A series of worker strikes in India’s Hindi heartland, most recently the riots in the Noida industrial zone, have sparked much comment. Among these Saroj Giri recent article in The wire offers one of the most convincing interventions. He argues that a new form of workers’ power is emerging in India’s industrial belts, marked by spontaneous, leaderless direct action that bypasses all traditional mediations. In this way, the hypercontractualization of workers functions as an enabling condition, while capital’s own logic of just-in-time production has produced its counterpart in sudden revolt. His criticism of unions, stuck in the imaginary of the welfare state of the 1970s, is well founded. So is the observation that social media is leaning toward amplifying direct action in real time in ways that confound both state surveillance and media understanding. These are authentic theoretical interventions that deserve to be taken seriously. That said, several qualifications are necessary.
The shape is not entirely new.
Spontaneous and leaderless worker resistance in the form of riots is not solely a product of neoliberalism. Early capitalism was also marked by such eruptions, from the Luddite uprisings to the Captain Swing riots. Marx intervention The Luddite fight was not just about machines. It was a warning that spontaneity without political direction tends to misidentify its enemy, targeting the symptom rather than the source, that is, the underlying production relationship.
Today’s movements show considerably greater sophistication. Workers have been demanding an 8-hour work day, an increase in the minimum wage and double overtime. They are identifying capitalist management as the adversary and pressuring the State to intervene. The current pattern of spontaneous eruption, rapid state concession and subsequent demobilization is also well attested. While the novelty of the form in the current situation is real, it runs the risk of being exaggerated.
The form is not universal.
Since December, wildcat strikes have broken out in approximately 50 to 80 locations, and their momentum accelerated after the nationwide strike on December 12. February, followed by the IOCL strike in Panipat. But beyond Panipat and Noida, this is not yet widespread.. Rather than reflecting a new consciousness of workers, its predominance in industries characterized by high precariousness and immigrant-dominated workforces means that the form is conditioned by a particular labor regime. Assigning universality at this point would combine a conjunctural eruption with a qualitative change in the subjectivity of workers.
The form was produced in part by state aggression.
The form of revolt is not simply chosen by the workers; It is due in part to the conditions of repression they face. When formal organizing is preemptively criminalized through anti-union labor laws, police actions against picketing, and illegal arrests of union leaders across organizations, workers are structurally pushed toward informal, deniable, and leaderless actions precisely because they offer some protection from selective repression.
The Adityanath government’s struggle to identify “instigators” and “conspirators,” its compulsion to invent leaders where there are none, reveals the extent to which this approach confuses the state’s own repressive logic. But it also means the form developed as a reaction to state action, which allows and limits its possibilities.
Union absence versus union failure
This brings us to a more controversial theoretical question, since the two positions have very different political implications. Giri’s article argues that unions have been marginalized since at least Maruti Suzuki in 2013, reduced to doing public relations for workers who decide for themselves. But there is a question of causality that matters politically.
Did the unions fail to enter these spaces despite the existing possibility, suggesting bureaucratization and class collaboration? Or did capital and the state’s successful prevention of unionization produce this form as a natural consequence of that absence? Or both? The diagnoses have different implications. It is not the same question whether we are witnessing the failure of existing unions or the dismissal of unions as such, and their collapse carries the risk of drawing premature conclusions.
The discursive sediment of union campaigns
The emergence of the 8-hour demand in a movement without formal union leadership does not mean that it emerged from nowhere. It suggests that decades of the trade union movement, especially the campaigns against the new labor codes carried out by different central and local unions across India in recent months, have been able to sediment into the common sense of the working class.
Gramsci foresees in his notion of contradictory consciousness that workers carry fragments of “subaltern” knowledge alongside the dominant ideology and that, in moments of rupture, these fragments can rise to the surface. The question is whether this represents a weak discursive inheritance as a slogan floating free from its strategic context or a deeper, more absorbed understanding of what the 8-hour demand means politically, that is, the claim that labor power has limits that capital cannot transgress.
External contradictions and the question of consciousness.
If we identify the cost of living crisis, exacerbated by LPG shortages, as a trigger, the classic question arises about the relationship between economic and political consciousness. Lenin’s point in What should be done? was that union consciousness, even militant union consciousness, arises spontaneously from immediate economic grievances, but transformative consciousness requires political intervention from outside the immediate experience of exploitation. If the immediate trigger is the LPG and cost of living crisis, a social reproduction crisis hitting those already at subsistence levels, then the leap in workers’ collective action may be driven more by external contradictions than by any internal development of political consciousness.
This raises a difficult question: why didn’t pre-existing deplorable working conditions trigger this sooner? You could say that what has changed is that an existential threshold is being crossed. It is worth making a distinction here. It can also be argued that casual labor in organized manufacturing industry, the modern proletariat in the most classical sense, without any interest in property, even with no or less “false property” like Marx. notedIt has a different subjectivity than other exploited sectors that retain a certain ostensible, even illusory, control over insignificant goods. These casual migrant workers who have little to lose are structurally more likely to generalize their grievances. But structural position alone does not produce political generalization without some form of mediation.
The question of constructive direction
“Direct action” could already be the new form of political organization, or it could contain its elements. However, the Tahrir Square and recent Bangladesh cases are instructive, where massive spontaneous mobilizations were ultimately captured by Islamist politics, military restoration, or imperialist-backed civil society, precisely because no organized force with the political coherence and social roots existed to offer an alternative direction.
Social media does not solve this, as platforms are eventually controlled by Capital through algorithms.
The key question is whether the quantitative accumulation of grievances automatically translates into qualitative political transformation. The redundancy of existing “forms” is not the same as the redundancy of unions as such. Current organized sector workplaces have been effectively structured by capital through mass contractualization, legal repression, and the speed of hiring and firing. But workers don’t disappear when the shift ends. They live in slums, in peripheral rental settlements and in labor colonies where the crisis of social reproduction is felt most acutely. It is precisely this terrain that unions and leftist organizations have largely abandoned in favor of the factory gate and the labor commissioner’s office.
What’s next?
The current wave of labor protests and the “form of riots” point to the immediate need to reorient the terrain of labor politics. The domination of capital structures housing, healthcare, access to food, and daily reproduction. A policy that meets workers only at the factory gates grants the rest of their lives to capital and the state, especially at a time when, in the unorganized sector, capital has left no distinction between the workplace and the living space.
A turn toward neighborhood-based community intervention is not a retreat from class politics. It is class politics, well understood. It aims to build community collectives as forms of organization, not as welfare appendages of unions, but as political institutions that practice non-exploitative distribution and appropriation at the community level. Collective kitchens, housing cooperatives, community health initiatives, collective procurement against price gouging, community libraries or even community spaces, all prefigure in practice what class politics imagines in theory, that is, people making decisions acting not as isolated individuals, but as communities organized around the common well-being.
However, there is a risk that these initiatives will be absorbed by NGOization, becoming service providers rather than forms of counterpower. In that case, the creation of new structures of self-governance and spaces of conscience risks being reduced to charity disguised in radical rhetoric rather than challenging the status quo. Therefore, these collectives must be consciously connected to broader demands for planning and democratic control over the social surplus, so that the neighborhood is transformed from a place of life to a place of political formation.
The “form of riot” may well be the maximum expression of workers’ power at this time. Whether it is also sufficient remains an open question, subject to the emergence of new forms of organization.
The author is a former public policy professional and currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. Opinions are personal..
