Alternatives International Journal

The Erosion and Possible Demise of Bourgeois Liberal Democracy

Vinod Mubayi — 2026-10-01T17:15:00Z

At the heart of bourgeois liberal democracy there lay a contradiction. In the political sphere, bourgeois democracy promised equality via the familiar slogan One Man/Woman One Vote. In the economic context, however, the capitalist system, under which all bourgeois democracies so far have existed, presages inequality. The societal tensions inherent in this contradiction, historically, have been manageable as long as the gap created by economic inequality remained within socially acceptable limits. Under global neoliberal capitalism, economic inequality has soared to such heights that its social impact now threatens the demise of democratic functioning itself.

This is being experienced and acknowledged on an almost daily basis in the country that regards itself as the world's oldest democracy, the United States of America. On its 250th anniversary this year, any celebrations of this milestone are muted while apprehensions of its future survival are rife in the media and in society more generally. Too much should not be made, of course, of the US self-image as a land of pristine democracy and a bastion of freedom. Despite the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, the US at its inception was, as a leading liberal writer, Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, recently put it: “a liberal democracy founded on slave labor.” To which one may add, founded also on a genocide of the native American population. Thus, tyranny over various sections of the population, like the slaves and former slaves after the Civil War along with native Americans, continued to co-exist with liberal democracy for a large part of US history; after all, it was not until the mid-1960s when laws like the Voting Rights Act were passed that the black minority achieved equality at the voting booth.

The survival of such laws, much less their widespread implementation, is uncertain in the current dispensation as the Executive with its MAGA followers reverts to white supremacy, the federal legislature under a Republican majority remains not only dysfunctional but a doormat of the Executive and the conservative Supreme Court harks back to the worst features of the era of the Dred Scott ruling.

The election of a person with distinct fascist impulses like Donald Trump to the Presidency and the actions he has taken both at home and abroad in his close to two years in office certainly contribute to the sense of uneasiness about continued democratic survival but Trump's ascent is as much, if not more, a symptom of the problem rather than its sole cause.

Certainly, the rush of events in the past few years that feature an overturning of the usual practices and guardrails of bourgeois democratic functioning has become too obvious to be passed over despite the attempts of the mainstream media to ignore the elephant in the room. The familiar institutional set up of the executive, legislature and judiciary that was supposed to provide the checks and balances characteristic of bourgeois democracy has been eroded to such a degree that it has been almost rendered dysfunctional.

Consider, for example, the fact that Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury in a New York State court on May 30, 2024 on 34 counts of falsifying business records. A month later, the US Supreme Court, three of whose justices were appointed by Trump in his first term, rendered its decision on presidential immunity that gave Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court's decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” After Trump won the 2024 election, he has been emboldened to behave as one.

Trump's stupid and buffoonish remarks that he posts almost daily on social media should not blind us to the plans being prepared under his administration that could eventually pave the way for fascism to emerge in the US. Veteran reporter Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, is one of the very few current or former mainstream media personalities who provide critical, informed and honest commentary on political and social issues. The Chris Hedges Report of August 31 deals with the Trump administration's plans to subvert the November 2026 elections, where the Republican party is widely expected to lose at least one chamber of Congress, most likely the House of Representatives. In an excerpt from his report worth quoting at length, Hedges states:

“The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections…If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections. The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration's demands for voter data. Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican. Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records. Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting. The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition. Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices. Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters ‘when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.'”

According to Hedges: “Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.”

Whether the doomsday scenario sketched by Hedges comes to pass or not, a number of leading, not necessarily radical, economists have pointed to extreme economic inequality where a handful of billionaires have not only accumulated extreme wealth but excessive political power as a prime cause of the problem. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in a recent YouTube video said bluntly that “10 US billionaires own the US government, the news media and the social media. They have already destroyed democracy,..”

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman's substack post of August 30 describes “the rise of American oligarchy, which I define as the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small number of people — not the 1 percent, but the .01 percent or even the .0001 percent, the 300 billionaires who made 19 percent of all reported federal political donations in the 2024 election.” Some of this inequality has been driven by technological and capitalist market forces that have resulted in a small number of extremely profitable “Silicon Valley” companies whose owners command incredible amounts of wealth. But much of it, according to Krugman, “has been driven by deliberate policy rather than technological or market forces. And that deliberate policy has been the decades-long dismantling of the system of progressive taxation — a system that had ended the Gilded Age, the last period of great inequality.”

Trump's Big Beautiful Tax Cut enacted last year added considerably to the pockets of the “malefactors of great wealth,” to quote former President Teddy Roosevelt, while eviscerating Medicaid and other social programs further to the great detriment of the poorer sections of the population.

One may add that politicians belonging to both major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, have been complicit in this policy facilitated by the US Supreme Court judgment that removed limits on financial contributions to politicians and equated monetary ‘gifts' to the exercise of free speech under the First Amendment. It is only relatively recently that political figures on the democratic left like Bernie Sanders have begun to campaign against oligarchy and call for higher taxes but their numbers are still too few to make a noticeable difference.

Another notable statistic on the staggering extent of wealth inequality comes from a YouTube video on August 30 of Prof. Richard Wolff who quoted Oxfam data that showed 62 wealthy individuals worldwide, most of whom, though not all, are American, control more wealth than 3.6 billion people, approximately the bottom 50% of the entire world population. Prof. Wolff indicates that he can't think of a word strong enough to describe this shocking and obscene figure; a fraction of that wealth could transform the lives of the world's poorest and most vulnerable who suffer from lack of food, clean water, shelter and health care. But that is clearly not going to happen in our liberal capitalist democratic system that only serves to funnel wealth and resources upward not downward, in what economists call K-shaped growth.

One major aspect of the autocracy that we are hurtling towards is the criminal neglect by the administration of global warming and climate change, an issue that poses an existential long-term threat to humanity's survival. The US is widely acknowledged to be the world's largest historical contributor to fossil fuel emissions, global warming and climate change while Trump and his cohort is not only in deep denial of the basic science it is actually encouraging fossil fuel production that will accelerate the problem. Meanwhile, the deleterious impacts are already being felt in the high Himalaya mountains as witnessed by the ongoing disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border. Are the uber-elite bothered by any of this? Elon Musk boasts (or jokes) about settling Mars or making other extra-planetary excursions if the Earth becomes uninhabitable while his fellow elites embark on building immense numbers of data centers powered by natural gas that will surely increase carbon emissions.

The reaction of the uber-wealthy who now increasingly control our political system and certainly constitute the bulwark of the Trump presidency is typified by the Silicon Valley capitalist Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the surveillance technology company, Palantir, and one time mentor of Elon Musk, reputed to be the world's richest individual. In a manifesto published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible…Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women…have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron.”

So, there we have it, from the horse's mouth itself as it were, of the de-linking of the economic system, capitalism, from liberal democracy. Freedom will only exist for the uber-rich while one-person one-vote electoral democracy will either become a remnant of the past or continue in some restricted version.

A century ago, the great radical Rosa Luxembourg, contemplating the destruction and misery of the First World War, memorably remarked that humanity had a choice: either Socialism or Barbarism.

That choice confronts us even more urgently today as the end-point of the capitalist economic system threatens to extinguish not only the freedom but the very existence of over 99% of the world's people.

Photo Caption: Hands Off! protest, Minnesota State Capitol, April 5, 2025
Photo credit

We'll Take Those Odds: The Left and the Polarization of Options

Benjamin Y. Fong and Sam Gindin — 2026-09-30T15:40:00Z

Sam Gindin is one of the most exacting and capacious thinkers on the socialist Left today. With decades of experience in the labour movement as research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (which merged in 2013 with the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union to form Unifor, today the largest private sector union in Canada), his political orientation is grounded in the reality of the contemporary state of organized labour. His perspective is also informed by a careful study of the current political-economic conjuncture, evident most notably in his important work with Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism. We talk below of the contemporary crisis of capitalism, of the privileged position of organized labour among social movements, and finally, of the importance of the project of organizing Amazon today.

Benjamin Y. Fong (BF): How do you understand the contemporary crisis of capitalism? And what do you mean when you say you oppose "crisis mongering as politics"?

Sam Gindin (SG): There is a crisis today of the legitimacy of political institutions, and a crisis for working families, but not a crisis of American economic decline. People are suffering and insecure, but the US economy is growing, the share of profits is at record levels, overall investment is growing, albeit unevenly, and technology and productivity are advancing. There are conflicts with China, but China has neither the interest nor capacity to take over America's international role. People are frustrated and angry over what the successes of capitalism have wrought but unable to convert the political delegitimation of the US into a crisis of capitalism. So, it's not a crisis of capitalism but really a crisis of the labour movement and the Left.

Crisis mongering subordinates serious economic and political analysis to exaggerated warnings of imminent collapse. The hope is that this will spur people into action. It looks to decline to do the heavy lifting for us. This betrays the actual challenges we face and the need for the kind of deep and long-term organizing we actually need. It also fails even as a populist mobilizing tactic; it could just as easily make people feel like, "Well, what's the point? The world's going to come to an end soon." In the end, it undermines the credibility of the Left in repeatedly presenting overblown declarations that don't come to pass.

BF: The Left today is very electorally focused, and from one angle, that's a direct way of intervening in this crisis of legitimacy. But from another, you could see this electoralism without first rebuilding the base as a kind of quick fix too.

SG: Absolutely. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani deserve credit for affecting political discourse, generating enthusiasm among young people, and moving them from protest to politics. But there is a limit to even "left-ish" politics if there is no solid base on the ground. And while social democratic politics can have some impact on that base, the electoral arena is not conducive to building its depth. Elections look for numbers, not the quality of understanding and commitment. They tend to be about quick door-step exchanges, not the genuine conversations that organizing entails. They also tend to cater to where the polls tell us people are (generally some middle ground) and not to what it might take to change people. It's the building of a genuine base for social transformation that ultimately makes elections relevant; elections by themselves don't build the base.

Socialism will come from many streams and whatever helps is welcome. But what's needed is not just adding up various movements, or making social democrats "better." We need an appreciation of how profound transforming capitalism is, and we also need an organized orientation to building the kind of social force that can eventually replace it. This is especially so because of a polarization of options today. Decades of capitalist restructuring of workplaces, industries, and communities; of globalization, financialization, and neoliberalism - all alongside the stagnation of labour and the Left - have negated middle-of-the-road responses. Capital and the state have made significant reforms near impossible ("There Is No Alternative"), and in this context, radical politics tends to be the only practical politics.

BF: André Gorz once said that the success or failure of a wide variety of progressive causes, from gender equality to immigrant rights, will largely depend on that of the trade union movement. Why does organized labour hold a privileged position here?

SG: About a dozen years before he said this, Gorz's book, Farewell to the Working Class, seemed to write off the radical potential of workers. What you're referencing is his later, changed view in which he came to realize that most movements simply can't - unlike labour - sustain themselves over time. For all the weakness of the American labour movement in the US, it still has some $35-billion in assets and 14 million unionized members. Most movements don't have those kinds of resources, and they regularly look to unions for financial assistance.

In saying this, we should not separate unions from movements that address social needs. Workers obviously have lives outside the workplace and care very much about universal healthcare, affordable shelter, adequate transportation, the environment their kids face, etc. What working-class organizations offer is not just financial resources. They also play a role in uniting the interests of workers as workers and in organizing working people as part of society more broadly.

BF: Many would characterize the key issue here as one of restoring labour's militancy. Is that the key problem?

SG: In the absence of resistance/militancy, the conditions of workers can't be advanced. So yes, restoring militancy is fundamental. But it's not enough to have militancy, and this was graphically demonstrated in the sixties. When the post-war boom ended, workers stubbornly resisted lowering their monetary expectations and the unilateral authority of managers. This blocked the restoration of the status quo at their expense and was a factor in the downturn of profits and the rise of inflation, both of which threatened the status of the US dollar.

The labour movement hung on for nearly a decade after that, but without going beyond workplace-by-workplace militancy to broader politicization along class lines, including demanding the democratization of investment decisions and guaranteed full employment, labour's ultimate defeat was preordained. The eventual response from the state was an engineered recession (near-20% interest rates) that weakened and exhausted the unions. Neoliberalism arrived. Capital's crisis was solved by way of a greater and more long-lasting crisis for the working class. The message of the sixties is, therefore, that workplace militancy is essential but not enough.

BF: You also emphasize the importance of socialist organization outside of unions.

SG: Absolutely. The kind of politicization I raised above is unlikely without the role of organized socialists with one foot in the workplace and unions and one outside. Unions are particularist organizations, not class organizations: they represent a particular group of workers that happen to be working together. The role of organized socialists is to overcome the fragmentation of workers across workplace, unions, economic sectors, and communities. It's also to overcome the separation of individual workers from other dimensions of their lives.

This is all the more important today. In the fifties and sixties, unionized workers in auto and steel could win a great deal on their own, but that period is largely over. Given capital's increased power since then, workers can't win without thinking in larger terms, i.e., in terms of class as a whole. That means making connections across workplaces, sectors, and communities. Unions are limited in doing this, and that's where socialist organizations come in. Building the class into a coherent social force is (or should be) their prime focus.

I'm not making an ideological point. It's a practical issue to be clear about who your enemy is. Employers are the face of the enemy, but they are not the enemy. What constrains improvement in working conditions is the threat of competition. Employers defend the pressure they put on workers with the claim that competition forces them to do so to survive. Moreover, competition is asymmetrical. As stronger capitalists devour weaker ones, capital becomes stronger as a class. However, for workers, competition undermines their primary strength - solidarity - and so weakens them.

It's important to raise these points in educational meetings organized by or outside the union. Some people think of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] as the place to do this. But DSA is also really fractured.

BF: It could be that the very fragmentation of DSA is a kind of virtue right now. I don't think it'll ever be the party organization that some people hope it will be, but it's a place to meet people.

SG: I think that's true. There seem to be distinct groups which are, in essence, mini-parties - each has their own analysis, do their own education, take specific positions. Under the banner of DSA, they meet, discuss, and debate strategy. That's important because premature mergers, even among socialists, can paper over differences, and then the organization disintegrates.

But from afar, I don't know how sharp the debates are. Sometimes, in the name of unity, the more difficult debates are avoided, but such debates are important for mutual development. It does seem that certain crucial issues, like how to relate to the Democratic Party and at what scale (local/municipal, state, national) electoral contestation should take place, are coming to a head. Splits are likely necessary, but they can be very destructive. It's worth, in this context, to examine how Syriza [Greece] and Momentum [Britain] went from glory to obliteration, but there's been too little of such investigations on the Left.

The Amazon Project

BF: You've said that unions need a "virtual crusade" to make a dramatic leap forward. Why is that the case, and is the struggle to organize Amazon that crusade?

SG: In the 1930s, the CIO sparked a breakthrough in industrial unionism. John Lewis of the Mineworkers grasped that if steel wasn't also unionized, the miners would be isolated. So, he sent 100 of his organizers out to support the organizing of the steel industry. That kind of sensibility is especially pertinent today, given the expanding imbalance of power between capital and labour, the result of massive economic, social, and political changes over decades that can't be addressed with marginal tactical changes. This imbalance demands the kind of leap forward that brings submerged frustrations to life and transforms working-class expectations, institutional capacities, and confidence. This amounts to a crusade, both organizationally and culturally.

There are any number of struggles that could act as the catalyst for such a crusade. Amazon is only one such catalyst-in-waiting, but Amazon's iconic status - the largest private-sector employer in the US, a leader in high tech and AI that links some two million businesses with some 300 million consumers - would make its unionization the most important breakthrough in generations.

The labour movement has, however, already lost a step in approaching Amazon as a pie to be split between different unions - warehouses for the Teamsters, Whole Foods for UFCW - rather than as a project for the whole labour movement. The catch, of course, is that labour's extended stagnation has profoundly weakened the very capacities needed to rethink and transform it. It's still possible for Amazon workers to win significant footholds, and if Amazon continues to stonewall, as it obviously will, then the challenge to the labour movement as a whole will become more pressing. The key test will not only lie in whether or not labour provides the needed financial support at the requisite moment but also in the readiness of already-unionized workers to disrupt Amazon as needed at ports, in rail and trucking, and in parcel delivery.

BF: Tactically, there's a lot of emphasis today on salting, or taking a job at Amazon and organizing it from the inside. What do you make of this?

SG: Salts are critical. Organizing from a base within the workplace is the most successful way to develop relationships with workers, and also to talk to workers about issues beyond the workplace. But salts also need a supportive structure outside the workplace: trained organizers to follow up on contacts, leaflet, generate support for the struggle across Amazon facilities that don't yet have salts. They also need resources for meeting spaces, socials, sustaining workers laid off or fired, etc. This demands a union that has your back: an institution that can help strengthen confidence and provide staying power among both the organizers and the workers.

BF: Could you say a bit more about how you situate the Amazon organizing project in the present crisis of labour?

SG: Amazon has the possibility of being a spur to the revival of the labour movement. What will labour's role be in this present conjuncture, in the crisis of legitimacy? Amazon is the test that helps us answer this broader question. Will labour stand up to this challenge, which has the potential to revive the movement, or will it remain too particularist to take advantage of it?

Contrary to what many union leaders and also many on the Left assert, the labour movement is not - in spite of some impressive and courageous struggles - about to "turn the corner" and become a powerful social force again. Some union supporters reject such assessments as counter-productive; what workers need, they say, is inspiration. However, being sober about where things are at is never counter-productive. Inspiration is great, but if it isn't based on concrete achievements, it ends up as a rhetorical substitute for actual organizing.

It's an interesting moment in terms of language. A lot of language that used to distinguish us is now common language. So, when you say we need class formation, everybody nods their heads. We say you have to think in class terms, they nod their heads. When you say that social democracy is limited, they nod their heads. But do they really understand the inevitable rupture when it comes time to govern? If they did, they'd understand that we're going to need a really deep base. That we're going to need allies, and that nothing will be easy.

So, the Amazon organizing project could also be a way of injecting some reality back into conversations about what it means to reckon with the present crisis.

BF: What would winning the fight at Amazon mean?

SG: A specific aspect of Amazon's model is that it is regionally rooted. Its massive facilities are concentrated at ports and key transportation hubs, with some regions being of much more strategic importance than others. This regional rootedness means that establishing leverage does not have to wait until all of Amazon is unionized; a strategic number of unionized regional facilities can be effective.

Within regions, the company's fulfillment centers (FCs) are critical. From the perspective of class formation, that's where most of the workers are. For the company to move these facilities to avoid unions would be difficult, given the high investment costs of FCs.

Amazon's determined resistance to avoid unions demands a revisiting of tactics that have largely been mothballed by organized labour over the years, and at great cost to their dynamism. Their successful rediscovery, along with other creative organizing innovations, is so vital because they can potentially have explosive implications beyond Amazon, challenging union approaches throughout the labour movement.

Unannounced disruptive tactics carry a special weight. With Amazon's powerful logistics network, the traditional strike deadlines declared in advance won't work. Given advance warning, Amazon would simply reorganize its distribution network to neutralize a dated work stoppage. Disciplined, creative, and sporadic disruption are therefore key for workers. The labour movement was born out of work disruptions (sit-downs, wild cats, health and safety refusals, rejection of production speed-ups), but its trajectory has moved away from those earlier tactics.

The revival of the tactic of unannounced disruptions is inseparable from the revival of the labour movement. To take advantage of it, it is also crucial to establish a strong everyday workplace presence, one based on prioritizing work standards, health and safety, and interventions in management authority. This, in turn, requires not only union majorities but large majorities and deep commitments; a simple majority of union cards is not enough.

BF: Are you optimistic looking ahead?

SG: Yes, but soberly so. It's a really difficult thing to commit to and believe in socialism, but there's no other option. Is this just pie in the sky? I can see someone doing the same analysis as me and writing it off. The chances of it being pulled off are 1 in 1,000. And I might not disagree about the odds and all the limits. But my response is, "Well, actually, 1 in 1,000 is pretty good. We'll take those odds." What else are you going to do with your life?

This Interview first published on the Damage Magazine website.

Benjamin Y. Fong is associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University. He has a Substack focusing on labour and logistics called On the Seams.

Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974-2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso), and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today, the expanded and updated American edition (Haymarket).

28 September 2026

Source: https://socialistproject.ca/2026/09/well-take-those-odds/#more

Student Uprisings in the Age of Hindutva

Chandni Desai — 2026-09-28T16:11:00Z

Thousands of students filled the streets of India in July 2026 in one of the largest student mobilisations since Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. As students waged their protests, confronting police and the Rapid Action Force (RAF), a paramilitary unit of the Central Reserve Police Force, the youth did not invent a new language of resistance. Leftist students reached for the voices of South Asia's courageous revolutionaries and poets that had long animated the subcontinent's struggles against British colonialism, caste and class oppression, and sectarianism. Students chanted: "Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live the Revolution)," "Jai Bhim (Hail Dr. B.R. Ambedkar)," "Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai (The desire for self-sacrifice now fills our hearts)," and numerous other chants. People also recited the Punjab-born Pakistani communist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's "Bol, ke lab azad hain tere" (Speak, for your lips are free) and "Hum Dekhenge" (We Shall See). These slogans and poetic verses were acts of historical remembrance, situating the student struggle against a corrupt and right-wing, neo-fascist BJP Hindutva regime within a radical tradition of rebellion. They were carried by left student organisations and taken up by many who had never belonged to one.

The student uprising, or Cockroach protests, sits at the intersection of two transnational circulations. One is the long, revolutionary internationalism of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist emancipatory political memory and praxis: a generation that never lived through these moments powerfully invoked Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry, Hasrat Mohani and Bismil Azimabadi's Urdu poetics, Bhagat Singh's revolutionary vocabulary, and B.R. Ambedkar's anti-caste jurisprudence. The left invoked them to position themselves within a historical continuum to reimagine an India free from religious hatreds, inequality, oppressive caste and class relations and patriarchal beliefs, intensified since 2014. The other is the security internationalism of counter-insurgency doctrines: the way policing techniques, surveillance technologies, counter-insurgency training, weapons, and biometric infrastructure move between states through trade fairs, bilateral agreements, and homeland security consultancy, carrying an ideology of population management, as surely as the chants and poetry carry an ideology of freedom. Students in India inherited the first circulation by remembering and invoking it. The extreme state violence that met them in the street was built, in traceable part, by the second circulation.

Student Protests Under BJP Authoritarianism

In May 2026, India's National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled the NEET medical entrance examination, the gateway through which more than 2.2 million students a year seek a medical career, after a paper leak. Over a dozen students committed suicide, turning the exam scandal into a national crisis. Competitive examinations in India for all professions are built on years of hard work and immense family sacrifice. For poor and middle-class families, preparing for them often means investing heavily, taking on debt, selling scarce assets, relocating to coaching centres, and forgoing essential life necessities, all sustained by the unpaid social reproduction of family members who provide emotional support, and domestic labour that falls disproportionately on women. The leaks devalued all of it, and broke the promise that education was a path to employment and a secure future.

"The protesters came from every background: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists; upper-caste and Dalit; middle-class and poor; women, men, and gender-nonconforming folks; high schoolers, farmers, workers, and the parents of protesters. "

Out of that anger came the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), launched in May 2026 by Abhijeet Dipke as a satirical response to the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, who had dismissed India's unemployed youth as "cockroaches" and "parasites of society." The cockroach became a powerful symbol because protesters reclaimed an image of disposability and transformed it into one of persistence: the people treated as unwanted would keep returning. By early June a protest encampment was put in place at Jantar Mantar, India's most prominent protest site near Parliament in Delhi, which was joined within days by the All India Students Association (AISA), the Students' Federation of India (SFI), and other left student unions and organisations, turning it into a mass movement demanding reform of the examination system and the resignation of BJP Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. By late June the climate and education activist Sonam Wangchuk had joined the sit-in from Ladakh with an indefinite hunger strike, alongside several AISA students. On July 18, on the 21st day of that hunger strike, Delhi police forcibly removed him and took him to Safdarjung Hospital, which ignited the protests further. Two days later, more than 10,000 people were marching on Parliament under the banner "Chalo Sansad" (Let's go to Parliament) and were met with extreme state violence and the shutdown of mobile internet services by the government. This ignited further nationwide protests.

The protesters came from every background: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists; upper-caste and Dalit; middle-class and poor; women, men, and gender-nonconforming folks; high schoolers, farmers, workers, and the parents of protesters. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) opened overnight to shelter and feed the crowds, in keeping with the Sikh tradition of langar (serving free communal food), and mosques did the same. The corporate media, the shouting mouthpieces of the government known as the "godi media," tried to brand the movement as foreign-funded by Pakistan, China, or George Soros; yet the students' control of their own narrative broke the attempt. In an interview with Democracy Now, Arundhati Roy described a large first-time cohort of middle-class and upper-caste Hindu students, many from households that vote BJP. Some were the children and grandchildren of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sympathisers, the right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation that popularised Hindutva as a political ideology through a project of transforming India into a Hindu nation. This was the most destabilising development for the government. A movement built from the state's "usual suspects" is easy to dismiss as ideological opposition, a movement that includes the sons and daughters of the BJP's own voter base is a fracture inside the base itself. The protests also exposed the class contradictions of India's education system. What began as a revolt against examination corruption became a struggle over neoliberal capitalism in which education had grown privatised, expensive, and insecure with high unemployment and an economic crisis that has captured the nation since the BJP came to office. In naming the gap between the promise of meritocracy and the lives of millions of students, left student organisations turned an educational grievance into a broader struggle over class, caste, labour, inequality, and fascism.

For 12 years, the BJP's governance has run on a specific architecture: Hindus and Muslims cast as the primary antagonists, with Dalits, Sikhs, and other communities in turn pitted against a Hindu centre, so that any demand to hold the government accountable could be deflected into religious grievance instead. That architecture has been enforced through a climate of sectarian polarisation and fear by Hindutva mob violence aimed at intimidating those who challenge the government or assert their rights; police complicity in violence against non-Hindus; a corporate media apparatus and BJP IT cell that together amplify the state's narrative, producing years of fear and self-censorship. The left student unions refused the deflection, communal hatreds, and Hindutva fascism. Corruption in an exam system is not a Hindu-Muslim question, and the large coalition that formed around it was proof that the divide in Modi's India could be crossed. One chant in particular illustrated this point: "Jab jab Modi darta hai, Hindu-Muslim karta hai" (Whenever Modi is afraid, he turns to Hindu-Muslim politics). Neha Bora, AISA's National President, a hunger-striker and a leading organiser of the protests, accused the government of trying to recast the student movement as a communal one.

Humour, memes, masks, ridicule, and profanity punctured the BJP's carefully crafted image and aura of masculine and religious authority that it has spent years and vast resources cultivating. Street art and protest signs caricatured Modi alongside Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, two corporate oligarchs central to the consolidation of Indian monopoly capital. This imagery drew on an iconography of crony capitalism that has circulated in Indian protest culture since Punjab's farmers burned effigies of the same two men in 2020. Protesters traced the education crisis to the corporate influence of these billionaires, and to the pracharaks (RSS organisers) installed across the country's key institutions, particularly educational institutions fully captured by the BJP who are destroying the education system. For the youth, this was evidence that their generation had no future under the present order. The culture of resistance the student protests produced became one of the sharpest challenges the BJP has faced. On July 25, Dharmendra Pradhan, a key party strategist and one of Modi's most reliable cabinet colleagues resigned. Since 2014 the BJP had conceded no ministerial resignation to protest or opposition demand. The student movement generated the people power that forced the regime to bend.

Revolutionary Internationalism: The Poets and Revolutionaries Students Invoked

Several chants and poems recited at the student protests carried a longer, border-crossing history. That history had been quietly edited out of this generation's school curricula. A decade of saffronisation of education and the curriculum through BJP-led textbook revisions has trimmed or removed chapters on: Mughal history, the 2002 Gujarat massacre, the post-independence ban on the RSS following Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, the later ban after the Babri Masjid demolition, secularism, democracy, dissent, caste oppression and Dalit movements, and environmental issues, while expanding narratives centred on Hindu civilisational identity and mythology. Combined with privatisation, the expansion of the coaching industry, and repeated examination failures, the curriculum became another site through which the BJP government sought to shape both knowledge and citizenship. In such a context, reaching for B.R. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Hasrat Mohani, Bismil Azimabadi, and Faiz was not only paying homage, it was a revolutionary recovery of praxis.

"Inquilab Zindabad," first coined by the Urdu poet, anti-colonial leader and freedom fighter Hasrat Mohani, was adopted by the Punjabi revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who popularised the slogan in the Central Legislative Assembly of the British Raj in 1929, before he was hanged at 23 for resisting British colonial rule alongside two of his comrades. Singh's own political formation was itself an act of circulation; he was influenced by the Russian Revolution, Marxism, anti-imperialism, socialism, Irish revolutionaries, and corresponded with an international network of anti-colonial radicals, and understood the Indian freedom struggle as one front in a wider world war against empire.

Another revolutionary refrain associated with Singh, "Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna" ("the desire for self sacrifice"), was written around 1921 by the Muslim poet Bismil Azimabadi and later popularised by the revolutionary Ram Prasad Bismil, a leader of the Hindustan Republican Association, which Singh belonged to. Carried into the revolutionary movement by figures executed by the British including Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan and Singh, the poem became an anthem of resistance and a shared revolutionary vocabulary that crossed social, political and religious boundaries.

The RSS did not participate in the freedom struggle that produced these anti-colonial revolutionaries; its founding texts, on the contrary, drew admiringly on European fascism, particularly Nazism, and its early leadership counselled cadres to stay out of India's anti-colonial movement because Hindu nationalism's real enemy was internal, not British. What distinguishes the RSS Hindutva fascism and governance from ordinary right-wing authoritarianism is an organised paramilitary movement older than the Indian republic itself that has spent a century building towards state capture rather than merely winning an election.

Within this context, when students recited slogans coined, written, and chanted by some of the subcontinent's most beloved revolutionaries, figures whose anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-caste traditions sit uneasily with the RSS's own historical and ideological inheritance, they exposed a documented rupture in the ruling party's claim to represent the nation. As the government denounced protesting students as "anti-national" and "terrorists," these chants reclaimed the language and memory of India's anti-colonial struggle. Not everyone welcomed that inheritance fully. The CJP's leadership appealed to protesters to hold several approved slogans, dropping "Azaadi" (Freedom)- a historic anti-colonial cry against the British, given renewed political force in the Kashmir Valley - to avoid handing the government material for "negative narratives." The appeal did not hold. Where the CJP's leadership kept its distance from the question of Hindutva, Neha Bora told a public gathering that Hindutva and the RSS had to be uprooted from Indian soil.

Other frequently recited slogans were "Jai Bhim," and "Educate, Agitate, Organize," in doing so the students invoked B.R. Ambedkar, whose own sense of caste oppression was comparative and global. Ambedkar wrote much of India's Constitution which affirmed equality before the law for all people, enshrined fundamental rights, freedom of religion, affirmative action reservations, and universal adult suffrage. He also drafted Article 17 which abolished untouchability and made caste discrimination unconstitutional. In 1946, writing from Bombay, he corresponded with W.E.B. Du Bois about parallels between Dalit and Black American subjugation. Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar that he had "every sympathy with the Untouchables of India." A generation later, a group of Dalit writers and activists named themselves the Dalit Panthers, explicitly modelled on the Black Panther Party, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s own 1959 visit to India left him remarking on parallels between caste oppression and American racial segregation. Ambedkar was also one of the country's foremost advocates for women's legal rights, which is why many women organisers continue to invoke him as an enduring source of political inspiration and a debt owed.

Layered with these slogans were also Faiz Ahmed Faiz's verses, "Bol," first published in 1941 during British colonial rule, and "Hum Dekhenge" (We Shall See) written under Pakistani martial law in 1979 and later banned by General Zia-ul-Haq's regime. Calling on people of the subcontinent to speak while they still could, and promising "a coming reckoning" against authoritarianism, these poems have become enduring anthems of protest movements across South Asia, including the 2019-20 anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and anti-NRC (National Register of Citizens) protests in India. Yet the afterlife of Faiz's poetry cannot be separated from the political life that produced it. His resistance to authoritarianism led to years of imprisonment and exile, eventually taking him to Beirut, Lebanon, where he edited the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's Lotus magazine and worked alongside Palestinian revolutionaries, including poets Muin Bseiso and Mahmoud Darwish, whom Faiz first met in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, as well as the writer Ziad Abdel Fattah and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. In Beirut, Faiz witnessed frequent Israeli incursions into the city and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and wrote elegies for Palestinian fighters and children, making Palestine not a metaphor grafted onto the poems, but part of the very soil from which they emerged.

"Situating the current student protests within the longer history of student resistance, including the anti-CAA and NRC protests, the repression of students at JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Occupy University Grants Commission (UGC), and the movement for Rohith Vemula (a Dalit PhD scholar), points to the way the BJP government has progressively refined its repertoire of surveillance, policing and repression against dissenting students. "

The student protests did not happen in a vacuum. Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, two former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) scholar-activists who are Muslim and are India's most prominent political prisoners, have now spent more than six years in Delhi's Tihar jail without trial, denied bail again by the Supreme Court in January even as five of their seven co-accused in the same February 2020 Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom conspiracy case were finally released. They were arrested under the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for their alleged role in organising protests against the NRC and CAA, the same movement that also sang Faiz's poetry, popularised the slogan Azaadi and chanted Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar into Delhi's air. Their continued detention is the material referent behind the word anti-national, or terrorist, labels deployed by the BJP and state authorities against a wide range of dissidents including Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, Kashmiris, and leftists, and since the summer protest to all youth, including Hindus.

The word anti-national does specific work. It turns a person with a grievance into an enemy-of-the-state, and once that move is made under a legal architecture built for counter-terrorism rather than crowd control, six years in a prison cell without trial stops being a scandal and becomes state policy and a lesson to intimidate others. Situating the current student protests within the longer history of student resistance, including the anti-CAA and NRC protests, the repression of students at JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Occupy University Grants Commission (UGC), and the movement for Rohith Vemula (a Dalit PhD scholar), points to the way the BJP government has progressively refined its repertoire of surveillance, policing and repression against dissenting students.

The continuity extended beyond domestic struggles: the same left student unions and organisations that were confronting the state apparatus in the cockroach protests had also spent the previous two and a half years mobilising thousands in solidarity with Palestine and against India's deepening alliance with Israel, facing arrests, detention, surveillance and restrictions on assembly. In October 2024, more than 40 organisations collectively gathered at Jantar Mantar to protest one year of Israel's genocide in Gaza which became a site of police surveillance, crackdown and Hindutva mob violence against pro-Palestine protestors. This violence re-emerged during the exam protests. It marked the point where the two circulations of resistance and repression collided at Jantar Mantar.

State Violence against Protesters and Movements

"This is what a doctrine of population management looks like: a grammar of suspicion, biometric sorting, shooting at unarmed protesters and bystanders, religious targeting, family harassment, and family-as-hostage detention, normalised over a decade of violence against Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, leftists, the working class and poor."

Students faced barricades, police and RAF lathi charges (beatings with batons), tear gas, AK-47 and pellet gun bullets, arrests, detention, harassment, sexual assault, and some sustained severe injuries. Delhi Police also deployed an AI-enabled surveillance van equipped with 360-degree cameras and facial-recognition capacity, called Ikshana. Police officers were seen wearing AjnaLens smart glasses. Police used video feeds and database matching to identify people at the demonstration, later used to witch-hunt protesters specifically Muslims, Dalits and leftists. Digital-rights advocates challenged the absence of clear legal authorisation, retention limits, notification procedures and independent oversight. The use of such technologies transformed these protests into biometric checkpoints, allowing police to record faces, identify participants, and create enduring databases of dissent.

A day after the Delhi crackdown, in Bihar's Siwan district, a constable was filmed opening fire with an AK-47 during the Bihar Bandh, the statewide shutdown. Three people wounded, among them a 15-year-old shop worker named Md Arif, shot in the neck on his way home from work; he survived. In the Bihar crackdown, police arrested hundreds of protestors, including many leaders of left student unions. And in Delhi, Mohammad Junaid, a Muslim volunteer who spent weeks distributing meals to protesters at the Jantar Mantar encampment, said plainclothes police officers blindfolded him, detained him overnight, and abandoned him 250 kilometres away in Mussoorie. At the same time, police in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh and Meerut detained his father, his minor brother and his sister's in-laws, confiscating the family's PAN cards, Aadhaar cards and bank passbooks until Junaid turned himself in. Danish Ali, Joint Secretary of the JNU Students' Union, said police visited her family home and village in an apparent attempt to intimidate her as well. This is what a doctrine of population management looks like: a grammar of suspicion, biometric sorting, shooting at unarmed protesters and bystanders, religious targeting, family harassment, and family-as-hostage detention, normalised over a decade of violence against Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, leftists, the working class and poor.

Gender was a central dimension of both the repression and the public response to the student protests. Women reported that police officers or members of far-right Hindutva mobs struck, verbally abused, groped or molested them, while videos and testimonies described torn clothing during the police crackdown. Such violence carries significance beyond crowd control, as the humiliation or displacement of women's clothing invokes patriarchal ideas of honour and respectability that can discourage future political participation. The government's response also revealed the gendered policing of dissent. Modi's criticism of women and girl protesters for using "abusive language," coupled with his unsolicited paternalistic forgiveness of them in an awkward Instagram reel, reflected a gendered expectation that "respectable" women and girls remain polite and deferential, even as male anger, profanity, and violence are more readily accepted. Following the protests, many women have reported facing doxing, rape threats, and online BJP IT cell harassment, as well as police harassment of their families. This is intended to humiliate them nationally and intimidate them into withdrawing from public life. Yet, in openly expressing rage, women and gender non-conforming folks challenged both political authority and patriarchal gender norms, exposing the BJP's hypocrisy of policing women's speech while repeatedly defending and protecting men convicted of rape, such as the rapists of Bilkis Bano in the Gujarat massacre. The godi media turned its coverage towards character assassinations of student protesters, especially women and girls, the most notorious was the case of Ruchika Singh, a 15-year-old girl who mocked Modi in an online video and was coerced to apologise and forced to flee her home. Modi, Hindutva mobs, and the godi media are making an example out of her, to show the country that ridiculing the Prime Minister is closer to sedition than protected political speech.

Built With Israel: The Counter-Insurgency Doctrine Behind Police Crackdowns

Occupied Kashmir has been the laboratory: biometric monitoring, facial recognition, internet shutdowns, arrests, disappearances and extra-judicial killings, heavily armed crowd control, all of it justified in the language of "counter-terrorism" and "national security.

The security doctrine that met the student protesters has a face, and this summer it was put on camera again, as it was in Kashmir in 2019 after the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A, and during the farmers' protests of 2020-21. The extreme state violence and crackdown on student protestors across the country this summer was not freelance brutality by officers improvising under pressure. It was produced by a decade of training exchanges, cybersecurity MOUs, and homeland security seminars. A police force has been retrained to read a protest not as people with grievances exercising their democratic right but as a threat to be sorted, tracked, neutralised and criminalised.

The doctrine decides in advance what kind of thing a crowd is, once that decision has been made in Israeli classrooms and Delhi seminar rooms, the baton and the bullet only enforce it. Occupied Kashmir has been the laboratory: biometric monitoring, facial recognition, internet shutdowns, arrests, disappearances and extra-judicial killings, heavily armed crowd control, all of it justified in the language of "counter-terrorism" and "national security." What was developed through the oppression and control of Palestinians and adapted through India's militarised occupation of Kashmir, has returned to Delhi, Mumbai, Patna and, above all, Manipur as "ordinary policing."

India's diplomatic ties with the Israeli settler-colonial apartheid state opened in 1992, with covert defence purchases going back further, but the relationship changed character after 2014 when the BJP came to power. In 2015, 150 Indian Police Service (IPS) officers visited the Israel National Police Academy to study counter-insurgency, low-intensity conflict and warfare, counter-terrorism, and policing technologies; IPS trainees have gone every year since. Trainees observed Israel's Border Police and airport-security operations, while SIBAT, the Israeli Defence Ministry's international defence-cooperation arm, introduced them to Israeli homeland-security companies and the use of technology in "live situations."

"India became the world's largest buyer of Israeli arms, spending upward of a billion dollars annually. Increasingly, those weapons were also made on Indian soil, as the 2022 India-Israel Vision on Defence Cooperation paired Israeli military technology with Modi's push for domestic manufacturing under the "Make in India" initiative."

Modi's 2017 visit to Israel, the first by a sitting Indian prime minister, marked a decisive deepening of the India-Israel alliance, producing roughly $2 billion in Israeli defence and intelligence purchases, a cybersecurity agreement, and, according to a New York Times investigation, India's acquisition of Israel's Pegasus spyware, later used against Indian journalists, academics, activists, and opposition leaders. What began as police training soon became institutionalised: by 2018, an India-Israel Joint Steering Committee on Homeland and Public Security formally committed the two states to sustained cooperation in police "capacity building and modernization" and border management. Israeli security expertise was thus entering India not simply through weapons purchases, but through the training, technologies and institutional practices of the police themselves.

India became the world's largest buyer of Israeli arms, spending upward of a billion dollars annually. Increasingly, those weapons were also made on Indian soil, as the 2022 India-Israel Vision on Defence Cooperation paired Israeli military technology with Modi's push for domestic manufacturing under the "Make in India" initiative. Adani Enterprises and Elbit Systems established a joint venture in 2018 to manufacture the Hermes 900 drone for the Israeli military, the only production line outside Israel, while Bengaluru's Alpha Design Technologies and Elbit produced SkyStriker loitering munitions for the Indian Army. By 2024, Israeli arms companies including ELTA, Rafael, Elbit, and Skylock were using a standing forum in Delhi to develop further defence and dual-use partnerships. But as Azad Essa argues in Hostile Homelands, this convergence is ideological as well as material. RSS ideologues drawing on Savarkar and Golwalkar had long admired Zionism as a model of ethno-religious nationhood. Under Modi, a lifelong RSS member, that affinity increasingly shaped state policy, from suppressing domestic criticism of Israel's genocide in Gaza to attempts at withholding support from UN resolutions calling for its end.

Modi's most recent 2026 visit to Israel, two days before the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, crystallised this transformation at a moment of full-scale regional war in West Asia. Addressing the Knesset, the first Indian leader to do so, Modi told the chamber that Indian-origin Jews in Israel hold that "Israel is their fatherland and India their motherland," that he was born on the day India recognised Israel, and that India stood with Israel with full conviction. He was awarded a medal for strengthening the alliance and embraced Netanyahu, who remains subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The material consequences of this alliance became still clearer in July 2026, when Amnesty International's Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel documented 2,596 shipments of arms, ammunition, and military components from Indian companies to Israel between October 2023 and November 2025, including artillery-shell casings and components for SkyStriker drones. Against the backdrop of the International Court of Justice's provisional measures in the genocide case, India could hardly claim ignorance of how these supplies might be used.

For India's left and people of conscience at home and across the diaspora, this marked the culmination of a reversal decades in the making: from a global leader of non-alignment and supporter of Palestine and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, to a government supplying the Israeli war machine, integrating Israeli surveillance and security practices at home, and aligning itself ever more closely with Israel and Washington in ways an earlier generation would not have imagined. Yet it was against this architecture of repression and alignment that the students won their immediate concessions.

Reformist Victories, Making Revolution Imaginable

The Cockroach movement's immediate gains were reformist: the education minister's resignation, a signed agreement with the government on compensation for the families of students who died by suicide, a parliamentary commitment to reform the examination system, and assurances that protesters would not face police arrests and detention. These were the terms on which students suspended their hunger strike and called off their mass protest. But the movement never declared the struggle finished. If the protest's achievements were liberal in form, its political significance was far larger. It exposed fractures in the BJP's claim to unquestioned authority, it disrupted the ideological confidence of Hindutva and exposed its inner fascist workings to the country, ruptured over a decade of fear and censorship, revealed the failure of neoliberal capitalism, and sparked the emergence of a generation willing to confront the state through many forms. The threat to the regime posed by this generation was perhaps evident in Modi's 2026 Independence Day address, he branded youth protesters "dimagi Naxals" ("intellectual Naxals"), invoking the language of Maoist insurgency to recast political dissent as an "internal security threat" to be dealt with.

The protests radicalised and awakened millions of young people and have instilled a sense of hope for another India, and protests continue across the country in the present. People have called for the resignation of BJP Home Minister Amit Shah (responsible for the police, RAF, and their brutality) and Modi himself, captured powerfully in the chant "Desh bachao, Modi Hatao" (Save the Country, Get Rid of Modi). The protests also ruptured the borders meant to divide them, as Pakistani students sent moving messages of solidarity to India's students, one blogger specifically identifying them as the "children of divorce," referring to the subcontinent's Partition. Student movements in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have also asked what they can do in solidarity with the left student unions who are committed to advancing the struggle further.

The protests also confirmed what the two circulations traced throughout this essay had always implied: internationalism is never politically neutral. Each gives rise to a distinct political world, one producing a generation capable of creative collective resistance, imagining revolution, and cultivating hope (despite internal contradictions); the other produces institutions capable of administering immense state violence and human rights violations.

Revolutions rarely arrive fully formed, they begin by making the existing order appear vulnerable. In that sense, the student uprisings may be remembered not as the revolution itself, but as the moment one became imaginable. The surveillance cameras on the mast are still running, compiling a database for whom the state will target in the days to come. Hum Dekhenge records something else, written in the future tense, it promises that there is still more to be seen: the world it anticipates has not yet arrived, and students continue to organise and struggle for a different future. They are remaking and ushering in a new world in these fascist times.

To them: Inquilab Zindabad!

Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is working on a book tentatively titled Revolutionary Circuits: Cadres, Culture, Internationalism and the Palestinian Revolution.

Sep 17, 2026

Source: https://www.jamhoor.org/read/hum-dekhenge-student-uprisings-in-the-age-of-hindutva

Photo caption and credit : Political graffiti, protest slogans and spray-painted messages cover a boundary wall near the site of the students' protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, July 2026. Image: Sayyed Abuzar Ali

‘We Need Convivencia': Haim Bresheeth Envisions Palestine after Zionism

Thinking Palestine Editors — 2026-09-28T16:00:00Z

Israeli anti-Zionist scholar Haim Bresheeth-Žabner argues that only a single democratic state-not partition-can deliver justice, equality and decolonization in Palestine.

For decades, the two-state solution has dominated international discussions on Palestine. At the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Dublin, Israeli anti-Zionist scholar Haim Bresheeth-Žabner dismissed the framework altogether, arguing that it is neither viable nor desirable.

Instead, he urged audiences to abandon what he described as an obsolete political paradigm and return to a solution that, he argued, Palestinians themselves have advocated since the earliest years of the conflict: a single democratic state across historic Palestine.

"The solution has to come from the Palestinians," Bresheeth-Žabner declared at the outset of his keynote address. "The Palestinians have already worked on that solution in 1947."

For Bresheeth-Žabner, the conversation should no longer revolve around rescuing the two-state formula. Comparing Palestine to other anti-colonial struggles, he argued that liberation movements in places like South Africa and Northern Ireland never accepted permanent political separation as the basis for justice.

"We never talked about a two-state solution in South Africa," he said. "We didn't say, 'Let's have a Black state and a white state.' We didn't, in Northern Ireland, say, ‘Let's have a Catholic state and a Protestant state.'"

He contended that continued discussion of partition ultimately serves to preserve Zionism rather than challenge it.

"Our reason not to talk about it is that it's a way of preserving Zionism," he said. "None of us here is interested in preserving Zionism."

Returning to 1947

Bresheeth-Žabner grounded much of his argument in the debates surrounding the United Nations partition proposal of 1947.

While the UN ultimately endorsed partition, he reminded the audience that another proposal-a unitary democratic state-had also been discussed. "There were two proposals," he explained. "To divide Palestine- or not to divide."

From his perspective, partition represented both a political and moral failure. He argued that it allocated the larger share of the land to the Zionist movement despite Jews constituting roughly one-third of Palestine's population at the time.

"When you have a third and two-thirds," he asked, "you give the third two-thirds of the country?"

He further argued that the violence associated with the Nakba began immediately after the adoption of the UN partition resolution rather than after the formal declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948.

"The war didn't start on the 14th of May," he said. "It started on the first of December 1947."

A Palestinian Proposal

Central to Bresheeth-Žabner's speech was his insistence that Palestinians have consistently offered an inclusive political vision rather than one based on ethnic exclusion.

Rejecting portrayals of Palestinian liberation as incompatible with coexistence, he described Palestinians as having shown extraordinary political generosity.

"It's not normal, and it's not obvious", he said, that a population under colonial control says to the colonizers: “Stay with us. You will be citizens like us in the state of Palestine.'"

To illustrate the point, he drew parallels with Algeria's anti-colonial struggle.

Before the Algerian war reached its bloodiest stages, he noted, the National Liberation Front (FLN) envisioned a democratic Algeria in which French settlers could remain as equal citizens if they accepted the country's independence.

"What happens before a genocide and what happens after a genocide is very different," Bresheeth-Žabner observed, arguing that mass violence fundamentally alters the political possibilities available to an oppressed people.

The One Democratic State

Bresheeth-Žabner also reflected on his own involvement in the One Democratic State Initiative alongside Palestinian intellectuals and fellow Israeli anti-Zionists, including historian Ilan PappÈ and physician and author Ghada Karmi.

The group drafted a model constitution envisioning a secular democratic state where citizenship would be based on equality rather than religion or ethnicity.

"What we wanted," he explained, "was one democratic state, which is basically a secular state. Religions don't have distinct political rights... everyone is an individual in that state."

He acknowledged that this vision remains politically distant but argued that it continues to provide the most coherent framework for a just future.

Gaza Has Changed the Conversation

While reaffirming his long-standing commitment to a single democratic state, Bresheeth-Zabner argued that Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza has fundamentally altered the immediate priorities facing Palestinians.

"We know that the one state is the only democratic, just and practical solution," he recalled hearing from young Palestinians.

"But at the moment... our problem is not to establish one democratic state. Our problem is to survive the colonial attack on us."

He argued that the destruction in Gaza has made discussions about future constitutional arrangements secondary to the immediate struggle against what he repeatedly characterized as genocide and colonial violence.

"We cannot actually, at the moment, even talk about it," he said, "without first resolving the fact that Zionism is in existence."

For that reason, he concluded, "we need to end Zionism. This is my priority."

Decolonization and Accountability

Looking beyond the current war, Bresheeth-Žabner envisioned a future Palestinian state built through decolonization rather than partition.

"Palestine should be liberated," he declared. "Palestine should be decolonized. Palestine should be de-Zionized."

He also argued that accountability for crimes committed during the war must accompany any future political settlement.

"We will not do a Nuremberg," he said. "We will do a Genocide Convention future in Palestine."

A Personal Journey

In his closing remarks, Bresheeth-Žabner moved away from political theory and spoke about his own life. "I was born in a refugee camp in Rome after the Second World War," he told the audience. "My parents were stateless, and so was I."

Recalling his childhood among Palestinian communities, he described growing up in an environment where Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking children lived and played together without perceiving one another as enemies.

"The first thing that happened to me is that I became a Palestinian," he said.

He ended with a historical vision that reached back to medieval Al-Andalus, invoking the concept of convivencia-the coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews-as both a historical precedent and a political aspiration.

"Let no one tell you that we can't live together peacefully," he said.

His final appeal framed Palestinian liberation not only as the liberation of Palestinians themselves, but also as the liberation of Israeli Jews from Zionism.

"We shall achieve it," he concluded, "by liberating Palestine and liberating Jews from Zionism."

Source: https://thinkingpalestine.com/we-need-convivencia-haim-bresheeth-envisions-palestine-after-zionism/

Photo caption and credit: Israeli anti-Zionist scholar Haim Bresheeth-Žabner. (Illustration: Thinking Palestine)

Donald Trump and the Age of Evil

Chris Hedges — 2026-09-26T01:48:52Z

By any standard of morality, Trump is depraved. But adorned with the power of the state, he descends to another level - the level of evil.

Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths - superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.

But is he evil?

If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.

In her new book, "Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era," Neiman argues that evil "isn't cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary."

She continues:

There's a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures-at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot-and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There's no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.

Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.

In short, he does what all who commit evil do.

He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.

Concepts of fairness, decorum, justice and empathy are imploded by the Trump administration. His threat to annihilate Iran ñ i.e. carry out genocide ñ announced of all places at the United Nations, is greeted with indifference by a public rendered numb by his moral vacuity.

"Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naÔve but suspect," Neiman writes. "Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage."

The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality - including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class - swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.

To an enraged public Trump's transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.

Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.

"Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior," Neiman writes of Trump:

Nor does he appear to understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people to override self-interest in order to honor them. In acting on the international stage like Richard Dawkins's ruthless genes, he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn't mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they're relieved to watch a man who never hides it.

The worst evil, Neiman argues, "may be the denial of evil ñ as well as disdain for any goodness that might oppose it. When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself. It's already been mistaken for rationality."

This evil leads us down the familiar road to fascism. It was Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump's first term, who warned us, calling Trump "fascist to the core."

The media - too spineless to label Trump a fascist - prefers the word "authoritarian,' which Neiman notes may be a more bearable word, but "will not make fascism more bearable."

Authoritarianism, she notes:

[I]s a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors, and the softer sort of Latin American military regime. But a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they've never seen? Combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens? A government that coerces media, universities, and other countries to suit its will? A military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications, then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned? As it wrote in 1946, 'To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.' It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.

We are in deep trouble.

The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.

We must fight back while we can. But to do so requires that we recapture the language of good and evil. It requires us to make moral choices and to accept self-sacrifice. It requires us to name the bleakness before us, not turn our faces from the fascist monolith being cemented into place.

Denying these truths and refusing to defy evil will ensure our enslavement.

Speaking these truths and standing with the oppressed and the marginalized, even at the cost of our own financial and physical security, will set us free.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Photo: The Great Dicktator - by Mr. Fish

Beneath the 65-Metre Waste Mountain of Ghazipur: The Realities of India's Waste Pickers

Nicolas Auger-Chrétien — 2026-09-13T16:00:00Z

Every day, around 11,000 tonnes of waste ends up in Ghazipur, brought in by the constant flow of roughly 500 trucks. Over the years, this has created a massive garbage mountain the area is known for. Yet Ghazipur isn't only a landfill, dairy farms still exist right beside it. On the site, they use biomining and large excavators to break down old waste and separate it into materials like plastic, sand, and concrete. Nothing is wasted if it can be reused: plastic is sent to cement factories, and sand and debris are used for new roads and construction. But the work is far from easy. The incinerators haven't been running for about three months, and wet waste can't be sorted right away, so more trash is still being piled on top, left to dry for years before anyone can process it. Hidden underneath are machines and teams working from the bottom up, trying to slowly reduce the mountain. Along the seven-level route to the top, initiatives like the Namaste Program show that efforts are being made, but the scale of the problem is still huge.

In the communities surrounding the Ghazipur landfill, the limitations of institutional recognition are felt in very concrete ways. Despite the existence of national schemes such as the Namaste Scheme, which aim to register informal waste workers and extend basic social protections, access to support remains extremely limited on the ground. Many waste pickers living and working around Ghazipur are neither registered nor informed about available schemes, effectively excluding them from social protection mechanisms. In practice, this leaves them dependent on informal and precarious waste work for survival, with little or no interaction with public institutions. Their labour keeps the city functioning, yet they remain absent from official records, excluded from protections, and rarely consulted on decisions that directly affect their lives.

In recent years, the Government of India has taken steps toward formally recognising informal waste workers through the Namaste Scheme, which now explicitly includes waste pickers within the national sanitation and waste management framework [1]. From the 2024-2025 financial year, the scheme has aimed to integrate waste pickers into formal systems through digital registration, occupation-based identification, and linkages to social security programmes. While this represents a significant policy shift on paper, its reach and effectiveness remain uneven, particularly for workers operating in highly marginalised contexts such as those surrounding the Ghazipur landfill.

The Namaste scheme represents one of the most recent national efforts to formally recognise waste pickers as part of India's sanitation workforce. It aims to provide occupational identification, health insurance, protective equipment, and livelihood support, while also promoting the formation of waste picker collectives and digital profiling systems. The initiative targets approximately 2.5 lakh workers across India, signalling a large-scale attempt at formal integration into waste governance systems. However, implementation remains uneven, with only a limited number of workers currently profiled under the scheme, highlighting a gap between policy ambition and on-the-ground reality [2].

Recent announcements offering one-time financial incentives to landfill workers in Delhi, such as the Rs 5,000 Diwali payment, reflect a broader pattern of short-term welfare gestures rather than sustained institutional integration, highlighting the gap between political recognition and structural inclusion of informal waste workers [3]. At the same time, restricted access to waste has led many waste pickers to report declining incomes and increased dependence on hazardous sites such as landfills, where competition, health risks, and environmental exposure are significantly higher.

The growing dependence on sites such as the Ghazipur landfill is not accidental, but the result of policy choices that have progressively excluded informal waste pickers from neighbourhood-level waste collection. Urban cleanliness is not determined by rankings or infrastructure alone, but by the effectiveness of governance systems, civic participation, and the inclusion of sanitation workers within urban decision-making processes. This perspective shifts attention away from surface-level performance indicators toward the deeper structural conditions that shape how waste is managed in cities [4].

The Ghazipur landfill has long exceeded both its intended capacity and its original lifespan, yet it continues to receive vast quantities of waste decades after its planned closure. Initially designed to operate for approximately 25 years, the site now functions less as an engineered landfill than as an open dump, lacking many of the environmental and safety safeguards required under waste management regulations [5]. The accumulation and decomposition of waste have led to the continuous release of toxic gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, contributing significantly to air pollution in surrounding areas. At the same time, the site poses serious risks to water systems: leachate from the landfill has been reported to flow into nearby drains and canals, raising concerns about groundwater and surface water contamination [6]. Structural instability further compounds these hazards, as cracks and slope stress within the waste mound have increased fears of collapse among workers and nearby communities.

Frequent fires, often linked to methane buildup, have become a recurring feature of the site, releasing dense toxic smoke and causing sharp spikes in air pollution that affect both waste workers and nearby communities [7]. With these conditions, Ghazipur has evolved into a chronic environmental hazard, where climate risks, pollution, and informal labour are concentrated in the same urban space.

In response to sustained environmental pressure, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has announced plans to fully clear the Ghazipur landfill by 2027-2028, alongside the establishment of additional waste processing facilities [8]. Authorities have pointed to bio-mining as a central strategy for reducing legacy waste, combined with limited diversion of ongoing waste streams to processing and waste-to-energy facilities. Despite these commitments, progress on the ground remains slow. Large volumes of accumulated waste continue to dominate the site, and only a fraction of the total legacy waste has been processed so far. The clean-up has moved far more slowly than announced.

Communities living around the Ghazipur landfill, including densely populated neighbourhoods and nearby wholesale markets are exposed to multiple environmental risks. Poor air quality, respiratory illnesses, and water contamination are persistent concerns, while contaminated runoff threatens surrounding soil, groundwater, and surface water systems. Beyond these local impacts, the landfill also represents a broader climate challenge, as uncontrolled methane emissions from decomposing waste contribute to greenhouse-gas emissions. Taken together, these conditions reflect deeper failures in urban waste governance in megacities like Delhi, where rapid urbanisation, inadequate planning, and slow remediation have concentrated environmental harm in already marginalised spaces.

Gender, informal labour and climate justice

At sites such as the Ghazipur landfill, environmental degradation and social inequality intersect in deeply gendered ways. Women waste pickers working around the landfill are exposed daily to toxic air, contaminated water, and hazardous materials, while simultaneously facing heightened risks of harassment, theft, and physical violence. Unlike men, women often combine waste picking with unpaid care responsibilities, limiting their mobility and reducing their ability to seek safer or more profitable work opportunities [9]. As a result, their economic vulnerability is compounded by environmental exposure and social insecurity. These conditions are not incidental but reflect broader policy failures that concentrate environmental risk in informal labour spaces while excluding women workers from protection, recognition, and decision-making processes.

The Ghazipur landfill has reached an estimated height of around 65 metres, comparable to the towers of London's Tower Bridge or the height of a city block, and only a few metres shorter than Delhi's Qutub Minar - the world's tallest minaret made of bricks. This physical scale reflects the intensity of waste accumulation in one of the world's most rapidly growing urban regions. As Swati Singh Sambyal, a programme manager at the Center for Science and Environment in Delhi, notes, “Among the metropolitans, Delhi is probably the biggest waste generator. Ideally, only 10 to 15 percent of Delhi's waste should go to dumping sites, but around 70 to 80 percent is still being disposed of there because waste is not segregated at source. Our approach remains collection, dumping, or burning, which is not a sustainable or viable solution.” [10]. This persistent failure of waste segregation and reliance on dumping-based systems continues to shape the conditions in which informal waste pickers, particularly women operate, reinforcing both environmental exposure and economic precarity.

Voices from Ghazipur: Community perspectives

I also had the privilege of going into the slums of Ghazipur myself to conduct some interviews with my work partners. I interviewed Jatin Nasha Bibi, a waste picker living in the Ghazipur community, who has been residing in the area for approximately 25 years and is now 38 years old. She describes her daily routine around night work at the landfill, where she begins collecting waste around 6 p.m. and continues through the night, a pattern shared by many workers operating across the 24-hour cycle. She explains that her household includes three children, aged 20, 22, and 26, who have also participated in waste picking activities at times, reflecting the intergenerational nature of this labour. Despite the demanding conditions, she describes her work as something she has become accustomed to over time, emphasizing familiarity and endurance rather than hardship.

Many people work across 24-hour cycles, and she noted that her monthly income ranges between 10,000 and 12,000 rupees. She described the absence of basic facilities at the landfill, including toilets and shaded areas for rest, which forces workers to rely on conditions available in the surrounding community. There is no formal water supply or pipeline in the area. Water is accessed through tank deliveries and stored in containers for daily use. While electricity is available in the community, access to safe water remains highly constrained. She also described how leachate from the landfill flows into local drainage systems, affecting household water infrastructure. As a result, many homes either lack sinks entirely or avoid using them due to contamination concerns. In these conditions, water is often reused for multiple purposes, including washing, bathing, and drinking, due to limited alternatives.

She noted that people do experience illness frequently, although many have become accustomed to the conditions over time. She also described how women in the community manage both paid work and domestic responsibilities. In her case, she works in the evening at the landfill and spends the daytime caring for her children. Sleep remains limited, as work is continuous and survival needs take priority.

Many children also participate in the work and sometimes accompany their parents to the landfill. Workers are required to pay 20 rupees to guards to access the site, as entry is now controlled through a privatised system introduced by the city. What was previously an open informal space has increasingly become restricted and, in practice, semi-illegal for many waste pickers.

The work itself is highly hazardous. Landslides have occurred, and there are reported cases of fatal accidents involving heavy machinery such as excavators. Despite these risks, families continue to depend on the landfill as their primary source of income. Encounters with municipal authorities, including MCD workers, can sometimes further disrupt access, as workers are often instructed to stop collecting waste, though many return regardless due to economic necessity. Protective equipment is virtually absent. Most workers rely only on their hands and plastic bags, with no formal safety gear provided.

When I asked her what she thought about the fact that the government has been saying for years that they will remove the landfill, she said that people do not believe it will ever be removed. The harsh truth, as she put it, is that they do not want to see it gone. Their livelihoods depend on it, and it has become the way of life for so many people. The city is trying to clean it, but at the same time more waste continues to be added. You cannot clean it with more dumping. In her view, the city is also running out of space for another landfill, which makes the situation even more difficult to resolve. The landfill, as she describes it, is what people depend on to make money and survive. What will they do without having the mountain. That is why, they do not believe it will ever be removed, because there is simply too much waste being processed at the same time.

Available estimates suggest that the Ghazipur landfill sustains a significant number of informal waste workers from surrounding communities. While figures vary across reports, earlier studies indicate that approximately 600 waste pickers from the immediate area depend directly on the landfill for their livelihood, while more recent assessments estimate that up to 1,500 workers regularly collect waste at the site [11]. These variations reflect the informal and fluid nature of waste picking, but they nonetheless point to Ghazipur's central role as a survival space for hundreds of families who remain excluded from formal waste collection systems.

I also interviewed Sheikh Akbar Ali, a community leader and organiser with Basti Suraksha Manch in Ghazipur. He explains that he worked for approximately 25 years in the waste sector before transitioning into advocacy for waste pickers' rights. Originally from New Seemapuri, he now works as a community organiser supporting workers in the sector. He previously earned a living through waste selling and collection. He is now 42 years old and lives in Ghazipur with his family. “Waste is the most important aspect of human life because everyone is creating waste, no matter what. But no one is taking care of cleanliness apart from them. Most of these people are cleaning it, but they are not getting proper help from the government.”

According to his account, the introduction of the Namaste scheme, which is specifically designed for waste pickers, represents an important step toward recognising sanitation workers at the national level, as it aims to provide social security and formal acknowledgement of their role in urban cleanliness. “It's the first government scheme for that.” However, he stresses that the lived reality on the ground remains far more precarious, particularly for those working inside the Ghazipur landfill without formal registration, safety equipment, or consistent institutional protection. He describes a fragmented system in which waste pickers operate under different conditions, with some collecting waste from households and others working directly within the landfill environment, often under unsafe and informal arrangements. For him, the central issue remains the lack of effective rights-based implementation, despite the increasing visibility of waste management in policy discourse.

There is a difference in payments. Women are mostly working in segregation, while men are more often involved in loading activities. Women earn around 300 to 500 rupees per day, while men earn approximately 700 to 800 rupees per day. However, income also depends on the quantity of waste collected, as payments are linked to material value rather than fixed wages. As explained, it is ultimately a market-based system: for example, if iron is sold at 30 rupees per kilogram, the price remains the same regardless of gender. Both men and women go to the landfill, not only during the night but also during the day. Income can also be affected during heatwaves, when many workers choose not to go due to extreme conditions.

When asked what the government could do to improve the livelihoods of waste pickers in Ghazipur, particularly through schemes such as Namaste, he returns to a fundamental distinction between two groups of workers: those who collect waste from households and those who depend directly on the landfill itself. He explains that many of those working on the landfill operate during the day or night without protective equipment and often without formal permission, collecting and sorting waste before selling it through informal networks. In his words, in Ghazipur, it remains almost entirely an informal system, lacking help from the government. “This is the game here, and the reality,” he states.

Around 1,000 waste pickers reportedly access the Ghazipur landfill at night for waste picking, reflecting the scale of economic dependency on the site. This activity is closely linked to surrounding informal settlements, where residents continue to face severe infrastructural deprivation, including limited access to sanitation, drinking water, and sewage systems. In one such settlement, shared toilets serve approximately 3,000 people across 550 households, while water is delivered only intermittently through mobile supply vans.

The Ghazipur landfill exposes how urban waste systems rely on the largely invisible labour of informal workers who remain excluded from formal protection and recognition. Their testimonies show that waste picking is not temporary work, but a long-term survival system shaped by family dependence and economic necessity.

While initiatives aim to formally include waste pickers within India's sanitation framework, a significant gap remains between policy and lived reality. Many workers continue to operate without registration, safety equipment, or stable institutional support. Ghazipur also reflects broader patterns of urban inequality, where environmental risks and infrastructural deprivation are concentrated in already marginalised communities. In this sense, the landfill is not only a site of waste disposal, but also a space where labour, survival, and exclusion intersect.

References

1: Global Rights and Environmental Coalition. (2025). India launches NAMASTE scheme to recognize and support waste pickers. https://globalrec.org/2025/04/02/india-launches-namaste-scheme-to-recognize-and-support-waste-pickers/

2: Bandyopadhyay, O. (2025). India's waste pickers: indispensable but invisible. British Safety Council. https://www.britsafe.in/safety-management-news/2025/india-s-waste-pickers-indispensable-but-invisible

3: Times of India. (2025). All landfill workers to get Rs 5,000 each before Diwali: Khattar. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/all-landfill-workers-to-get-rs-5000-each-before-diwali-khattar/articleshow/123953394.cms

4: Singh, S. (2025). Beyond rankings: What truly makes a city clean. Down To Earth. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/waste/beyond-rankings-what-truly-makes-a-city-clean

5: India Today. (2015). Ghazipur landfill site in Delhi is a ticking garbage bomb. https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/ghazipur-landfill-site-in-delhi-is-a-ticking-garbage-bomb-279145-2015-12-27

6: India Environment Portal. (2025, March 29). Report by Court Commissioner on Ghazipur landfill and waste-to-energy plant at the landfill. https://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/in-court/report-by-court-commissioner-on-ghazipur-landfill-and-waste-to-energy-plant-at-the-landfill-29032025/

7: Indian Express. (2024, April 22). Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai seeks detailed report on Ghazipur landfill fire. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-minister-gopal-rai-seeks-detailed-report-on-ghazipur-landfill-fire-9284431/

8: The New Indian Express. (2025, November 5). Ghazipur landfill site to be fully cleared by 2027, MCD to set up 4 processing facilities: Panel chief. https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/delhi/2025/Nov/05/ghazipur-landfill-site-to-be-fully-cleared-by-2027-mcd-to-set-up-4-processing-facilities-panel-chief

9: The Indian Express. (2019). Ghazipur landfill: Delhi's mountain of waste continues to grow. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-has-a-burning-problem-three-garbage-mountains-ghazipur-bhalswa-and-okhla-landfills-7900065/

10: Kuchay, B. (2018, September 10). Ghazipur landfill: Despair over Delhi's deadly rubbish dump. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/9/10/ghazipur-landfill-despair-over-delhis-deadly-rubbish-dump

11: Thilak, N. (2012, May 13). Waste pickers of Ghazipur. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/waste-pickers-of-ghazipur/

250 Years of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and US Independence

Ingo Schmidt — 2026-09-13T15:51:46Z

In March 1776, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published. Four months later, 13 North American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. Both events were in the air.

Economists before Smith had already pondered how to explain the then-observable increase in manufacturing and global trade, and what its consequences would be. Smith could not have foreseen that his Wealth of Nations would become, not long after his death, a kind of manifesto for the rising industrial bourgeoisie. First in England, soon after in Europe, the United States, and finally in all parts of the world where capitalists were striving for class rule based on industrial production.

The plantation owners, traders, freight forwarders, and shipowners of the North American colonies had long believed that the British Crown, British bankers, and merchants were taking an undue share of the profits from transatlantic business. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 gave spectacular expression to this resentment over economic exploitation and political domination. That the United States would one day replace Great Britain as the leading global power was not foreseeable at its founding.

Smith: Not a Prophet of Unfettered Markets

To justify this power, ideologues of the American bourgeoisie repeatedly invoked Smith. While presenting Smith as the herald of a doctrine of unfettered markets and themselves as the embodiment of this doctrine, they consistently deviated from it in the pursuit of their business interests.

In the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith established a theoretical system of natural liberty. He contrasted this with mercantilist practice, which promoted the export of finished goods from the imperial centers and restricted corresponding imports to stimulate manufacturing production within those centers. Tariffs levied for this purpose, along with taxes imposed on the colonies, filled the coffers of absolutist rule. Slavery and debt bondage on the sugar, coffee, tea, and tobacco plantations supplied the wealthy and powerful in the centers with luxury goods. Under pressure from overcapacity and thus declining profits on the one hand, and an abolitionist movement - inspired in no small part by the Enlightenment - on the other, the British Crown considered abolishing slavery. Overcapacity or not, slave labour was indispensable to the plantation owners. They saw freedom from British colonial rule as a guarantee for the continuation of slavery.

Slavery and the Cotton Empire

Among other works, Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments also provided abolitionists with arguments against slavery. Addressing soberly calculating businessmen, he explained in the Prosperity of the Nation that slave labour was less productive and profitable than wage labour. The American plantation owners refuted his argument. The shift from producing luxury goods for the wealthy to cotton, which, machine-processed in England, clothed the masses in all parts of the world, was enormously profitable - for the American plantation owners as well as for the English industrialists.

The market seemed limitless. This was largely because the combination of English mass production and forced market liberalization devastated textile production in India. Textile manufacturers in the United States managed to escape the fate of ‘de-industrialization' - if one wants to apply this term to the manufacturing prevalent in India - by imposing tariffs on their own Indian colonies to promote domestic manufacturing. Smith had introduced free trade as an alternative to mercantilism. While the latter, with its promotion of exports and restrictions on imports, benefited manufacturers and absolutist rulers, it did not benefit the nation.

Free trade became the guiding principle of British policy after the Industrial Revolution granted the country's manufacturers a global monopoly. In the United States, the plantation owners of the South championed free trade. They rejected the tariffs demanded by the burgeoning industrialists of the American Northwest to secure their share of the global textile market against superior British competition. The plantation owners feared British retaliatory tariffs that would increase the cost of their cotton shipments to the Northwest's industries, thereby reducing sales and profits. This issue led to the Civil War. The victory of the Northern states paved the way for the United States' rise to industrial power.

Tariffs protected American industry from foreign competition, and the end of slavery opened up a new source of cheap labour. Racial segregation, introduced under the Jim Crow laws, ensured that Black workers were paid significantly less than white workers. This provided a source of continuous extra profits for American industry and a kind of economic compensation for the Southern plantation owners who had lost part of their business assets with their slaves. This was not how Smith had envisioned the prosperity of nations. He considered profit, ground rent, and wages to be distinct sources of income for manufacturers, landowners, and wage labourers. The fact that some enriched themselves at the expense of others contradicted his worldview. Therefore, he also criticized laws that prohibited workers from forming unions, while entrepreneurs seized every opportunity to collude to increase prices and profits. He also believed that the nation's prosperity was measured by the increases in the lowest incomes. In his view, free trade would lead to larger markets and a progressive division of labour. This would increase productivity and incomes. In all income brackets.

American Industrial Power and a Multinational Proletariat

This was far from the case in the United States, even after the end of slavery and the industrial boom. Westward expansion, coupled with another genocide of the indigenous population, supplied the industries of the Northwest with raw materials. The Second Industrial Revolution gave rise to new industries. These were linked to the emergence of large corporations and an enormous concentration of wealth. In contrast, there was the poverty not only of Black workers but also of workers who had recently immigrated from Southern and Eastern Europe. Between this poorly paid, multinational proletariat and the industrial magnates on the other side, the old and new middle classes - farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers or managers - as well as a labour aristocracy recruited from the descendants of Northwest European immigrants, tried to assert themselves.

The promise that everyone, perhaps even every woman, could rise from dishwasher to millionaire created an ideological consensus against which countless appeals to workers' solidarity bounced off. This ëwhere there's a will, there's a way' consensus stems, not least, from the ‘free-trade-individualistic' interpretation of Smith, which ideologues and propagandists of the American bourgeoisie disseminated among the people in ever-new variations.

It took the First World War and the Great Depression to shake this consensus. The United States emerged from the war as the true victor. France and Great Britain had bought their victory with indebtedness to their American ally. Its political elite entered the world stage under the banner of democracy, national self-determination, and capitalism. The ideological alternative to communism, which had become a real power in Russia after the war and revolution, initially proved discredited by reality. It could not halt the rise of anti-democratic nationalism, particularly in Italy and Germany. The Roaring Twenties proved to be a prelude to the Great Depression, which led to a surge in trade union organizing and struggles that overcame nationalist and racist divisions within the working class. This, in turn, became a challenge to capitalist domination, paving the way for a policy of Keynesian class compromise.

Anti-Communism, Free Trade, and Social Reform

This path was only taken, however, after the politically violent nationalism and racism of Europe triggered a second world war, in the aftermath of which communist rule spread as far as East Berlin, Beijing, and Pyongyang, and eventually, Havana and Hanoi. Washington finally got serious about free trade, aiming to create sales and investment opportunities throughout the non-communist world. This applied not only to American companies but also to companies from countries that had united under American leadership to form an anti-communist bloc. This bloc was secured internally through social reforms usually associated with Keynes, but which would certainly fit into Smith's worldview, provided it is not distorted into a stateless market utopia.

The combination of containing communist enemies and free trade among friends didn't last long, because capitalists came to see social reforms within the anti-communist free trade bloc as another road to serfdom. The fight against this ‘Keynesian road to serfdom', begun under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, ended with a global victory of free market ideology after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Chinese communists accepted the rules of world trade written in Washington.

When the prosperity promised under the name of globalization failed to materialize, crises and ever-deepening inequality arose, and previously existing social safety nets disappeared, the specters of American history joined the Adam Smith reforms, now reduced to unregulated markets: the racism of the slavery era, the nationalism of the mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the anti-communism of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The Tea Party movement marked the beginning of the shift from a confident globalism to a fearful liberalism that invoked national and racial superiority; with Donald Trump, it entered the White House.

Smith is neither a suitable witness for globalism, nor for the Tea Party or Trump. Leftists who don't misunderstand Smith as an apostle of unfettered markets might find points of connection with his work. This might be a way to engage in conversation with people who fear the Marxist spectre of communism, consider themselves followers of Smith, but are disillusioned by the policies pursued in Smith's name.

Ingo Schmidt teaches Labour Studies at Athabasca University. Recent books include Reading 'Capital' Today: Marx After 150 Years (with Carlo Fanelli) and The Three Worlds of Social Democracy: A Global View.

Source: https://socialistproject.ca/2026/09/250-years-of-wealth-of-nations-us-independence/#more

Photo Caption: In Panmure House, on the east side of this close, Adam Smith lived from 1778 to 1790.

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September 13, 2026