escalating from small factory disputes into generalized political warfare. It is this fundamental “contradiction” within capitalism, and the actual physical struggles arising from it, which ultimately forces the qualitative leap—the sharp break of the revolution. As V.I. Lenin noted in his Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic:

“The split of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.”

A “Class-for-itself”

It is within these features of dialectical materialism that we discover the intellectual weapon needed to understand both our current circumstances and our historical path. But simply reasoning, creating abstract logic, and writing books is not enough. To remain in the realm of pure thought is to fall right back into the passive trap of the spectator. As Karl Marx famously concluded in his final entry of the Theses on Feuerbach:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

True understanding requires a physical, historically conscious act to fulfill both that comprehension and human reason. As dialectical materialism teaches us, new material conditions are constantly emerging, new ideas are constantly breaking through the crust of old thinking, resistance is steadily increasing, and change stands as the absolute truth of the universe. No condition remains constant for all eternity; change is continuously happening. This historical movement is, as Marx noted, “going on before our own eyes” if we care enough to look.

Throughout history, there have been many philosophers and theorists who, in response to the demands of their times, sought to analyse and understand the conditions of their present. Even though their intentions were sincere, and they were not trying to intentionally trick anyone, they were innocently developing within the limited tools and resources available then to soothe one’s thoughts of actions. They were bounded by their historical era. Today, however, the situation is completely different. We have centuries of historical data, a massive accumulation of global knowledge, and, most importantly, the support of a revolutionary, scientific theory. We no longer have an excuse to be confused.

Yet, people today have found their own ways of becoming accustomed to the system. Those who hold economic privilege find comfort in ignoring the mass destruction, adapting their lives to the status quo because it suits them. Others find an escape reason in media propaganda that serves the ruling class, sinking into a manufactured state of ignorance and passivity. Then there are those who fall into deep despair and hopelessness, completely unable to find reason or an exit path within the available information and institutional lies. They look at the world and feel completely powerless, believing that one human can do nothing to change the course of history.

Dialectical materialism clears this hopelessness entirely. It turns our emotional exhaustion into scientific clarity by showing that change is historically proven, materially possible, and already occurring. It reveals that the world is always in need of people’s conscious effort to help grow the movement. Without this conscious intervention, the working class remains what Marx called a “class-in-itself”—a fragmented collection of separate individuals who share the same exploitation but remain isolated, competitive, and idle spectators of their own misery. Left to its own spontaneous devices, the working class can never break its chains. As Lenin argued in What Is To Be Done?, spontaneity alone is a dead end:

“The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness... Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle.”

Dialectical materialism is that conscious force from without that transforms the proletariat into a “class-for-itself”—a unified, self-conscious force that recognizes its historical task. This requires what Mao Zedong outlined in On Practice as the essential leap from theory back into physical reality:

“If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance. The whole process of human knowledge is a leap from theory back into the practice of changing the world.”

In the Communist Manifesto, while urging for a strong, uncompromising revolutionary line against the bourgeoisie—one led directly by the working class—Marx and Engels define the necessary role of this conscious vanguard:

“They [the Communists] have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.”

A key part of this consciousness is the complete shattering of the illusion that property relations are eternal laws of nature. Just as the rising bourgeoisie “burst asunder” feudal property because it had become a fetter on development, the conscious proletariat is destined to do the same to bourgeois property—the social power that allows the few to monopolize wealth and subjugate the labor of the many. Marx describes this as a “radical rupture” with traditional ideas. It is the exact moment where the human will actively breaks free from capitalist machine-training, shifts from passive reflection to objective creation, and restores a truly human consciousness to the world.

What is to be done?

The tool of dialectical materialism, when wielded not as a passive academic index but as an active method of study, restores an unyielding hope and a precise scientific understanding of the structural changes that are entirely possible in our world. It fundamentally alters our relationship with our own suffering; it takes our paralyzing despair and redirects it into a rigorous, calculated reasoning and an objective action driven entirely by hope.

Under the suffocating fog of capitalist propaganda, we are taught to internalize our misery as a personal flaw or an unchangeable law of nature. Dialectical materialism explodes this deception. It reveals that the widespread despair, the isolating loneliness, and the deep hopelessness confronting the global populace today are not proof of human helplessness. Rather, they are the concrete, objective proof of a ruling class that is no longer fit to hold power—a dying system blindly awaiting its necessary historical unrooting.

This science provides us with a genuine understanding of the immense value of our individual and collective choices. It exposes the inherently mortal, decaying nature of the current capitalist system, and delineates the precise historical role that conscious human beings must play in its dismantling. Dialectical materialism teaches us that we do not have to accept this reality as an eternal sentence. We must gather our hopelessness, our despair, and our collective anger, and direct them away from passive self-destruction. We must put this revolutionary tool to work against the prevalent idealist propaganda of the bourgeoisie, shatter the illusion of our powerlessness, and put our active human consciousness to physical use in the material world.

Dying capitalism

This weaponized consciousness brings us back, finally, to the “hollowed” sense of responsibility identified at the very start of this journey. The Communist Manifesto provides the material diagnosis for this emptiness, proving that our psychological exhaustion is the systemic symptom of an economy where the past dominates the present. In bourgeois society, dead labor—accumulated capital, corporate assets, and automated machinery—reigns supreme over the living, breathing human being. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels define this distortion in Chapter II:

“In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

The world is not a distant movie to be watched from a safe distance. The “conscious effort” we advocate is the realization that by manufacturing this hollowed, oppressed class, the bourgeoisie has inevitably produced its own executioners. Capitalism forces millions into a state of living death, but in doing so, it organizes the very force that will bring about its end. By gaining a clear, theoretical understanding of this “line of march,” we cease to be the idle victims of a blind historical current and become its conscious drivers. We shatter the passivity that maintains the status quo. As Friedrich Engels summarized in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, this active leap of consciousness is what allows humanity to break its cycles of historical subjugation and step out of the dark:

“To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act... is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.”

All Unite!

It is here, at the peak of this revolutionary path, that we find the ultimate resolution to our existential dread. The physical mortality of human beings is a biological fact; it must be accepted as our ultimate, shared truth. Yet, it is a profound tragedy of our current era that millions fall into deep despair and hopelessness, not because they are mortal, but because the brutal conditions of capitalism strip their lives of dignity, joy, and peace before they ever reach the grave. Capitalism robs us of our time, forcing us to spend our brief existences competing in an artificial rat race simply to survive. It turns our limited days into a source of constant anxiety, isolation, and terror.

But through the lens of revolutionary practice, we can visualize a different reality. I am deeply hopeful that there will come a day—a new world—where our mortality will no longer be a source of worry, fear, or existential trauma. When we systematically dismantle the “machine-training” of capitalism and replace it with an association based on collective care, the very nature of time changes. The hours of our lives will become immensely beautiful, spent in the shared joy of others and sustained by the deep love of many. This profound connection will extend past artificial borders, binding not just human beings to one another, but uniting us with all living beings and the vast, surrounding natural world we inhabit.

In a society stripped of exploitation, scarcity, and class warfare, mortality will lose its terrifying sting. We will no longer worry about running out of time in an artificial race for survival, because our days will no longer be spent in despair. We will move from the hollowed isolation of the spectator to an association in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Through the science of dialectical materialism, the pure human will is resurrected, the spectator vanishes, and humanity takes its definitive step into true freedom.

As the Manifesto triumphantly concludes:

“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”

This reverence, contrary to popular notion, cannot be explained simply by the risks soldiers face. Military service is neither the most dangerous occupation in the country, nor the only one in which individuals routinely risk their lives. Doctors and nurses work on the frontlines of epidemics, sanitation workers enter toxic sewers (often without proper protective equipment, unfortunately), and factory labourers operate under hazardous industrial conditions every day. All these forms of labour demand courage and expose individuals to mortal danger, often with far less recognition. And yet, it is the army alone that enjoys this strange, persistent, and unparalleled admiration. The goal of this article is to analyse this admiration and understand the cause behind it.

But before we understand this strange relationship between the people and the army, we must first understand what an army is.

In popular imagination, the army is a heroic force that exists solely for the security of the country and its citizens. Political theory, however, has a less romantic definition. If, as Weber argued, the modern state is defined by its monopoly over ‘legitimate violence’, then the army is the most concentrated and disciplined embodiment of this violence. It should be carefully noted that this power is not merely an abstract principle, but a material force, organised, institutionalised, and exercised through real bodies in specific social contexts. Lenin describes the standing army as a ‘special body of armed men’, trained and armed to the teeth by the state, responsible for enforcing this monopoly, and answerable only to the state. It executes decisions that are made elsewhere, carrying out violence on behalf of the state and in protection of its interests.

Thus, when stripped to its bare bones, the army appears to be nothing but a weapon without its own conscience, not because the soldiers within it lack moral judgement, but because the institution itself is designed to subordinate personal morality to the command of the state. Since the institution itself is subject to the whims of the state, individual morality becomes insignificant. Ultimately, it functions as an instrument of violence that the state can choose to deploy, beyond its borders or within them, at its own discretion.

But if the army is the institutional embodiment of the state’s monopoly on violence, why does it occupy such a uniquely moral position in public imagination in India? The answer is not straightforward. A combination of historical experience and sociological factors has gradually produced this reverence, and we must study these in order to make some sense of this phenomenon.

The roots of this phenomenon can be traced, in part, to the traumatic birth of the Indian state in 1947. An extraordinarily violent partition brought with it territorial insecurity, post-colonial fragility, and almost-immediate military conflict. In tumultuous times like these, institutions capable of projecting order and stability acquire immense symbolic power. The army, disciplined and visibly organised at a time when other institutions — and the newly born nation itself — seemed fragile, came to embody this stability. Early conflicts over territory (as early as October 1947) only reinforced this perception, and established the army’s position as the physical guarantor of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the years following the partition. The reassuring idea of a brave and valorous institution defending the country against external threats provided a sense of protection and psychological safety, and assurance that the state would endure. Gradually, this pride in the army fused with pride in the nation itself, to the point that admiration for the army became an essential tenet of nationalism. In popular imagination today, the army sits at a pedestal closer to the nation itself than to other institutions within it.

This historical experience, however, is not enough to fully explain the army’s image, especially why it has persisted almost uncontested for so long. A sociological factor that contributes to this image is the severe deficiency of art that criticises the army, or even art that seriously confronts the brutality of war in general, in the Indian mainstream.

Artistic traditions around the world have often questioned the necessity of war, and the legitimacy of the institutions that carry out war, including the military. In the United States, for instance, the fall of Saigon gave rise to an entire genre of anti-war cultural production, ranging from films to music albums. Popular and intentional art criticised war and the army alike and demystified the army, stripping it of its higher moral ground it had long enjoyed in public imagination, especially since the end of the second World War. What followed was a widespread sense of disillusionment, to the point that the romantic image of the army was replaced by abhorrence, to the extent that Vietnam veterans were greeted with the accusation of being ‘baby killers’ when they returned home.

A similar sustained cultural movement, which makes the military itself an object of sustained moral scrutiny through cultural production, has been largely absent in India.

This absence is partly rooted in the way war has been experienced in post-independence India. Conflicts in the years following the partition have largely remained geographically and socially distant from the everyday lives of most civilians. They have been short and fought primarily along the borders. As a result, war has rarely generated the kind of prolonged national disillusionment that might provoke sustained cultural interrogation of the military institution itself.

Although popular films that did attempt to portray the horrors of war, including Haqeeqat (1964) and Border (1997), were somewhat successful in humanising the army, they fell short of critically examining the role of the military institution itself. It made the army appear more relatable and humane without questioning the legitimacy of the institution, which in fact deepened public sympathy instead of forcing people to confront their own beliefs about it. What could have been an interrogation of war itself, an interrogation of this seemingly all-powerful institution that carries out mindless violence regardless of the brutality it inflicts on the soldiers themselves, was instead simply absorbed into a familiar narrative of sacrifice and patriotism. The ‘anti-war’ genre in the years following the partition, ultimately, could do very little to evoke an ‘anti-war’ emotion at all, it simply humanised the army while leaving the romantic image intact.

Even more progressive pieces of cultural production, for instance, Swadesh Deepak’s excellent play Court Martial (1991), which powerfully exposes the caste hierarchies embedded deep within the structure of the army and does a brilliant job at stripping it of its romantic aura, stops short of questioning the legitimacy of the institution. Overall, isolated attempts were made to humanise the army (while still keeping its ‘rightfulness’ intact) or even question aspects of it (without undermining the structure itself), but a ‘movement’ could hardly be seen.

At the turn of the century, things took a drastic turn. The rapid expansion of private satellite television in post-liberalisation India in the late 90s coincided with the Kargil War (1999), completely transforming the way war was experienced by the urban public. Television, which had begun modestly with just forty-one sets and a single channel in 1962, had by 1995 reached more than seventy million homes, with an estimated viewing population of over four hundred million people across more than a hundred channels. For the first time, conflict was broadcast into living rooms across the nation in near real-time. Television coverage framed it as a dramatic national narrative where the army was the protagonist, courageously defending us from the enemy. War became a spectacle, and the army, mythical. Popular culture, of course, soon reflected this shift, from movies like the quintessential Lakshya (2004) and LOC: Kargil to multiple plays and books that glorified the valour and heroism of the armed forces across cinema, theatre, and literature.

The little work that had been done to ‘humanise’ the army was inundated by the flood that came with the spectacle of Kargil.

In the years that followed, the mythologised image of the army was only amplified, a process which has accelerated dramatically particularly over the last decade as an increasingly aggressive and violent form of nationalism continues to grip public discourse and culture. Popular cinema, again, has played a significant role in reinforcing this image. Blockbuster films like Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) and Shershaah (2021) set the stage for more recent works such as Major (2022), Sam Bahadur (2023), and 120 Bahadur (2025), all of which have used the manic expansion of OTT platforms in India to their advantage. The prevalent nationalism in urban metropolitan societies fuels mainstream art that romanticises the bravery and sacrifice of the troops, which, in turn, intensifies further the nationalistic fervour; a vicious self-reinforcing loop that has little space for counter-narratives. The majority of the people interact and engage with the army only symbolically from a distance, not materially.

However, it would be naive to assume that everyone experiences the presence of the army from a distance. For a vast population, the army is not just a symbol of pride defending our borders, but a force that lives and breathes in their everyday life. A force that inflicts violence not just for them, but upon them; an omnipresent monstrosity breathing down their necks. This continuous violence has long been a part of the lived reality of people in Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and large parts of the North-East. In these regions, the army is not an abstract symbol mediated through cinema or television or literature, but an institution encountered directly, materially. Yet the voices that emerge from these spaces rarely find a place in the national mainstream. They remain geographically distant, politically marginalised, and culturally underrepresented.

When the army carries out barbaric violence against these people on behalf of the state, when it kidnaps, maims, rapes, injures, shoots, and kills, the screams of the victims fail to pierce the bubble of the narrative constructed within urban metropolitan society. The vicious feedback loop between jingoistic nationalism and cultural production remains largely intact, insulated from the realities it does not represent. And the army continues to exist in the public imagination as a largely unquestioned and unopposed moral force, because even though alternative experiences exist, they are systematically excluded from the spaces where national meaning is produced.

Another major reason for the relatively little scrutiny is the historically stable and amicable relationship between the army and the state in India. In countries like Pakistan or Myanmar, where the military has repeatedly intervened in politics, and has, at times, even overthrown governments, the army comes to be seen as a competing centre of power. Such interventions naturally generate suspicion and distrust in the public imagination. In India, by contrast, the army has never attempted to seize political power by undermining the state, and by doing so it has preserved its image as a loyal and disciplined extension of the state, not as an entity driven by its own political ambitions. The idea of the army as an ‘apolitical’ institution is, therefore, not merely assumed, but actively reinforced through this history.

Taken together, these historical, cultural, and institutional factors produce an image of the army that transcends ordinary scrutiny. It comes to be seen not merely as a state institution, but as something closer to a moral absolute, a ‘godly’ entity imagined as being above error and sin, and therefore beyond question. In such a framework, to criticise the army begins to feel indistinguishable from criticising the nation itself. Consequently, incidents or actions that might otherwise invite criticism and reflection are either absorbed into narratives of ‘national duty’ and ‘sacrifice’, or dismissed as isolated aberrations or accidental mistakes attributable to individuals rather than the institution. The institution itself remains untouched, its moral authority intact.

What emerges, then, is not simply respect for the army, but a form of reverence that shields it from the very scrutiny that every instrument of power must inevitably be subjected to.

What is spontaneity?

...the “spontaneous element”, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form… The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.

— V.I. Lenin, Chapter 2, “What is to be done? Burning Questions of Our Movement” (1902)

Spontaneity or spontaneous movements mean, in essence, the outbursts or mobilizations taken up by section(s) of the oppressed classes that have come from within them in a manner which focuses for the most part on their immediate needs. Their demands remain constricted to meet these needs, for example they may ask for a wage raise, a reduction in compulsory working hours and even the withdrawal of a bill. If these demands are met to a certain degree, business-as-usual can carry on. If they are not met at all, there may be escalations seen till they are or till the upsurge dies down out of exhaustion. But this does not address what allowed these problems to arise, as much is evident by the periodic and intensifying nature of these crises and outbursts.

The Need for Political Consciousness

If we look on the surface, it may seem that there are some political parties, certain corporations or a few evil people in power who are causing these problems to occur in our lives, who are responsible for destroying the lives of many. These people and groups in power collectively act this way, in the interest of corporates and capital, because they belong to the ruling class of capitalists and exercise their power through the State, which is not a neutral entity but an instrument of class rule.

Even if a certain reform is achieved, for example a wage hike or the repealing of a law, the power still remains in the hands of the same ruling class. Such reforms are only superficial, while desirable, they must be only one of the means of class struggle and not the end in itself. As long as the rotten core of the old society is not uprooted and thrown out, the oppression and exploitation will continue, all historical examples of reformist methods have shown us the same. Hence, the method of legislative reform does not bring a fundamental and lasting change. Only through the conquest of political power by the proletariat from the bourgeoisie in the process of a social revolution would a new society be formed.

This deeper understanding of the origin of these problems being not simply this or that greedy individual, a few “crony” capitalists but rather the entirety of class society and the knowledge that the enemy of all hardworking and oppressed peoples, the enemy of the toiling masses being the ruling classes and their State, is what can be regarded as political consciousness.

Trade Union Consciousness Is Not Political Consciousness

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.

— V.I. Lenin, Chapter 2, “What is to be done? Burning Questions of Our Movement” (1902)

Trade unions, when not connected with any of the revolutionary forces and not as a means of organizing the working class employed by a communist party, become in essence, mediators between the workers and their exploiters and oppressors. A means by which the workers are duped into settling for reasonable demands and to return to their daily lives without any fundamental social change. The leaders of trade unions don’t become representatives for workers’ demands but play the role of rationalizing the capitalists’ demands in the workers’ eyes. In this way they seek to preserve an unjust peace, a compromise between labour and capital, the subjugation of labour to capital continues.

Economic agitations such as demands regarding wages, working conditions, working hours, against a particular law are taken up as our sole task, they get stuck in a loop of getting concessions from the ruling class and as more and more severe crises hit, the concessions are taken away. Without having far reaching goals and not having the means or intent to achieve them, the subjugation of labour to capital cannot end. To end this subjugation, to bring a fundamental social change, a transformation of society, means primarily to struggle for the seizure of political power under which economic agitations must be included as opposed to making economic agitation itself the sole task and relinquishing any possibility of struggling a new society.

Revolutionary Politics and The Source of Political Consciousness

The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.

— V.I. Lenin, Chapter 2, “What is to be done? Burning Questions of Our Movement” (1902)

A crucial point to understand is that while in its coming face to face with the conditions that capitalism has produced, the working class can have a sense that the boss, the corporation or even a particular political party, a particular government is its enemy, the working class cannot on its own or from within itself become conscious of the contradiction of class society as a whole. As Lenin has explained, this consciousness first arose in the intellectuals through the development of the theory of socialism and further developed into scientific socialism. This is because it requires an understanding of the development of society as a whole, of all the inter-relations within class society, of the laws of motion of capitalism, its contradictions and the means, historical necessity to resolve them. This is not to deny the day to day experiences and struggles of the working class, it is in the full acceptance and understanding of these conditions, not in isolation or just in an immediate sense but in the inter-relation with the whole of the rotten old society is what allows us to find the way to do away with these conditions entirely. To imbue this political consciousness into the oppressed masses then becomes a key task of revolutionary politics.

Why Must Revolutionaries Combat Spontaneity?

...for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism … and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.

— V.I. Lenin, Chapter 2, “What is to be done? Burning Questions of Our Movement” (1902)

Spontaneity, by its very nature, subdues itself to ruling class politics, that is to say, however many times these spontaneous outbursts take place, they will get nullified through the state machinery, through repression by the police, through the granting of certain temporary concessions and being taken advantage of by ruling class political parties to bring the participating workers, peasants or any oppressed section of society into their politics.

This politics will keep parliamentarian, constitutionalist and reformist illusions alive in the mind of the oppressed, they will be made to believe that if you simply side with us, vote for us, we will fight for you. But owing to their nature, these parties (whether “left”-wing or right wing) go on to betray the masses. Every couple of years, the ruling class political parties come to the people asking for votes on this or that promise of change. But their class character becomes clear when they inevitably serve capital and no one else, they also utilize the state machinery when it comes to repressing mass struggles.

Whether it is Adani and Ambani for the BJP now, Tata earlier for even the Congress, or Adani and his port deal for the so-called CPI(Marxist), these parties contest only for the redistribution of power among various sections of the ruling class. Some are outright fascist, while others not so much, they all still operate within the politics of Neo-liberalism. What is required then is a revolutionary intervention to boycott elections in an active manner, to expose the falsehoods perpetrated by these ruling classes and bring the toiling masses under the revolutionary movement.

The Noida Worker Protests and Other Working Class Protests Across The Nation

Around 2 weeks ago on April 13, 2026, workers in Noida took the streets in a wave of unrest. This was after previous dharnas and an increase by a meagre sum of money, as low as 320 rupees increase in monthly wages for some. This clearly conciliatory move was not enough as they face more and more problems in their daily lives from financial issues. The LPG crisis from the US-Israel imperialist aggression war on Iran (even more so because of the Indian state siding with the Imperialists) pushes cylinder costs in black markets upwards of 5000 rupees.

Moreover, the Brahmanical Hindutva fascist state has implemented the new labour codes, which are meant to directly serve corporate interests and make worker exploitation more efficient. Over 40,000 workers in more than 80 locations within Noida’s industrial areas mobilized on the streets. Swift police repression was brought down upon these protestors. The arrests that were made during these protests, of both workers and activists, have still not been released, families of workers and activists await answers of whereabouts and the conditions of their family members. These protests have not been the only ones, in various industries, thousands of workers have been protesting in recent times.

The Nature Of These Protests

They [the strikes of the 1890s] marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers, were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness. In this sense, the strikes of the nineties, despite the enormous progress they represented as compared with the “revolts’, remained a purely spontaneous movement.

— V.I. Lenin, Chapter 2, “What is to be done? Burning Questions of Our Movement” (1902)

What is observed differently in these protests is the lack of the leadership of any trade union. This is the case because the established trade unions not tied to any revolutionary forces in the country have fallen behind the workers. They became a fetter during these protests and hence were sidelined, instead used only as per the convenience of the protesting workers’ for legal aid and such. “What sets these [Noida] protests apart is the absence of major trade union leadership, which is unusual for labour movements in India, said a union leader who declined to be named for fear of police action.” reported BBC news on April 16. In this scenario we can observe directly the nature of trade unionist politics, that the workers became more militant and came into a direct confrontation with the police and the state machinery. But nonetheless theirs remained a spontaneous upsurge that on its own cannot fundamentally change society owing to the limited demands and lack of a revolutionary leadership. Hence it becomes the role of revolutionaries to bring the workers into revolutionary politics and elevate, not de-escalate or pacify their struggle.

A Contrast With The Anti-Transgender Amendment Bill (2026) Agitations

Now we have seen the power that the working class possesses, even if in its embryonic form of a spontaneous outburst. Just about 2 weeks before the Noida workers protests, the Trans amendment bill that directly aims to criminalize Trans people and police their identity, became a law on March 30, 2026. It was brought into the Lok Sabha on March 24th and swiftly steamrolled through both the houses, passing in the Rajya Sabha on March 25th. Amidst this, some limited sections of the so-called opposition parties gave a few hollow words and “staged a walkout” as their only action to supposedly stop this bill from passing. The agitations on the ground to oppose this bill were limited, in both their participation and their scope. For example, email campaigns to MLAs and MPs, then to the President were conducted, moreover, most protests that happened were done with police permission in restricted areas and limited slots of time.

There were many reports of marginalized peoples and activists within the Trans community, from working class and oppressed caste sections having their demands and their voices not reaching the leaders that were present for this movement. The NGOs and sections of ruling class parties that came to acquire leadership of these agitations, were inherently limited by their class character to not elevate these agitations and keep them palatable. What was lacking in this movement, even in the shared characteristic of being spontaneous movements, was working class participation and hence there couldn’t be a large-scale mobilisation that would pose a significant challenge to the bill. What is needed in the Queer movement, is its fusion with the revolutionary movement, with the striving to defeat the fascist state’s onslaught on all the oppressed sections of society and not just workers or transgender people.

... people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.

— Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution” (1900)

Spontaneous upsurges often fail to achieve the demands that they themselves set out to, this is owing to their primitive nature. As opposed to this, revolutionaries must be organized in a party and through a concrete analysis of all inter-relations within our society and a study of the primary and secondary contradictions, wage the struggle for the birth of a new society. To further understand these ideas it is imperative to study the Marxist classics such as “What is to be done? Burning questions of our movement” (1902) by Lenin and further study the Russian and Chinese experiences of Socialist revolution and other movements that have been born since then including our own. In the summing up of their experiences, both achievements and setbacks faced by them and in creatively applying Marxism to our specific conditions through a concrete analysis lies the key to furthering the Indian revolutionary movement.

It says that Bengal has marked a total voter turnout of 91.66% in its Phase-2 elections. Immediately after this declaration, conversations and arguments emerged over the news. With some describing it as an indication of change in government (high turnouts are usually associated with that) and some alleging election rigging. But without going into either of these arguments, let us focus on another aspect of it—voting turnouts are indeed higher than ever.

This is not only reflected in the recorded numbers but also in the mass migration taking place from different urban cities of workers towards election-bound states, especially West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. This fervour is being celebrated as the “beauty of democracy”, of “people finally exercising their consciousness”. However, there is another, not so cheerful side to it that the dominant narrative conveniently ignores—how people are effectively being forced to vote.

In liberal democracies, voting is considered the most powerful right. But what is a right? A right is usually defined as a privilege or a claim enforceable by law. While it gives one the freedom to act, it also gives the freedom to not act. In the case of voting, that aspect of the “right” is effectively missing.

Let us understand this in light of current events and from the experiences of the most underprivileged sections of society. While the 91.66% is being held up like a huge number in Bengal’s election, the figure of 9 million is missing from popular news. 9 million is the number of voters who have lost their right to vote in Bengal alone after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. There is little doubt that the SIR exercise has been marked with severe mismanagement, corruption, and irregularity, something not unheard of in India’s bureaucratic functioning.

With the deletion of names comes an additional threat—being marked as “suspected foreigners”, directly affecting citizenship and exposing people to the risk of being labelled foreign nationals and facing forced deportation. In states like West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, where people are repeatedly alleged to be “outsiders”, the concern is the gravest.

Long before elections were even announced, the anxiety around SIR had already taken hold. This anxiety is on another level for those from underprivileged sections, who lack access to correct information, legal recourse, and the ability to afford the hefty bribes that bureaucratic systems often demand.

In Delhi, under our mass action programme, Janchetna Abhiyan, we have been working in a slum that houses migrant workers from Bengal, largely involved in scrap work. For over a year now, people have been bearing heavy costs of travel and missing out on work just to ensure their names appear on the electoral list. With SIR shifting the burden of proof onto individuals, much of their year has been spent moving from one government office to another. One month they are in Delhi, the next they must appear at hearings in Bengal over objections to their documents.

This constant to-and-fro has not only affected their income but has also disrupted the education of their children, many of whom were enrolled in schools in Delhi but later had their names struck off due to lack of attendance.

If this ongoing ordeal was not enough, in November 2025, the same slum caught a massive fire, reducing hundreds of huts and shanties to ashes. The fire spread within minutes. People, while running for their lives, did not carry valuables but instead searched for their documents and Aadhaar cards. Some were successful, many were not. With documents destroyed, the already difficult SIR process became even more impossible for many. Some managed to get through it, others continue to await their fate.

As April approached, many began rushing back to their hometowns again. When asked why they were leaving their source of income to travel all the way to vote, the answer was not hope or confidence in elections, but fear of being struck off voter lists, and with it, their claim to citizenship.

Another experience from the previous year further reflects this reality sharply. As Delhi approached its legislative assembly elections in early 2025, Jailorbagh became one of the many slums turned into a political stage. In January 2025, Narendra Modi visited the area and inaugurated “Swabhiman Apartments” as a gift to slum dwellers, just a month before elections. Although the project had been under construction since 2009 and remained incomplete, around 1,200 people were hastily resettled. Over 500 families were declared ineligible under the DSUIB policy and promised resettlement after elections.

Elections brought BJP back to power after years in Delhi. The promises, however, remained promises. Instead, what followed was a mass demolition of the slums on 16th June 2025. Some residents managed to secure a stay order, but for three months, people lived in the remains of their homes without electricity or water, until restoration came only through court orders.

During this period, while conducting relief work, we spoke to residents to prepare a report. In one interview on 15th August, while discussing “independence,” Sanjay, a slum dweller, remarked, “In this country, the poor have only one right—to cast a vote.” He added that even this right is not free, describing how people are often prevented from voting by local power structures.

We asked about the common accusations of how slum dwellers “vote irresponsibly” for accepting small bribes like ₹200 or a quarter of liquor. One resident, however, described this situation quite differently. He mentioned how taking such bribes itself reflects their lack of trust in the system. He said the act of voting itself feels as cheap as the bribe, making it a no-loss situation.

In Jailorbagh’s case the compulsion to vote as against the “right”, becomes even clearer. The DSUIB policy includes eligibility conditions requiring names to have appeared in voter lists between 2010–2015. Residents allege that they were declared ineligible for missing votes, being out of town, or losing documents. In this way, the right to housing itself becomes linked to voting history.

Under such conditions, one must ask: how free is the act of voting? Can the argument that people, especially from the slums, vote in high numbers in elections show their faith in electoral politics just based on voting percentage?

Conversations with residents repeatedly made us realise how elections and political debates often serve as entertainment for the middle class, but mean little to those in slums. Many openly say that no party will do anything for them but still have to vote.

Voting, thus, while described as a right, a duty, or an expression of faith in democracy, does not hold the same meaning for everyone. For many among the working masses, it is not an act of belief or hope. It is something they are compelled to do.

The cycle shall continue. Elections will bring promises and spectacle, people will be lined up in the “largest democracy”, and their forced participation will be called a “celebration of the festival of democracy”.

These two classes will always stand opposed to each other, for their class interests are opposite. In the capitalist system, these two classes are the capitalists/owners and proletariat/workers.

Capitalists own the means of production - factories, machines, tools, resources, capital, etc., workers own nothing except for their labour power, which they offer to the capitalists in return for wages. While the earnings of workers are wages, the earnings of the capitalists are the profit.

But while the workers labour for specific hours to add and generate value, the capitalist doesn’t create any value on his own. The source of his profit lies in the labour of the worker. So, if a worker is paid Rs. 500 to work for 10 hours, he goes to work and generates the value of Rs. 500 say in the first 2 hours only; for the rest of the 8 hours, the worker is still working to cover the cost of production and what is left is the profit of the capitalist. This tells us that the capitalist is earning through the labour of the worker itself, and this gives rise to a struggle between them.

In the free market, the capitalist is constantly competing against other capitalists. For this, he has to keep making more and more profit. But how can he do so?

He does that through various means applied on the workers; first is increasing the working hours - if a worker works for more hours on the same pay, he would create 500 of his own still in 4 hours, but would work 2 hours extra if the total hours are made 12 from 10, thus creating more profit. Second is by reducing wages, in this way, the worker works less for himself in the total number of hours and more for the capitalist. Further, it does so by intensifying the work, increasing the “efficiency”, this means the worker creates more value in the same hours than what he was creating before by giving efforts as extra as might be inhumane at times.

Thus, the capitalist is always in an attempt to reduce the amount he has to give away as wages in proportion to the profit he is making, which he constantly wants to increase.

On the other hand, the worker is always struggling to keep more out of the total value he has produced from the capitalist, this leads to a constant struggle. The class contradiction leads to class struggle, and this class struggle leads to class consciousness. It’s where the members of the classes start identifying the members of the class they’re fighting against as a single class. Since workers as a class are on the back foot for their hand-to-mouth existence, their individual bargaining power is almost nothing in front of a capitalist, but the workers have a high collective bargaining power.

Despite the capitalist being strong with the money and resources he holds, the production is still dependent on the workers. Land, raw materials, and a machine are not going to produce value itself, it’s always the worker that produces value.

This could explain why, when the world was hit by a pandemic and the workers could not work, the production fell to the lowest. It was the worker who was the missing element. Thus, workers as they work together and organise, realise the strength they hold if they collectively bargain. This bargain is the only way they could earn some victories against the capitalists who are constantly trying to extract more and more out of them. The International Workers’ Day was a result of this bargain.

While the workers struggle to collectivise together for their fight, the capitalist is also constantly countering this fight and breaking the unity among workers. The days like May Day are thus celebrated in order to remember together the struggle workers have led in the past, to keep us reminded that we have won before and we shall win again.

The objective of celebrating such days is to collectivise the worker and remember that every society moves forward due to the contradictions in it. Thus the class struggle that we are waging will lead us all to a better system, a step forward in our aim to reach a classless society.

It is the duty of the vanguard, the students, and the organisations to not only celebrate May Day but also understand the responsibility it puts on our shoulders.

It’s our task to work together, make unions, help workers collectivise, help them gain consciousness about their class, remind them of the battles fought and won before, and the battles in front of us; remind them of the importance of a collectivised fight. And finally to remember that a better system is a possibility.

Note: This article was originally written in 2023.

On April 9, 2026, the Haryana government announced a 35% minimum wage hike after a series of protests and demands from workers across industrial belts in Manesar, Panipat, Faridabad and others. But this had a stronger impact in Noida, just across the border, where workers were earning only ₹9,000 to ₹13,000 a month.

On April 10, thousands of factory, industrial and contractual workers from Noida Phase 2 walked off the floor. Within days, workers from nearly 300 factories, including Motherson, Dixon Technologies, Richa Global Exports, Kent RO Systems and Rainbow Fabart, also joined in. More than 40,000 workers from nearly 80 locations demanded an 8-hour shift instead of 10–12 hours, overtime pay and a monthly wage of ₹20,000.

However, the state, acting as a vessel of the capitalist machine, responded with the arrest of over 300 workers, lathi charges and tear gas. The fascist UP government even associated the protests with a “Pak link” and dismissed them as having “Naxalite elements”.

While the protests ended with some minimal assurances from the government, many worker protestors and labour activists continue to be under the custody on the pretext of “provoking violence”, “organising through WhatsApp groups”.

What Do These Protests Teach Us?

Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto talks about how workers, as their conditions become more precarious and oppressed, begin to form trade unions against the bourgeoisie. They club together and fight for wage increases and prepare for these “occasional revolts”. And then, “here and there, the contest breaks out into riots… Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.”

In this context, the Noida protest is in a way, a recurring formulaic event that capitalism structurally keeps on generating. Workers are pushed to extreme exploitation, leading them to revolt, after which they may win partial concessions. But after this apparent and limited wage increase, they are forced back into the same system, returning as wage slaves.

These protests are thus revolutionary, yet limited. Revolutionary, because it brings workers together in real struggle, and makes them realise their power and potential; and it is limited, because, without a broader direction at the grassroot level, such movements often remain confined to immediate economic gains and reforms.

Spontaneous Protests

The Noida protests were largely spontaneous though an expression of a long build up. Workers from one hosiery complex started walking out, and others joined later, not because of a long standing organisational unity, but because their demands also revolved around economic factors like wages, working hours and working conditions. This is what Lenin called “trade union consciousness” in What Is to Be Done?

Lenin wrote:

“The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness — that is, it may realise the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation.”

According to Lenin, these strikes are “simply trade union struggles”, yet they “represent the class struggle in embryo”, because these struggles still need further nurturing and proper organisation.

Limits of Economism

Lenin had a specific term for the tendency to treat the economic struggle of workers as sufficient in itself: Economism. The Economists of his time argued that Marxists should focus primarily on supporting workers’ day-to-day battles with employers, like wages and so on. And it was assumed that the political struggle would follow naturally from economic struggle.

Lenin however didn’t “bow to spontaneity”, though he recognised its importance. His point was not that economic struggles do not matter, but that spontaneous movements can only address immediate economic issues. They cannot challenge the system that makes such struggles necessary in the first place.

So, according to Lenin,

“the task… is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.”

(Note: Social Democracy was synonymous with communism during that time)

Unless something changes in how the working class organises and what it fights for, the immediate gains of the protests would not last long. This is especially in a state where the crisis of capitalism has become constant, where workers win one step forward on a front and are pushed two steps back on other fronts.

As Marx said, “the real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers.” That union is expanding, and slowly expanding across factories, across districts, across states, and across India. The Noida workers being influenced by the Haryana workers’ protest is a big testament to this. These protests showed us that workers are ready to risk arrest and face lathi charges, in search of liberation. What is needed now is the political infrastructure to channel that readiness toward something that outlasts the wage hike.

The real task, as Lenin put it, is not to dismiss spontaneous struggle but to “utilise the sparks of political consciousness which the economic struggle generates among the workers, for the purpose of raising the workers to the level of Social-Democratic political consciousness.”

It is through the correct education, political struggle and powerfully chained organisational lines that such battles can be waged not only for the immediate needs, but the wins and losses of today can culminate into experience towards a larger revolutionary movement.

The Bursting Bubble of Capitalism

As we write this, hundreds of workers and activists are facing arrests and many others are being subjected to constant state intimidation. Attempts are being made to colourise these protests as anti-national or as conscious acts of mindless violence, to hide a simple fact: the current system is incompatible with the current stage of human history.

The Haryana and Noida protests of April 2026 are the biggest examples of this fact that Indian capitalism is not stable; it indicates that the carefully manufactured bubble is slowly bursting. Workers across industrial India are getting pushed to points where silence is no longer possible.

But a breaking point is not automatically a turning point. That transformation from spontaneous revolt to conscious political struggle, does not happen by itself. It requires organisation and strong and strategic roots. And of course, it is difficult to end such a political commentary without this quote:

“Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”