From 7 May to 10 May, the working classes of India and Pakistan were held hostage by the Indian and Pakistani states. Artillery, missiles, drones and aircraft killed civilians on both sides. Who knew where it would stop? 
India began its strikes claiming it targeted only “terrorist camps” and not military assets, because it did not seek escalation. But as Pakistan downed Indian fighter aircraft and attacked air defences, India did escalate. It attacked Pakistani military infrastructure—one site just 10 kilometres from the capital Islamabad. The attacks and counterattacks threatened to turn into outright war between two nuclear-armed nations: Pakistan boasts low-yield tactical nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use as a credible threat against India’s more capable conventional forces. 
An enormous chunk of the world’s population was, for a time, held hostage by not only the generals on both sides but also the ruling politicians, their capitalist backers and the jingoistic media, all united by their lust for money and power. Then suddenly—a ceasefire. The exact role of third parties (especially the US) is still unclear. But according to Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale, consulting editor at the Indian news magazine Caravan
and a veteran of the Indian army, it seems that outside intervention presented a timely off-ramp for the two militaries. 
The ceasefire is a welcome reprieve. Reportedly, neither side was prepared for war or seeking war, and the ceasefire is likely to hold for now. But relations between the two states are qualitatively worse and the stakes considerably higher today than a month ago. 
Since the ceasefire, both states have claimed victory and as such vindication of their military positioning and strategy. Some observers are glad: both sides claiming a face-saving victory for the benefit of their domestic constituencies lowers the immediate risk of further military action and strengthens the ceasefire. But the fact that both sides feel vindicated leaves us in a more alarming and dangerous position in the long run.
For Pakistan, the ceasefire reinforces its strategy of using the threat of nuclear weapons to make India relent—if not directly, then by increasing the likelihood of intervention by the US. At the same time, Modi has declared a “new normal” in military policy. He won’t abide “nuclear blackmail”, meaning that Pakistan’s tactical nukes will not deter escalating military attacks. Moreover, the Pakistani state will be held responsible for future terrorist attacks in India (regardless of evidence). Over the past decade, India has made increasingly severe attacks on Pakistan in 2016, 2019 and now 2025, in response to attacks by Kashmiri militants on Indian armed forces or civilians. It is expected that, next time, India will escalate another step. 
That may be the new normal in India’s military policy. There also seems to be a new normal in Indian society: a higher intensity of anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan nationalism and militarism. Modi is in an unfamiliar position of having to defend the ceasefire against voices to his right. These voices argue that he should have kept going and pressed his advantage. 
Nationalism has also surged to the left of Modi. Just three days after the 22 April attack in Pahalgam that set off this latest escalation of tensions, all major opposition parties extended full support to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government to take any action against Pakistan in response. They knew full well that Modi’s response would not be a police investigation to catch the terrorists and try them in court—but some sort of military attack on Pakistan. India’s nationalist roar was green-lit across the spectrum of mainstream politics. 
At the centre of the chest beating is the disputed territory of Kashmir. For decades, the Indian-occupied portion of Kashmir has been host to one of the highest concentrations of army troops deployed against a civilian population outside war times. It is a sign of how much the Kashmiri people don’t want to be ruled by the Indian state. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, aside from military actions short of war. 
Since India’s independence from Britain in 1947, the primary antagonist in Indian-occupied Kashmir has been the Indian state. Over the decades, there have been periods of relative calm, as well as periods of armed insurgency by Kashmiris and armed occupation by the Indian state. Through it all, the Indian state has refused to hold a referendum to let Kashmiris decide whether to remain within India or to secede. 
Kashmir remained underdeveloped and suffered frequent bouts of repression by Indian armed forces shielded by special anti-terror laws that granted them impunity. This situation spurred the formation of separatist militias that undertook armed actions against the Indian army, or terror attacks on civilians. 
The most recent bout of repression began in 2019 during Modi’s second term as prime minister. Kashmir used to have a constitutionally enshrined “special status” reflecting the circumstances of its accession to India. At independence in 1947, the Hindu king of this Muslim-majority region had opted to join India and not Pakistan, without any consultation of popular opinion. Modi ended this special status in 2019, a long-desired goal of Hindu nationalists. 
To intimidate Kashmiri opposition, Modi arbitrarily placed Kashmiri politicians under house arrest and detained thousands of civilians. Curfews were imposed to stifle protest. There was a crackdown on journalists and a months-long internet and phone blackout. Laws had up until then restricted residency status in the state and the right to buy land to Kashmiris. These laws were revoked to allow increasing settlement by non-Kashmiri Hindus to change its Muslim-majority demography and distinctive culture. In the years since, Modi claimed to have subjugated Kashmir and was touting it as a peaceful tourism hot spot.
Meanwhile, Pakistani nationalists have long seen Kashmir as rightfully theirs and unfairly denied to them in 1947. The dream of integrating Kashmir into Pakistan, or the objective of helping Kashmiri Muslims against a repressive Indian state, has been a key ideological justification for the large military and intelligence budget in the poor and underdeveloped country. 
The Pakistani army and intelligence have supported Kashmiri militant groups with arms and training, and by providing safe havens in Pakistan. They have had some identifiable role in several terrorist attacks in India. This is particularly so since the 1980s, when the US under President Ronald Reagan cosied up to the dictatorship of General Zia, with his program to Islamise the state. The US found the Pakistani military invaluable in arming and training mujaheddin in Afghanistan to undermine its pro-USSR government. Pakistan’s generals are key players in the country’s politics. They made military coups and ruled directly for three long stretches in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Coups aside, politicians are often seen as becoming viable only when they secure support from influential figures in the military. 
Today, the real head of state is acknowledged to be General Asim Munir, not Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Munir is known for pushing Islamism in the army. He was among the crop of officers promoted under Zia in the 1980s. Domestic popular support for the regime of Munir and the generals is not strong. The economy is in dire shape and heavily indebted. Insurgencies in some parts of the country plague the army. There is stronger support for Imran Khan, a cricket celebrity turned conservative populist politician, than for the current rulers. Khan became prime minister in 2018, initially with the support of the military. But he came to be seen as too assertive against the military by 2023, and is now in jail. The fragile hold of the military regime makes jingoism over Kashmir more politically useful. 
The trigger for the most recent war scare was the terrorist attack in the Kashmiri town of Pahalgam on 22 April in which 26 civilians were killed—mostly Hindu tourists from outside Kashmir. India immediately blamed Pakistan, though no proof has been offered and the culprits remain at large. The Modi administration immediately launched a jingoist campaign against Pakistan and Muslims generally, amplified by the far right. 
The Modi government has suspended the Indus Water Treaty between the two countries, which controls how India could act on three rivers that flow from India to Pakistan. The river flow is vital for the livelihoods of masses of Pakistani farmers, as well as for electricity generation. Pakistan declared that India’s suspension of the treaty could be seen as an act of war. 
India has already weaponised the flow of water to minor effect, causing small-scale flooding in Pakistan in late April. But to weaponize this to major effect would take the construction of dams and reservoirs over a decade or more. Indian planners have long identified this measure to assert India’s material interests against Pakistan. As Pakistani journalist Khurram Husain argues in the Dawn newspaper, the Pahalgam attack merely offered the pretext.
India’s action over the river treaty has raised the stakes in the region generally, not just with Pakistan. Kanak Mani Dixit, Nepalese journalist and founder of Himal SouthAsian magazine, interviewed on Indian news platform the Wire, noted that there are many shared river systems between India and Nepal, China, Bangladesh. These are contentious resources given climate change, economic needs and population pressures. As regional tensions evolve over time, these resources are likely to be further weaponised. 
In Kashmir, more than 3,000 people have been arbitrarily arrested or detained since the Pahalgam attack. The government demolished the houses of Kashmiris it declared to belong to relatives of terrorists. This is a common form of collective punishment used by BJP politicians against Muslims. Prominent right-wing voices—including a former army general and a former Kashmir police chief—have called for “the Israel playbook” and to turn Kashmir into Gaza. 
Rohingya refugees (mostly Muslim) from Myanmar were rounded up in New Delhi, flown to navy ships, beaten and then dropped in the ocean with a life jacket and told to swim to Myanmar. More than 1,000 Bangladeshi residents of India (also mostly Muslim) were rounded up by police in different states, and hundreds have been forced into Bangladesh.
Kashmiri students at universities in several north Indian states have been attacked or threatened and told to leave campus. The attacks were led by the BJP’s student wing, as well as Hindutva vigilante groups (like the Hindu Raksha Dal). 
The state of Uttar Pradesh, a stronghold of the far right, has experienced the most anti-Muslim hate incidents since 22 April, according to a report by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights. Authorities there have demolished at least 20 mosques and madrasas. At least one Muslim man has been killed by a Hindu vigilante group. 
Hindutva mobs have also led attacks on Muslim-owned shops, mosques and random Kashmiris and Muslims in several other states. Social media handles with big followings among the Hindutva right wing have been full of incitement, death threats and rape threats against Kashmiris, Muslims and anti-war activists. 
An example from a state that is not a stronghold of the BJP is West Bengal, which borders Muslim-majority Bangladesh. It was once a bastion of left parties, but for the past decade and a half it has been ruled by Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress Party. Suvendu Adhikari, a BJP politician and leader of the opposition in the state assembly, has threatened that if the BJP wins state elections next year, they’ll throw out elected members of the legislative assembly who are Muslim. When the left organised anti-war protests and rallies in Bengal, they were physically attacked by a BJP mob, while the police refused to intervene. 
Banerjee once positioned herself as a secular protector of Muslims, who make up 31 percent of the state’s population. In recent years, though, she has been shoring up her Hindu credentials, doling out patronage to Hindu religious causes. She fears the BJP might consolidate the Hindu vote in Bengal and end her fiefdom. 
Indian nationalism is intense across mainstream politics. It is a bad sign for the working classes of the region. The Indian ruling class will likely seek to assert itself more in the region—economically or even militarily. There will likely be more anti-migrant hysteria against Bangladeshis. The situation for Indian Muslims and the left is becoming increasingly perilous. Secular or liberal nationalists might quibble with Modi’s Hindu chauvinism, but that is largely academic. It is Hindu nationalism above all that sets the agenda and makes facts on the ground, and unfortunately, very few are willing to stand up to it.

Sagar Sanyal

Indian nationalism intensifies over Kashmir

The Indian national elections began on 19 April. With close to 1 billion people voting across 28 states and eight territories, polling is staggered and will be completed in early June. The far-right Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP) is likely to win, giving incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi his third straight five-year term in office. 
Yet for all the talk about the country being “the world’s largest democracy”, the process is in some ways hollow and shambolic. The Modi government has used its control of the state to persecute opposition politicians. And a flood of corporate money backing Modi’s party makes the contest very one-sided.
The chief minister of Delhi, a major opposition politician, was arrested earlier in the year, hobbling his party’s campaign. Many other prominent opposition politicians have been arrested or harassed over the past couple of years on pretexts such as tax fraud or corruption. A couple dozen such politicians have switched parties to join the BJP and—to no-one’s surprise—their tax investigations went into hibernation once they jumped ship. 
The Congress party, the largest opposition party nationally, claims that its bank accounts have been frozen, disrupting election campaign spending. On the other hand, two months before the elections, the Supreme Court forced the government to disclose information about parties’ use of “electoral bonds” for financing. The BJP introduced this opaque mechanism in 2017 to allow big corporate donors to give money without public disclosure. It turns out that the BJP is getting by far the largest share of such shadow funding. 
Many of the donors turned out to be people and companies the BJP had been targeting through the tax agencies. If they coughed up enough money for BJP’s campaign coffers, the investigations magically stopped. Modi has also pushed the Electoral Commission to institute the unusually long election campaign knowing that other parties would run out of funds sooner than the BJP.
But the threat to democracy goes beyond fair elections. Since 2014, Modi has attacked the independence of the judiciary and the civil service through changes to legislation and norms of executive practice. And his party and government have harassed and arrested prominent activists and journalists in retaliation for anti-government protests or critical media reports. In fact, since Modi was first elected in 2014, many prominent critical journalists and social activists have been murdered by far-right organisations associated with but operating at arm’s length from the BJP.
What’s more, big media are pro-Modi and echo BJP talking points—operating as loyal propagandists and reflecting support for Modi among media magnates. 
The government has continually pushed anti-Muslim chauvinism. It revoked the autonomy of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir, and split it into two “union territories”, which are more closely administered by the central government. It introduced anti-Muslim laws such as the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens. Under Modi, BJP politicians and Hindu religious leaders have repeatedly been filmed inciting crowds to violence against Muslims, spreading conspiracies about them and calling for their ethnic cleansing. 
In BJP strongholds, such as the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, there has been a spate of beatings and lynchings of Muslims carried out by vigilante groups abetted by police and sometimes with their cooperation. In Gujarat, the state in which Modi’s political career was launched, Muslims are ghettoised, unable to buy property in Hindu neighbourhoods, afraid to venture out of their neighbourhoods for fear of harassment or lynching by vigilantes. 
How did India, which has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, get here? 
The story begins with the National Volunteers’ Organisation (Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sang, RSS), a fascist organisation established in 1925 with the ideology of Hindutva (literally “Hindu-ness”), a virulent form of Hindu nationalism. The RSS combined the conservatism of elite Hindu society with an attempt to imitate the ideologies and movements associated with Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolf Hitler. 
Vinayak Savarkar, the founding ideologue of Hindutva in the early 1920s, pictured India as the land of the “Hindu race”. The Hindu nation, he wrote, could lead the world, but only once it became strong again and was purged of foreign ideas and domination. In particular, the target was Muslims, who were depicted as an internal enemy that weakened the Hindu race for a thousand years. In 1939, Savarkar enthused about Hitler purging Germany of Jews and wanted Hindus to show the same race pride against Muslims. 
B.S. Moonje, an influential early figure in Hindutva, toured Italy, met Mussolini and inspected the fascist youth and militia. Keshav Hedgewar, founder of the RSS, created the group’s organisational apparatus, including the branches in which members train in martial arts and are taught the doctrines of Hindutva. They develop full-time propagandists to build the organisation. By the time Hedgewar died in 1940, there were between 500 and 1,000 branches around the country, with 100,000 members. By 1973, when the group’s second supreme leader, M.S. Golwalkar, died, the RSS had 1 million members. Today it claims 5 million. 
From the beginning, RSS activists were predominantly urban middle-class people from an upper-caste background (the caste hierarchy, which is like a hereditary class system, is a mainstay of Hindu conservatism). They were lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, shopkeepers and merchants. From the beginning, they had supporters among rich and powerful people—big business owners, big landowners, Hindu princes, army officers and judges. These establishment supporters bankrolled the organisation and ensured that the activists’ violence was tolerated by the elites. 
Their vigilantism is no secret in India. When the British Raj ended in 1947 and the territory was partitioned into India and Pakistan, the RSS carried out pogroms against Muslims. An RSS activist assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The RSS led “communal riots” in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. In India “communalism” means pitting religious or ethnic communities against one another—like Hindus against Muslims. That whole time, the fascists were tolerated by the elites and the upper middle classes and grew among them. 
Yet they mostly had very little influence in mass electoral politics. It was only in the late 1980s that they began to get a sizeable vote. 
An important factor in their burgeoning success in this field was the decline of the Congress party as an electoral force and as the dominant political vehicle of the capitalist class. Congress, led by a family dynasty for generations, dominated national elections for decades after independence, but it began losing electoral support from the late 1960s. 
Into the resulting vacuum advanced a range of smaller parties, each with a regional base. By the mid-1980s Congress was embroiled in corruption scandals and a crisis of leadership after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the head of the family dynasty. It seemed a sinking ship, and sections of the big capitalists were looking for a party whose electoral star was rising. 
Enter the BJP, which is the main political front group of the RSS. The RSS networks among business, police, judges and lawyers create a bubble of impunity for Hindutva activists in a range of local strongholds. In that bubble, Hindutva vigilante groups (at arm’s length from the RSS and the BJP) use communal campaigns to gain a voter base far larger than their activist ranks. The RSS-BJP leverage the voter base to expand their influence among the top end of society. It has been a spiral of growing influence ever since the 1990s.
Narendra Modi has been intimately involved in the whole process. A creature of the RSS, Modi has been a member since he was a child and became a full-time organiser for the group. In the mid-1980s, the RSS moved Modi into the BJP, where he was an important figure in two communalist campaigns that were pivotal in creating and hardening a Hindutva pole in mass politics. 
First was the “birthplace of Ram” campaign of the late ’80s and early ’90s, which targeted a sixteenth-century mosque that was claimed to have been built on the exact birthplace of a Hindu god. Hindutva activists destroyed the mosque in 1992 and killed hundreds of Muslims in related clashes. At the time, Modi was a behind-the-scenes campaign organiser. This year, Modi inaugurated a Ram temple on the site of the destroyed mosque. It was an enormous media spectacle that functioned as the unofficial opening act of his electoral campaign. 
Second was the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, in which Hindutva activists killed 2,000 Muslims. This time, Modi was in front of the cameras as the state’s chief minister. Both campaigns mobilised support among a large layer of Hindu society. 
The fascist activists had to demonstrate that they spoke for “the people” in some way, that they had social licence to act above the law. But they also view themselves as the political right’s vanguard, who must lead much more extreme actions than the mass of Hindu society would demand or carry out on their own. 
They are two-faced about their political role and outlook. When speaking to the hard right, they boast of killing Muslims. When engaging more moderate voters, they deny their role in atrocities, and shift responsibility to “spontaneous Hindu rage” while adding that the rage is justified given the Muslim “threat”, even if they might condemn “excesses” committed by Hindus. This doublespeak is effective because of the RSS’s influence among “respectable people”—news presenters in big media, the police, judges and lawyers. When all the respectable people echo RSS (and Modi’s) talking points about “spontaneous Hindu rage” or “the Muslims started it”, when the judges conclude that Modi as chief minister was not responsible for the Gujarat pogroms—then it must be true!
While he was chief minister from 2001 to 2014, Modi surrounded himself with a growing layer of capitalists from Gujarat and its neighbouring states in western India. They included the relatively new big shots such as Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, and old capitalist dynasties such as the Tatas and Birlas, big shots since the 1800s. Modi’s attraction was his ability to deliver for big business—to get away with things by hook or by crook—and to keep winning elections. And he greatly rewarded his corporate backers with profitable deals.
By the 2014 national elections, when Modi contended for the prime ministership, he had enough corporate backing to vastly outspend the Congress. With its huge pile of establishment funding, the hard right BJP has grown to dominate the mass media. Neither left-wing social movements nor mainstream liberal actors have been able to build an alternative political pole to rally progressives. 
That brings us back to the question of how the far right has pushed its agenda since Modi’s 2014 victory. Put simply, the small cog of fascist activists moves the bigger cog of a mass voter base to turn the allegiances of leading capitalists firmly to the BJP. Society moves in a far-right direction chosen by a minority of organised fascists and to the benefit of the capitalist class, under the ideological cover of “the Hindu majority”. 
Incidentally, its claim to speak for this “Hindu majority” is itself an electoral distortion. The BJP received 31 percent of the vote in 2014 and 37 percent in 2019. But given how these votes are geographically concentrated, the BJP nevertheless receives a large majority of seats in parliament, enabling it to rule with few coalition constraints. Regardless of these details, the political supremacy of the BJP cannot be minimised by fussing over voting percentages. 
India’s democracy and its non-Hindu populations are under threat from the Modi regime and the BJP. But the source of the threat is not simply the government. It is a mass fascist network of organisations, rooted in the RSS and deeply embedded in layers of the ruling class and upper middle classes through ties developed over decades. 
The networks, held together by a mix of ideological agreement and personal gain, exist among police, army officers, the civil service, judges, lawyers, business owners, the mass media, criminals and vigilantes. The networks are linked and cultivated by RSS activists, whose tasks are executed by Hindutva vigilante groups. 
These networks among people at the top of society must be broken and disorganised. The fascist organisations and vigilante groups of the RSS and its offspring cannot be allowed to exist. Anything short of that—like a mere electoral defeat for the BJP—will be just a temporary setback for Indian fascism.

Modi and the threat to Indian democracy

Marx played many roles in his life: activist, journalist, historian, philosopher and also an economist. The crowning achievement of his efforts in economics was the three volumes of Capital. They laid bare for the first time a coherent theory of capital—the stuff that capitalists strive to accumulate.
What Capital offers, above all, is a solid science of capital accumulation—one intended as a weapon to be wielded in the working class’s struggle for liberation. Its potential as such a weapon was recognised from the start. As Marxist historian David Riazanov recounts, after the first volume of Capital was published in 1867, a resolution passed by the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) “urged the workers of the different countries to study Capital. The resolution pointed out that to Marx belonged the honour of being ‘the first economist who subjected capital to a scientific analysis and who reduced it to its basic elements’”.
The usefulness of Capital for revolutionaries remains undiminished today. Consider two of the main tasks Marx undertook in writing the book. One was to lay out the economic system underlying capitalist society. The other was to describe the turbulent dynamics of accumulation over time. The insights Marx won in these areas continue to provide a guide to revolutionaries seeking to understand the political and economic situation they’re operating in, to assess the social forces shaping that situation and to anticipate future developments.
Capitalist society, Marx contended, must be understood as a totality—a world system, the driving force of which is competition between big businesses and corporations (capitals) and between the capitalist states in which they’re situated. Within this totality we can make sense of why different parts act as they do. Capital and the states that “serve and protect” it are thoroughly interrelated, because they both arise on the “ruling” side of the underlying class-divided structure of society.
Marx describes how this system came to be. Before the rise of capitalism, Europe was a feudal society. The state was the executive agent of the landowning class—the feudal lords, the church, the monarchy. Together they ruled over other classes, like merchants, artisans and peasant farmers. From about the fourteenth century in parts of Western Europe, different fractions of the capitalist class began to rise in wealth and power: first merchants and bankers, and then industrialists from the seventeenth century onwards.
The emergence of capitalism in this period was far from peaceful and happy. As Marx writes in volume one of Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”.
In this “rosy dawn” of violent conquest and slavery, vast piles of money accumulated in the hands of merchants. What to do with it all? They lent it to states to fund wars for territory, ports and trade routes. The power of the state—“the concentrated and organised force of society”, as Marx put it—was used “to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition”. The merchants also lent large sums to industrialists who began to out-compete the craft guilds that structured industry in feudal society, by rearranging and bringing under stricter top-down control the labour process in the factories.
States, in turn, helped their industrialists to take over markets and hobble competitors. The British industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, for instance, was tied up with textiles. British textiles faced export competition from India, which was then the leading textile-producing nation. British rule in India broke up the textile industry there to clear the path for British manufacturers. Those manufacturers in turn got their cotton from the slave-worked plantations organised by capitalists in the US south. A world economy was created by capitals and states of the great European powers. 
As industrialists began to reshape production processes from the eighteenth century, they hit upon a way to systematically turn a given sum of money into more money—all by how they treated their workers during the work week the wages they distributed paid for. A simple example to explain this: you and some rival firm have both hired a worker for a week. If you can get your worker to produce far more commodities in that time than your rival can, then you can undercut your rival’s prices on the market and, over time, take over their market share. This competitive zeal drove industrialists to increase both the length and intensity of the working week, so they could produce more commodities in the same time.
Another tool for increasing productivity was to introduce an ever greater division of labour in the production process, so that instead of one worker undertaking a number of tasks, each worker was given only one. Finally, by the first half of the nineteenth century, they competed increasingly by introducing more machinery into the process, to expand the volume of raw material being worked into finished products by each worker in a day. That brings us to the mature system of industrial capitalism, theorised by Marx and still with us today.
Marx shows, in Capital, how certain economic laws and tendencies emerge in the process of capital accumulation. These laws don’t express themselves in a direct way in the surface phenomena we can observe. Instead, there are mediating forces between the deepest currents and the surface, and we must keep the totality in view to understand specific, concrete surface phenomena. In social science, it was one of Marx’s great achievements to show how the deepest economic tendencies interacted with more mediating currents and surface dynamics to yield social reality. With that in mind, consider three interrelated laws from volumes one and three of Capital.
First, the “law of value”: that the prices of commodities reflect the value that has been embodied in them by the amount of labour time involved in producing them. This doesn’t mean that prices reflect value directly—it happens in a mediated way. There are systemic reasons why prices deviate from labour values, within bounds. Short-term changes in demand or supply can also makes prices fluctuate up or down around the price that corresponds to value.
Second, the “general law of capital accumulation”, which emerges as competition pushes production methods in an increasingly mechanised direction. This process polarises society between a small and shrinking minority of obscenely wealthy capitalists, and a large and growing majority of workers. It does this because the increasing mechanisation of production continually undercuts and displaces independent commodity producers, artisans and peasants and turns them into workers. As the scale and technological sophistication of productive processes grows, only the bigger capitalists, those able to make large up-front investments in machinery, can keep up.
This process also periodically makes sections of the working class redundant, their labour taken over by the machines. In a more rationally ordered society, this would be a good thing—enabling more leisure time for all. In capitalism it merely throws some workers on the scrap heap of unemployment, while those who remain are overworked.
In volume one of Capital Marx summarises the human face of this cold economic process thus: “Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil”.
Third, because production methods become increasingly mechanised under capitalism, there emerges a tendency for the rate of profit to fall across the whole world economy. This happens as a slow process spanning centuries. It also expresses itself in faster processes of booms and depressions every few decades. Around these recurring economic and imperialist crises workers face unemployment, ruling-class offensives to lower living standards, reactionary nationalist upsurges, and war. We have seen this play out in the past decade in the lacklustre economic recovery from the 2007-08 global financial crisis.
Why do these laws matter? Most importantly, they bolster the case for workers’ revolution. What Marx’s analysis in Capital, shows, above all, is that there is no prosperous end game for the working class—and no peaceful and sustainable future for the world—under capitalism. If it’s left to the tendencies of capital accumulation, the world capitalist class as a whole will keep getting more of the value produced by workers. It will therefore extend its power over workers: more powerful militaries, more policing, more surveillance, more propaganda and marketing, and more wasteful consumption of resources by billionaires on super-yachts, private jets and space flights.
At the same time, the destruction unleashed by the competitive dynamics of capital accumulation will grow ever greater in scale. We’ll see more, and more devastating, wars and environmental destruction, and on a human level more alienation, more crippling of bodies and minds through the daily grind of exploitation, and more violence and degradation of human relationships generally. The bigger and more powerful the system becomes, the more the majority of humanity and the planet we depend on will suffer.
Only if we smash their state and take over society’s means of production, and direct social resources for the interests of the masses, can we make a new path for humanity. Capital’s insights about the capitalist system and its accumulation dynamics continue to provide a trellis to support and orient revolutionary organisations in this task. An army of university professors and social democratic politicians have, of course, consistently tried to bury it—defanging it of its radicalism, or simply dismissing it as disproved, incomplete, outdated, reductionist, or what have you (all based on misinterpretations that have long been refuted). Yet it has proved impossible to shut out this great work from politics once and for all.
Reality keeps making Capital relevant again, both in the mainstream and among radicals. As mainstream economics commentators struggled to explain the global financial crisis of 2007-08, some of them had to start saying that maybe Marx had one or two worthwhile insights about capitalism. Layers of newly radicalised youth have turned to Capital in the wake of the Arab Spring and the rebellions since 2019. Capital remains a spectre haunting the ruling class.

What’s the use of Marx’s Capital?

Australian Services Union members at Geelong Library held a half-day stop-work on 2 July. It is the latest action in a dispute between management at Geelong Regional Library Corporation (GRLC) and library workers, who are spread over 21 different work sites, since their agreement ended a year ago.
Library workers walked off the Geelong Library site to cheers of solidarity from a crowd of community members, socialists and unionists. “This place is run like a corporation, and it shouldn’t be”, library worker and union member Beth (not their real name) told Red Flag.
Several of the striking workers show great pride in the service they provide to their community. They help put library users in touch with information, entertainment and learning resources they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. They make the library a hub for the community. “That’s what our community wants us to be. That’s what a public library should be”, explains Beth. 
There is a common feeling among staff at the stop-work that the library executive does not listen. “We tell them what we need to run our services better, to feel safe in our workplace, and they just act like they know our jobs and conditions better than we do”, says another worker. “We tell them we want car parks nearby because staff do not feel safe walking 20 minutes to their car after an evening shift. They tell us, ‘Safety is not a concern for our staff’—while they have their own car parks and leave work at 5pm!”
The fight has been building since the previous agreement lapsed in June last year. Library staff baulked at management’s initial offer of below-inflation wage rises and cuts to overtime pay. Rank and file activists began meeting regularly across the many branches to organise a campaign. Workers are demanding their pay and conditions be brought into line with other libraries, which would involve a significant pay rise and improvements to conditions.
The CEO of GRLC resigned in March, midway through negotiations for a new agreement. Staff at the stop-work speculate this was because management thought she was not sufficiently forceful against an unexpectedly combative workforce.
The workers organised the first protected action ballot that anyone can remember at GRLC, which ended in May with resounding support for industrial action. The turnout was high, and nearly 80 percent voted to take action. To test the waters, less disruptive actions were planned to kick off on 20 May, with staff wearing badges with union demands and handing out flyers to library patrons to present their claims. But at the first sniff of the proposed action, management resorted to intimidation, introducing absurdly detailed new time sheets and threatening that staff would be docked pay for every second they spent distributing leaflets.
Staff were not cowed. In fact, they received a boost in confidence from the overwhelming support they received from library users while handing out leaflets to publicise their campaign. A mood to escalate industrial action began to spread. In early June, workers resolved to use the library’s public address system to make pro-union announcements and to waive overdue fines. Management announced that anyone using the public address system would be sacked! To disrupt the fine waiver action, management shut down the entire fine payment system —which also prevented patrons from borrowing items or accessing electronic resources.
The workers’ view of management has changed over the past year as a result of the dispute. “Librarians serve the community”, said one worker at the rally. “I used to think the library itself was a community: nice, progressive, managers and staff who all get along to serve the community together. But with these negotiations, management are just being bullies. They don’t care about us, and they don’t care about providing a good service to the community. They just want to cut costs.”
Workers have indicated that if management doesn’t agree to their demands, they are prepared to take further action.

Pay rise overdue for Geelong library workers

India is witnessing one of the largest farmers’ protests in decades. More than 200,000 are camped out in trucks and trailers along all the highways leading into the national capital, New Delhi. As the farmer convoys were making their way, police blocked their route in several places with boulders, concrete road dividers, shipping containers and trenches. They attacked protesters with batons, tear gas and water cannons. The determined farmers pushed through regardless, shunting aside any barricades and overwhelming the police with sheer numbers. They were finally stopped just outside the city limits by special armed forces. 
This is no one-day demonstration. The convoys began in late November, and the encampment has now lasted seven weeks, creating transport bottlenecks in one of the most important industrial and commercial regions of the country. With makeshift kitchens, electricity generators and supplies to last months, the farmers make a credible threat that they will continue this semi-blockade of the capital until their demands are met. Eight rounds of talks with the government have failed to convince them to compromise. 
With increasing support from local community organisations, and with the continual inflow of reinforcements of farmers and solidarity contingents from non-farmer activist campaigns, the protesters’ political confidence is high. They have declared that if their demands are still unmet by 26 January, marking two months since the start of the convoys and coinciding with a national holiday that commemorates the Indian constitution, they will march into Delhi. 
The farmers demand the repeal of a set of farm acts rammed through parliament in late September by the far-right BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, or Indian People’s Party), which rules at the federal level. On 12 January, the Supreme Court provisionally suspended the farm laws and appointed a committee to look into the farmers’ grievances. As a result, there are calls for the farmers to disband their blockade. However, the farmers point out that the committee appointees are well known for their support for the farm laws. They see the Supreme Court action as a demobilising tactic ahead of the 26 January ultimatum, and they are determined to continue their protest. 
To appreciate the grievances of farmers, it is worth beginning with their situation before these acts were passed. Agriculture employs almost half of the workforce of India. According to the 2011 census (the latest available), more than half of this agricultural workforce is landless: tenant farmers or wage labourers. Of farmers who do own land, 86 percent are small (owning less than two hectares) or marginal (less than one hectare). They usually work with just ox and plough, and hand-dug irrigation canals. 
For the past three decades, small farmers have faced a dire economic situation as they struggle to match the low sales prices of the big farmers who own the most fertile land and can afford high productivity inputs like tractors, mechanised irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides. There are tens of thousands of farmer suicides annually as small farmers despair at the prospect of forfeiting their land when they find themselves unable to repay usurious loans they have taken to pay for inputs at the start of each sowing season. 
As dire as this situation was, it was prevented from being even worse by various kinds of government support. State-run agricultural produce markets and granaries maintain minimum prices for many agricultural products. These give farmers a level of certainty about the sale price for their produce when they make sowing decisions. While such measures disproportionately benefit big farmers, some benefits flow through to the rest. This regime of state regulation is to be dismantled by the new farm acts.
Writing in the Indian journal Economic &amp; Political Weekly, Pritam Singh argues that the main objective of the farm acts is to open state-regulated agriculture to big agribusiness, both foreign and domestic. In the process, the acts will economically weaken small and medium farming households to the point that they cannot make a livelihood as farmers any more. Many will be compelled to sell their farms and become wage labourers, whether remaining in the rural economy or migrating to the cities. Both rural and urban wages will likely be pushed down as a result.
However, the tensions are not simply between agribusiness and farmers. A second dynamic involves a tussle between the federal government and various states, the latest incarnation of a long-running tension between centralism and regionalism in Indian politics. This is an important element in explaining why opposition to the farm acts has spread beyond farmers’ organisations to many mainstream parties. Agricultural policy has largely been a matter for states, not for the federal government. The acts take a major step in centralising not only the policy, but also control over the tax revenue from the local agricultural produce markets that states currently control. 
Patronage is a big part of Indian politics: the doling out of spoils of office to cronies through subsidies and contracts. It would be a big blow to regional parties if they have less to dole out. While only the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress Party can claim a national presence and hope to anchor ruling coalitions nationally, there are more than a dozen regional parties with a solid voter base in their region. They are perennial contenders as the ruling party at the state legislature level. The BJP too was once a regional party like them, but is aggressively trying to consolidate its national position by pushing out any regional rivals where it can. 
The main organising vehicle behind the protests, the All India Farmers’ Struggle Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), is an umbrella body that covers hundreds of farmer unions and civil society groups. It represents various political forces—conservatives, liberals and leftists. Noting this diversity is important in assessing how the farmer protests might impact broader social currents, given that the past two years have been a time of mass politicisation, hundreds of thousands of newly engaged protesters looking for a political lead. 
The BKU (Bharatiya Kisan Union, or Indian Farmers Union) and the SSS (Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghtana, or Farmer Pride Organisation) are two prominent organisations under the umbrella. They have bases among farmers in the states of the north and west of India respectively. While their mobilising rhetoric is about farmers as a unified identity, their practice reflects class stratification among farmers. Their leaders orient to big farmers. Yet they frequently mobilise masses for demonstrations, including large numbers of marginal and small farmers.
On the one hand, these farmer organisations have a history of agitating for government- subsidised inputs and guaranteed minimum prices for outputs, and against the effects of globalisation and the entry of agribusiness into Indian agriculture. On the other hand, they oppose higher wages for farm labour, and they oppose land redistribution to landless tenant farmers or farm labourers. In the past, the SSS has joined state ruling coalitions with the BJP and other far-right parties in the state of Maharashtra. The BKU’s social basis is tied up with conservative clan/caste institutions called <a href="https://www.epw.in/journal/2012/04/specials/khap-panchayats-socio-historical-overview.html">khap panchayats</a> at the village level that maintain, in part, the subjugation of women and of Dalits (an outcaste population who are mostly landless agricultural labourers). 
Among the civil society organisations under the AIKSCC umbrella is the National Alliance of People’s Movements, whose roots trace back to protest campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s against the effects on the poor of industrial development and market liberalisation. One of its leaders, Medha Patkar, has a decades-long international reputation for her human rights activism, especially in relation to protesting the displacement of tribal and village communities by the construction of big dams in the west and centre of India. 
Another influential organisation in the AIKSCC is Swaraj Abhiyan (Campaign for self-rule), which grew out of a populist anti-corruption movement in the early 2010s in the north that generally positioned itself as “neither left nor right”. One of its two main leaders, Yogendra Yadav, is a political scientist known for his writings on trends in electoral politics in India, such as the increasing sway of regional parties as opposed to parties that have a national profile. Its other main leader, Prashant Bhushan, is a public interest lawyer, son of another famous lawyer-activist and former law minister. This gives some indication of the party’s progressive urban middle-class image and appeal. 
The AIKSCC also includes left peasant organisations of the communist tradition. Their base is generally among marginal and small farmers (and they usually have separate unions of agricultural labourers). These parties have trade union wings that helped organise the large nationwide one-day general strikes that have occurred at least once a year over the last few years against the BJP’s labour policies. The trade unions claim to have involved 200 million in the general strike of 27 November last year, which was timed to coincide with the start of the farmers’ march convoy. The demands of the general strike included the repeal of the farm acts and the repeal of the spate of anti-labour laws that the unions had already been protesting since June. 
Given their politics and economic program, the most that the farmer unions or civil society groups can do is to delay the liquidation of the small farmers. Ultimately, their liquidation is caused not by this or that law, but by capitalist pressures from big farmers that drive less competitive farmers into bankruptcy. By contrast, the left organisations at least have an agenda of land reform and anti-capitalism. 
To assess the impact of the farmer agitation, we must look beyond the single issue of the farm acts and consider their effects on a society that was already in turmoil. Since late 2019, the BJP had been on a rampage, abrogating the limited democracy that existed in Indian-occupied Kashmir, passing anti-Muslim laws, enacting severe attacks on labour rights and pushing various ideological crusades to embolden its Hindu fundamentalist base. This provoked the largest counter-protests in decades. The BJP retaliated by arresting prominent activists and intellectuals. It unleashed deadly violence on protesters and on Muslim neighbourhoods—deploying both police and RSS goons (the RSS is a non-parliamentary fascist outfit that is the parent organisation of the BJP). Many political parties caught between the far-right rampage and the protesters in the streets found themselves forced to make public statements against the BJP. 
Given this context, such a large mobilisation of farmers is a particularly welcome development. Farmers are well organised in India, more so than either Muslims or the far left. They are an important voting base for major parties that may back them—at least opportunistically, even if in another context they might be happy to side with agribusiness against farmers. The farmer protests also amplify anti-BJP sentiment among the Indian middle classes, where the BJP has its main voter base. Thus far, the BJP has not felt confident enough to start arresting leaders of the farmer protests, or to send its goons to beat up farmers, as it did with anti-government protesters last year. It may be that the popularity of the farmer agitation widens the space for dissent and protest, which had previously been shrinking.
Some parties outside the AIKSCC umbrella did not initially build the farmer protests but declared support once the protests showed themselves to be large and popular. For them, the issue is above all their electoral prospects in the north, a key part of the country where the BJP over the last few years has been trying to take over, but where these regional parties have managed to make a foothold for themselves. 
The Shiromani Akali Dal (Supreme Akali Party), a major electoral force in Punjab and currently in opposition, is a centre-right party based on Sikh identity and Punjabi regional self-assertion. It has long been an electoral ally of the BJP, and it initially supported its farm acts when protests against them commenced in Punjab. But it has backtracked and left the alliance because of the scale of the protests and out of fear of losing a section of its voting base. 
Another latecomer to the side of the farmers is the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party, or Common People’s Party), which grew out of the early 2010s anti-corruption movement mentioned above. It now has a presence in some states in the north. AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal heads the Delhi local government as its chief minister. When it first entered the scene in 2013, it campaigned on a platform of anti-corruption and more social services for the poor. In the years since, and in a dominant position in the Delhi state legislature since 2015, it has tried to shut out the BJP by making increasing gestures to Hindu religious sentiment in an opportunistic way. 
The attitude of many liberals has been somewhat two-faced: supporting the opening of agriculture to agribusiness, while also wanting to swim with the tide of support for the farmers and against the BJP. An indicative example is Montek Singh Ahluwalia, former head of the (economic) Planning Commission and a cabinet minister under the centre-right Congress Party-led federal government of 2004-14. Ahluwalia said of the farm laws that similar moves were already contemplated during his term at the Planning Commission, but that he objected to the BJP introducing them in a heavy-handed way during the pandemic.
In sum, there are a few dynamics to watch. First, the past year and a half has been a back and forth between mass protest on one side, and on the other a project of ruling-class interests backed by state repression. The farmer protests have tilted the scales back in favour of protest. However, given the variety of political tendencies in the farmer alliance, it remains to be seen whether left or centre tendencies will benefit the most. This has implications for the longer term prospects of fighting the BJP’s far-right agenda beyond the farmer laws. Given the rush of opportunistic parties joining the popular campaign, it is also indeterminate whether momentum will remain with mass campaigns or will be coopted into the dead end of electoralism. 
Second, there is the extent to which the BJP retains the confidence of the Indian capitalist class. In recent years, the BJP has become the favoured party of Indian capital, and it continues to court capital with its attacks on labour. However, if it fails to make the laws stick and provokes too much mass protest, sections of the capitalist class may declare the BJP incompetent and turn to equally pro-business parties that have a softer and more diplomatic approach to pushing the corporate agenda. 
Third, there is the issue of whether the BJP’s electoral supremacy will be consolidated or weakened. After the mid-2019 national elections, commentators declared a new era of BJP hegemony, it having opened up a clear lead over the centre-right Congress Party, which is the only other party capable of anchoring national ruling coalitions. Yet now, mired in protest and losing allies, and facing a resurgence of regional parties in state elections where the BJP had expected to extend its support, its prospects seem less certain. 
However, the danger is that any electoral setbacks for the BJP will at most be temporary unless underlying social problems are addressed. Many commentators expect India’s social crisis to deepen in the next year or two. Many regional parties see an opportunity to eat into the BJP’s voter base while it is on the ropes. Yet that competition between smaller parties may prove self-defeating. They may split the non-BJP vote, or enter lowest common denominator “anybody but the BJP” coalitions that fail to present any real economic alternative to the BJP’s policies. 
Meanwhile, the ideologically committed portion of the BJP’s voter base, cohered around Hindu chauvinism and jingoism, may be sizeable enough to earn it a plurality of votes and leave it in a position to anchor ruling coalitions. Some of the parties that opportunistically broke with the BJP in the past year can just as easily return to the alliance if they see something to gain by it. And the longer a social crisis continues, the more likely the BJP will be to pull the capitalist class back to itself given its clear corporate agenda and demonstrated commitment to use force to quash protest.

India's farmer protests: what you need to know

Understanding India under Narendra Modi

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from a purely natural occurrence. Respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) that exist in populations of birds and various mammals such as pigs, horses, cows and humans, are nothing new. But the circulation of these viruses between species, and the frequency of viruses spreading from animals to humans, has increased in recent decades, and changes in the relationship between human society and nature have been the main driver of this.
The origin of COVID-19 and the vector for its spread to humans are still under investigation by scientists. The closest variant of the virus has been identified in bats, and it’s possible it was transmitted to humans through wild meat or bush meat markets, perhaps via pangolins. Whatever the exact origin and vector, however, the jump from animals to humans fits a familiar pattern, one long understood by epidemiologists. 
The destruction of nature by capitalist industry plays a big part. As forests and other areas untouched by human development are destroyed, wild species like bats are forced out to forage for food in urban centres. Those wild species carry diseases that previously remained confined to forests and only rarely infected humans – never enough to cause an epidemic. But now this migrating wildlife comes into more frequent contact with large human populations. Sneezes and droppings from wild animals spread the virus to other animals that humans handle more often – like pigs, chickens or, as with the MERS outbreak in the Middle East a decade ago, camels. 
Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, is among the writers who for years have warned of the increasing likelihood of such epidemics. On COVID-19 specifically, Wallace and his collaborators emphasise how the wild meat sector fits into the broader context of industrial food production. “How did the exotic food sector arrive”, he asks, “at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan? The animals were not being sold off the back of a truck or in an alleyway”.
Increasingly, according to Wallace, wild food is being integrated into the mainstream of the capitalist food market. “The overlapping economic geography”, he writes, “extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness. As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid the last stands”.
Right wing news outlets more interested in racist scapegoating than in facts made a big deal of the wild meat issue, as if the world would have been spared the virus if only Chinese consumers had stuck to eating chicken or pork. But that is a false narrative. Since the 1990s, several deadly strains of bird flu and swine flu have developed and spread from industrial farms of chickens or pigs, including in North America and Europe, as well as in China. 
It has long been understood why these places breed disease. The animals are crowded into feedlots under conditions that run down their immune systems. The genetic monoculture of these populations takes away the natural diversity that reduces the prevalence of diseases. As farmers try to minimise time from birth to slaughter, this has the perverse consequence of acting as a natural selection pressure for pathogens that can survive more robust immune systems. All these things mean diseases can spread very fast within industrial herds and flocks. The cost cutting imperative means that work conditions (like protective equipment) are so poor that farm labourers are highly vulnerable to catching viruses from these animals. 
The danger to humanity from such practices was reinforced in June, when scientists discovered a number of new strains of swine flu with pandemic potential circulating among pigs on farms in China. Although the strains, collectively referred to as G4 viruses, don’t appear currently to be able to spread between humans, around 10 percent of blood samples taken from farm labourers showed evidence of prior infection. All it would take is a small mutation and one or other of these viruses could start jumping from human to human and spread rapidly through the broader population, just as has occurred with SARS-CoV-2.
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Marx and Engels’ groundbreaking work on the relationship between human society and nature in the context of the emergence of capitalism as a global system in the 19th century can help us understand the destructive dynamics underlying these developments. Central to their work in this area was the idea of the “metabolic rift”. All living things have a metabolic relation with their ecological surroundings, taking in certain things and putting out waste. When it comes to humans, Marx and Engels noted that our metabolism with the rest of nature is not due to our biology alone, but also to the kind of society we’ve built. To understand human metabolism with nature, we thus need social science in addition to natural science. 
The metabolic rift has both historical and theoretical aspects. On the historical side is the displacement of peasants and peasant farming methods from the countryside, and their corralling into towns to create the modern working class. Workers, unlike the peasantry, had no means of livelihood of their own, and therefore had to move around to find waged work, crowding into the cities where that work was concentrated. One consequence of this was that, instead of being reabsorbed back into the local environment, human waste now collected in vast pools in the cities.
This process was the main driver of the soil fertility crisis that struck Europe in the late 19th century. By displacing the peasantry, and forcing more and more people into the cities, capitalism, Marx wrote, “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”.
What about the theoretical aspect? The rift isn’t just about the natural effects they observed, but also their social cause. It is a rift in social relations: the forcible conversion of a peasantry into the modern working class. 
Peasants farmed a plot of land to which they had customary right over generations. They controlled their own labour process, and this meant there was a feedback mechanism between their labour and its effects on the land. If they depleted the soil and thus threatened their livelihood, they could adjust their methods of work accordingly. Peasant farmers had, over many generations, developed practices to maintain soil fertility through crop rotation, cycling between crops and pasture to ensure manuring, and returning human excrement to the fields. Peasant methods of labour were the main factor in the metabolism between feudal society and the rest of nature. Feudal lords would leave peasants to farm as they wished, then take a portion of the produce. 
By contrast, the capitalist mode of production involves the capitalist dictating the labour process, and then just hiring labourers to do what they are told. As capitalist farmers emerged, they realised more money was to be made by cutting out the aspects of peasant farming practices that had no immediate pay-off (even though they maintained soil fertility) and focussing just on the highest earning aspects. 
Around the same time the first factories were being established in towns, and the emerging capitalist class and the state that served them realised that wages could be forced down if large masses of former peasants were concentrated in a handful of industrial areas rather than scattered across a large number of small population centres. During the 18th and 19th centuries, vast numbers of peasants were driven from the land by a combination of brute force and legal changes (such as the Enclosure Acts). Out of this uprooted peasantry, the modern working class was born.
A new dynamic began to shape social metabolism with nature. Unlike the peasants who worked the land directly, capitalist farmers and the new captains of industry were far removed from the destructive consequences of their activities. So long as they had workers prepared to exchange their labour for a wage (and the desperate poverty in which most people lived ensured that there was no shortage), they could turn a profit, even if their actions were detrimental to the natural world on which their business ultimately depended. If they destroyed the land, they could use the profits they had made to buy more land elsewhere. More often, however, the destructive consequences of their activities were simply externalised – the poisoning of the air and water in factory districts, which had a major impact on the lives of workers in this period, provides a clear example.
From this point on, what was produced in society and through which methods was determined by the profit motive and competition among rival capitalists and nation-states. The impact of production on the natural world became, at best, an afterthought. A new dynamic was driving society’s metabolism with nature – one that would create environmental disasters on an ever widening scale.
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Scientists who study the origins of diseases have been telling us for decades that we will continue to have outbreaks of novel viruses that hop from other animals to humans because of how we farm animals and how we destroy wilderness. This advice is ignored, just as the advice of climate scientists is ignored, because acting on it would require breaking from the profit-driven logic of capitalism.
Where it’s a choice between booking short-term profits and taking a hit to profit to address potentially destructive consequences in the longer term, capitalists will always put profit first. They, after all, can escape the consequences of their actions. They spend their days in air conditioned offices, unlike the farm labourers who spend their days surrounded by hundreds of pigs riddled with swine flu. In a pandemic, capitalists can hide away in their country mansions and, in the event that they fall ill, can pay for the very best of medical care.
For workers it’s a different story. We’re the ones on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, not through our own free choice, but through economic necessity. For the vast majority of workers around the world, stopping work isn’t an option. We must work to survive, even if in doing so we are actually putting our lives at risk. This suits the capitalists very nicely. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a moment when the world economy was already struggling. The ruling class, whether in Australia, the US or any other country, is desperate to limit the economic damage from the crisis, even if that means many more people will die.
If workers ran the world, it would be very different. It would make no sense for us to ignore the warnings of scientists about how industrial agriculture and environmental destruction are fuelling the emergence of new diseases, for the simple reason that we’re the ones who will suffer when they appear. We don’t have a stake in the relentless scramble for short-term profit that defines capitalism today. We can organise production – both what we produce and how we produce – with human health and environmental sustainability in mind. 
In the current pandemic, that might mean shutting down all but the most essential parts of the economy to slow the spread of the virus, while ensuring other workers are paid to stay home. In the longer term, it would mean reshaping animal agriculture to limit the potential for it to function as a petri dish for the emergence of deadly diseases.
This is how Marx envisaged the metabolic rift being healed. “Freedom in this field”, he wrote in volume 3 of Capital, “can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature”.
Such freedom will never exist under a capitalist system in which the drive to profit rules. The first step in fixing the metabolic rift is to make our labour our own again. That means taking it back from the ruling class.

COVID-19, Marxism, and the metabolic rift

Countrywide rallies opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens drew tens of thousands around India on Thursday 19 December, capping a week of the most militant and widespread national protests seen in many years. Enacted a week ago, the CAA is the latest anti-Muslim measure passed by the far right government of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Protests in dozens of cities have been variously repressed over the week. The 19 December protests were a response to this week of police violence, and as a show of force that the left will not take lying down the Modi government’s escalation of repression and its persecution of Muslims. 
At least 17 protesters have been killed by police, all in states headed by a BJP chief minister. Over the week, police attacked protesters with batons, water cannons, tear gas and, occasionally, live ammunition and stun grenades. Hundreds have been detained or arrested. Police raided libraries and residential halls of universities to beat up and sexually assault students, who have been central to protests in some cities. In parts of the country, the government has cut off internet access to reduce press coverage of the level of repression, generalising the precedent it set with Kashmir’s continuing internet blockade. In some cities, the state cut mobile phone services for periods to hinder protest organisation. Videos circulate on social media showing uniformed police officers apparently dousing buses in petrol in agent provocateur actions. In West Bengal, BJP-affiliated activists have been caught stoking communalist hatred and a right wing narrative of “crazed Muslim rioters” by dressing up in typically Muslim attire to throw stones at trains. 
The BJP government won the May 2019 elections and is now in its second consecutive term in national office. In the months since, it has set the tone for its term, escalating the nationalist and repressive force against Muslim-majority Kashmir, dismissing its elected leaders and entrenching rule from the centre. It sent thousands of extra troops into the heaviest military occupation in the world, repressed protests and imposed an internet blackout to block news reporting and political organising. It fanned anti-migrant and anti-Muslim flames in connection with the National Register of Citizens in Assam, one of the north-eastern border states that has been a continual target of Indian nationalism. Many Muslims already lived in a state of political terror under the preceding BJP term in office, as lynchings and beatings of Muslims by far right Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) activists became increasingly prevalent in parts of the country. That terror has been ratcheted up. 
The party of the centre, the Congress, was once the leading party of the Indian ruling class. The party of Nehru, Gandhi and the independence movement ruled for 55 of the last 72 years. Today, it is in no position to reassert the political centre against the Hindutva far right. The Congress is outgunned by the BJP in all the areas it once dominated. The Congress stitched together an Indian nationalism out of linguistically and ethnically very different states in the federation. Aiming to become a powerful nation in the world, it imposed a centralised developmental project by subordinating the many regional ruling classes and parties through patronage networks and electoral alliances. The nationalist ideology it cemented was always much more Hindu in its colouring than secular or multi-religious. It created and fostered the nationalist repression of Kashmir and the north-eastern states. It repeatedly fomented communalist tensions and violence for political gain. Introducing economic liberalisation and neoliberalism in the early 1990s, Congress often resorted to repression and jingoism to deal with people resisting the resulting land grabs and destruction of livelihoods. 
In the 2014 and 2019 elections, the BJP displaced the Congress as the dominant party brokering patronage relations and electoral alliances in most of the country. It is now the favoured party of the Indian ruling class. In the most transparent sense, this is illustrated in its campaign coffers, which receive more than 70 percent of the combined income of the top political parties. But it has also integrated under its hegemony various parts of the establishment: whether in business, in the state bureaucracy, the courts, the police, the military or the media. Last month, the Supreme Court sided with the BJP in a politically and symbolically very loaded case about the destruction of Babri Mosque by Hindutva cadres in 1992. 
Beyond the support of a large part of the industrial and landowning ruling classes of the country, the BJP has an activist and electoral base in upwardly mobile parts of the middle classes, such as small business owners and farmers in sectors that benefited from the BJP’s anti-labour policies, and those who have made a living off the patronage gravy train that the party brokers with the big money in each region. It also has a large voting base among poor petty producers, traders and farmers who by and large continue to flounder in poverty. Even though their economic situation worsened under the 2014-19 government, the BJP retained the allegiance of many through its well-funded media campaign about “making India great” through economic development. It also employed the cynical strategy of turning one oppressed caste against another (even though the BJP has always been an upper caste party), blaming Muslims and immigrants for economic problems and created patronage relations with the better off leaders of oppressed castes who corral the rest to vote for the BJP. 
The BJP is not simply a more pernicious and extreme version of the Hindu nationalism and communalism of the Congress. It is qualitatively different in that it is part of a large “family” (Sangh Parivar) of non-parliamentary political and cultural organisations with many millions of members, including martial or vigilante groups such as the Bajrang Dal. These groups contain ideologically hardened cadre. The centre of the family is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), formed as a “blood and soil” Hindu supremacist organisation in the 1920s and inspired by Mussolini’s and Hitler’s parties in Europe. 
So far, the wave of anti-government protest has been repressed largely by the police, though on some campuses they have been aided by activists from the student wing of the Sangh Parivar. In some places, police reportedly have been yelling “Jai Shri Ram!” (“Hail lord Rama” – a religious chant co-opted as a political slogan of Hindutva) as they beat students. There is concern that the vigilante cadres of the RSS may be deployed for pogroms as they occasionally have been in the BJP’s rise to power. A BJP minister in Karnataka warned protesters not to test the patience of the Hindutva right, lest there be another Godhra – referring to a pogrom in Gujrat in which Hindutva mobs killed about 2,000 Muslims under the rule of then chief minister Modi. The widely acknowledged influence of the Sangh Parivar within the police means that such mobs are unlikely to be stopped by the authorities. 
The political situation is tense in India, and unlikely to ease during Modi’s term. The far right is on the offensive – but the current wave of protests promises that it will not all be smooth sailing for them.

Resisting the Modi juggernaut

The global financial crash of 2008 and the period since have created puzzle after puzzle for the mainstream economics that dominates the thinking of central banks and government departments, and the syllabus of university courses. Yet there has been no re-evaluation of the underlying assumptions on which economics is based. It is the great secular theology of our age: a mystical apologetics for capitalism, which says that a market economy is the most efficient way of allocating resources across society. 
The theoretical core of modern economics was established in the 1870s and 1880s. It outlined a system tending toward equilibrium, matching demand and supply, creating full employment, delivering efficiency and mutual advantage from market exchange and trade. Mainstream economics acknowledges many observed ills of capitalism, but says that these are not due to the system per se, but to imperfections that stop it working as it should. 
Across the spectrum of mainstream economics – from right wing laissez-faire advocates to comparatively left wing advocates of state intervention to stimulate and regulate the economy – there is a belief that market failures or imperfections can be fixed by the whizzes at the central banks and treasuries. 
There is also a broad consensus about addressing other market ills, such as the manic exuberance or panic of financial investors. The mainstream view is that we can regulate and mitigate economic bubbles, but cannot eliminate them. Just as Christian theologians explained the existence of evil in a world made by God by blaming the free will of fallen humans, mainstream economists don’t blame the godly processes of capitalism, but the choices of irrational agents. 
For example, Alan Greenspan, long time chair of the Federal Reserve, the United States’ central bank, said in 2002 that mortgage fund derivatives had made the financial system more stable by diversifying risk. As it turned out, derivatives were the devices through which the crisis was spread. In 2008, he confessed his shock and disbelief to Congress. He had been blindsided in his understanding of the economy. 
Prominent voices in the mainstream have acknowledged that the financial system is inherently prone to instabilities. But in their search for an explanation of these instabilities they have remained within the boundaries of the mainstream lexicon. Their focus is not on the nature of credit markets, but on the psychology of investors – their greed and irrationality, their tendency to follow as a herd and overinvest in bubbles, then get spooked and pop the bubbles. 
Lawrence Summers, secretary of the US Treasury in the 1990s, has pushed such views in recent years. He connects this to the field of “behavioural economics”, which points out all the ways observed human behaviour diverges from the model behaviour of economically rational agents. But he leaves intact the underlying theological defence of capitalism, understood through an idealised vision of rational agents and perfect competition. 
It’s not just on the role of individuals that mainstream economists have faltered, but on the relationship between the state and the market. A decade ago, the apostles of small government and minimal intervention in the market carried out the biggest bouts of public borrowing and state spending in history to bail out the banks and stimulate the economy. The recession ended in important parts of the world in 2010-11, but growth since then has been slow. 
Keynesians such as Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner and columnist for the New York Times, have attributed the persistently slow growth to austerity policies. He offers instead deficit-funded public investment to stimulate the economy and create jobs. Another Keynesian, Oxford economist Baron Skidelsky, believes the problem is the financial sector’s control over investment. Banks prefer to hold onto their money instead of investing it in enterprises at inconvenient moments. Better to have a portion of social investment controlled by the state to invest when the private sector won’t. That would revive the private sector’s confidence and induce it to invest. 
But state investment to restore private sector “confidence” is not enough to return the world economy to brisk and self-sustaining growth. For that, profitability must be restored. 
Because of competitive pressures, overcapacity has built up in many industries globally – a glut of factories and industrial hubs. The cause of the persistent slow growth is not too few products or too little buying power in the hands of workers (which Keynesian stimulus might address), but too much productive capacity relative to what can profitably be produced and sold.
This glut has two effects. One, existing enterprises will not make the profit they had anticipated. Many will go bankrupt because they are running on loans they expected to repay out of their profits. Two, no matter how much confidence is restored, capitalists will not invest if there is already overproduction. 
The easy credit doled out by states and banks has either been hoarded as idle money or has fed new bubbles in real estate and the share market. This happens periodically in capitalism. But because mainstream economics expects demand to match supply, prolonged and system-wide overcapacity is not even on their theoretical radar. 
In contrast to mainstream theories, Marxists argue that periodic depressions and bubbles are produced by profit-seeking competition itself – by the very motor of capitalism – and can be overcome only by abolishing the system and replacing it with a different one. It is understandable then, why the economic theologians insist that wherever the fault lies, it cannot lie with the core of the capitalist system.

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