An expression of the international revival of class struggle

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During the spring of 2026, a significant wave of workers' struggles developed across several industrial regions of India. One of its principal early flashpoints was the Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India (HMSI) plant in Manesar, where workers' protests over wages and conditions helped catalyse wider mobilisations that later spread to Faridabad, Noida, Panipat, Surat and other industrial centres. These struggles emerged against a backdrop of rising living costs, inadequate wages, precarious employment and deteriorating working conditions.

The Indian bourgeoisie presents the country as one of the great success stories of contemporary capitalism. It boasts of economic growth, industrial expansion and rising global influence. Yet behind this triumphant narrative lies a different reality. For millions of workers, growth has meant intensified exploitation, longer working hours and increasing difficulties in securing the basic necessities of life.

It was these conditions that pushed thousands of workers into struggle.

A struggle for more than wages

The immediate demands of the movement centred on wages and working conditions. In Haryana, workers mobilised despite the first minimum wage revision in more than a decade because they understood that official increases did not compensate for the real erosion of their living conditions. As inflation continued to devour incomes, workers increasingly found themselves unable to meet even their most basic needs.

But while the struggle began around wages conditions in particular workplaces or companies, it quickly revealed something more widespread.

One of the most striking features of the movement was the tendency of workers to break out of the confines of their individual workplaces. Rather than remaining isolated factory by factory, groups of workers sought to appeal directly to workers in neighbouring enterprises, encouraging them to join the struggle.

We also saw the participation in demonstrations of workers who are generally more atomised than those in large industrial concentrations: workers from small enterprises, domestic staff, part time and unemployed workers….

This tendency is of fundamental importance.

The strength of the working class has never resided in the isolated resistance of individual workplaces. Capitalism confronts workers as a class, and workers can only defend themselves effectively by fighting as a class. Every tendency toward extension, solidarity and unification therefore points beyond the immediate demands of a particular struggle and towards the historical methods through which the proletariat develops its collective strength.

However limited and embryonic, these attempts at extension expressed an instinctive recognition of this reality.

Why the state reacted so brutally

The response of the authorities revealed what was truly at stake.

The state reacted with police deployment, arrests, restrictions on gatherings and, in some cases, the effective militarisation of industrial districts. Predictably, the media presented these measures as necessary responses to disorder and instability.

But what worries the bourgeoisie is not the existence of isolated labour disputes. Capitalism has always been capable of accommodating and containing localised conflicts.

What the ruling class fears is the possibility that workers' struggles begin to extend beyond particular enterprises, sectors or regions; that workers begin to recognise common interests; that collective resistance develops into a broader movement of class solidarity.

The repression directed against these struggles therefore reflects not the strength of the bourgeoisie but its concern over the potential dynamic contained within them. And repression alone was not enough to kill the movement. In a number of cases, the brutality of police repression aimed at ending factory occupations provoked other groups of workers to come to the defence of the workers under attack.

The search for independent class action

Another notable aspect of the movements was the growing distrust expressed towards trade unions, political parties and state institutions.

Throughout the period of capitalist decadence, i.e.for over a hundred years, workers have repeatedly learned through experience that organisations like trade unions and 'left' parties, which claim to speak in their name, actually function as mechanisms for containing and controlling their combativity.

In the recent Indian struggles, there were repeated indications that workers sought to discuss and determine aspects of the movement themselves rather than simply following instructions issued from above. In several instances, especially in Noida and Faridabad, workers bypassed official channels and relied on their own collective discussions in deciding how to proceed.

These developments should not be exaggerated.

The movement remained marked by important weaknesses. The discussions among workers generally remained informal and fragmented. They did not yet develop into sovereign general assemblies capable of uniting all workers involved in the struggle. Nor did they produce elected and revocable delegates responsible to mass assemblies and mandated to coordinate the movement across different workplaces and regions.

These limitations are real. Yet they should not obscure the significance of the tendency itself.

The crucial point is that workers increasingly attempted to take aspects of the struggle into their own hands rather than leaving everything to unions, parties or professional representatives. Such tendencies express the search for forms of self-organisation that belong to the historic traditions of the workers' movement.

The limits of factory occupations

The movement also gave rise to factory occupations, a development that revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the current struggle.

On the one hand, occupations expressed workers' combativity, determination and growing confidence in collective action. They demonstrated a refusal to submit passively to the dictates of employers and the state.

On the other hand, the historical experience of the workers' movement shows that factory occupations cannot become a viable perspective for the development of the struggle.

The occupation of a workplace often risks turning a factory into a prison. By remaining enclosed within the walls of a particular enterprise, workers can become isolated from the rest of their class and more vulnerable to repression. Capital, meanwhile, remains organised on a much broader scale.

The real strength of the proletariat lies elsewhere. It lies in mass assemblies open to all workers, in elected and revocable delegates, in discussion, coordination and extension beyond individual workplaces, sectors and regions.

The most important dynamic in India was therefore not the occupation of factories as such, but the tendency of workers to reach beyond the limits of those factories and seek solidarity with other workers.

India and the international development of the class struggle

These struggles cannot be understood in isolation from the broader international situation.

Since the strike wave that erupted in Britain in 2022, important workers' mobilisations have developed in numerous countries. The movement against pension reform in France, workers' struggles in Belgium and Germany, strikes in the United States, the mobilisation of Airbus workers in Spain, the recent movement of high school and university students in France, and many other struggles have all emerged from the same underlying reality: the worsening crisis of capitalism and its impact on the living conditions of the working class. Despite their different forms and levels of development, these movements express a common tendency of the proletariat to return to collective struggle in the face of mounting attacks on its conditions of existence. In France, the youth movement was especially significant because it generated tendencies towards assemblies, collective discussion, reflection on the lessons of past struggles and efforts to establish links with workers, thereby affirming that the struggle against capitalist austerity can only acquire its full strength through its connection with the wider working class.

After decades marked by the retreat of class identity, the ideological campaigns following the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the corrosive effects of social decomposition, workers are once again being pushed by material necessity to struggle collectively in defence of their living conditions.

The struggles in India form part of this same historical process.

They do not represent the emergence of a revolutionary situation. They remain fragile, uneven and marked by many weaknesses. But they nevertheless express something significant: the continuing reappearance of the proletariat on its own class terrain.

Against the bourgeois political terrain

The significance of these struggles becomes even clearer when contrasted with the political movements that dominate media attention, both in India and across the world.

While workers' struggles were largely ignored or reduced to questions of law and order, extensive coverage was devoted to mobilisations organised by the Cockroach Janata Party operating entirely within the framework of bourgeois politics and parliamentarism[1].

This contrast is not accidental.

Movements that remain confined by disputes over elections, constitutional reforms, or competition between bourgeois factions do not challenge the fundamental social relationship between labour and capital. They may alter political alignments, but they leave untouched the capitalist foundations of exploitation.

Workers' struggles are different.

They emerge from the workplace. They arise from the conflict between labour and capital. They pose, however implicitly, the question of collective resistance by an exploited class confronting the conditions imposed upon it by the capitalist system.

For this reason, even a limited workers' struggle carries a significance that goes far beyond its immediate demands.

A small but significant step

The recent struggles in India should neither be glorified nor underestimated.

They remain marked by important weaknesses. Their forms of self-organisation were limited. Their capacity for extension remained partial. The weight of union influence, fragmentation and political confusion continues to represent a significant obstacle.

Yet beneath these limitations, something important appeared.

Workers sought to extend their struggle beyond individual workplaces. They increasingly distrusted the institutions that claim to represent them. They attempted, however hesitantly, to discuss and act collectively. They demonstrated a willingness to resist worsening conditions and to seek solidarity with fellow workers.

These developments form part of a wider international process.

The road ahead remains long. The difficulties are immense. But the significance of the recent Indian struggles lies precisely in the fact that they reveal, however modestly, the re-emergence of those fundamental tendencies through which the working class rediscovers its collective strength.

In this sense, the struggles in India are not merely an episode of industrial unrest. They are one expression, among many others throughout the world, of the slow and uneven reawakening of the international proletariat in the face of the deepening crisis of capitalism.

BN

 

Rubric: 

Strike wave in India