by Israel Dutra

First published in Portuguese at Revista Movimento. Translation by Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is becoming inevitable. Reflecting broad social opinion, the lower house of Brazil’s parliament has voted to end the odious “6×1” work week (six day/44-hours of work). Starting 60 days after the Senate passed it, the work week will be reduced by one day to five, and to 40 hours. This is undoubtedly an historic victory for the Brazilian working class, one that will have a political impact on the upcoming national election.

The parliamentary vote was overwhelming, with 472 in favour in the first round and only 22 against — mostly MPs from far-right parties such as Novo (New Party), Partido Liberal (Liberal Party), and Missão (Mission Party). The second round vote was 461–19.

The far-right tried all kinds of manoeuvres to obstruct the reform, even proposing a 10-year transition period. The coup plotters’ attempts to generate confusion was defeated, and the bill is now in the Senate. Vigilance and mobilisation are needed, as the bosses remain unhappy with the bill. We must also take advantage of the politicising effect this has had in the streets and on social media.

Popular support

A broad popular majority, expressed in the streets and on social media, celebrated this victory. The much-talked-about WhatsApp family groups this time were not filled with messages of support for conservatism. The proposed work week reduction resonated deeply with tens of millions of Brazilians — an impressive 70% plus of the population supporting it, an unusually high figure in such a politically fractured society.

The persistence of the VAT movement (Movimento Vida Além do Trabalho or Life Beyond Work Movement) succeeded in pushing its progressive agenda amid capitalism’s crisis, which currently offers few or no reforms. The movement helped sway Congress, which is usually aligned with the bosses’ interests and dominated by the Centrão (Big Centre, a centre-right parliamentary bloc). Up against the wall, and with about 120 days until the election, very few parliamentarians wanted to risk being listed as an enemy of the working class.

The government successfully tapped into popular sentiment, knowing this would be a crucial battle as part of its electoral strategy, where every vote matters. It ran advertising campaigns highlighting the importance of free time for all workers. President Lula da Silva spoke publicly about this too. Society became immersed in a discussion around a central issue for workers: the struggle for free time and the work week.

Despite this energy, there were no significant demonstrations in support of the proposal. Why? Leaving aside the paralysis of the main trade union leadership and the Workers Party government’s policy of avoiding actions that generate “street heat”, the new working class, mostly young and concentrated in certain sectors, instead expressed themselves via an unstoppable torrent on social networks. They did not express themselves that much in the streets, due to the lack of a tradition of struggle and a coherent strategy — there was not even a call for a united May Day event. Nevertheless, we have seen an important shift in the political pendulum, if not to the left at least towards a greater sense of class consciousness and class demands. An opening has been created.

This was a struggle with a “national political character,” which also set the agenda for the upcoming election, even if there are also important local struggles. There have been strikes by municipal teachers in state capitals such as São Paulo, and there is an ongoing strike in Belo Horizonte. There was also the strike at São Paulo state universities, which mobilised about 12–15,000 people in opposition to Governor Tarcísio Freitas.

Far-right on backfoot

As the dispute was more political than anything else, it has influenced — and, at the same time, been influenced by — the election campaign. The election campaign is coming to the end of a first period, which will likely last until the “mini-recess” for the World Cup, according to analysts such as Vinicius Torres Freire writing in Folha de São Paulo. The defeat of the 6×1 work week is part of this first period.

The Bolsomaster scandal, which links the Bolsonaro family to the Banco Master financial scandal, has also changed the dynamics of the election campaign. Directly damaging Flávio Bolsonaro, the scandal halted his upward trajectory and has left the far right at an impasse. Confidence among Flávio allies in him has plummeted, as has his voting intentions.

What seemed like the start of a favourable trend has stalled and is now going backwards. Some are even questioning the viability of his candidacy. Amid the unpredictability of our times, nothing is certain, but Flávio is clearly struggling to regain momentum.

Flávio managed to take a photo with Trump, which means a lot for him amid the crisis. He wanted Trump’s blessing to run with the same priorities as his father, Jair, did before. But the right-wing opposition is suspicious of him. Brazilian entrepreneur and Missão party presidential pre-candidate Renan Santos wants to channel the youth vote, while Partido Social Democrático (PSD, Social Democratic Party) pre-candidate Ronaldo Caiado and Novo pre-candidate Romeu Zema are trying to forge a possible alternative in case Flávio’s campaign falters.

Trump’s designation of Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC, Capital’s First Command) and Comando Vermelho (CV, Red Command) as terrorist organisations represents a very serious threat, and raises the spectre of more direct US interference in Brazil’s election.

There is logic behind taking a photo with Trump, as foreign policy will be a key issue in this campaign, and will only gain in importance as time goes on. US imperialism’s quagmire in Iran, its attacks on Cuba, and the popular rebellion in Bolivia are vying for people’s imagination just months out from the election. The far right is gambling its future on the Brazilian and Colombian elections, along with Trump’s strategic bid to win the November US midterm elections.

Support for radical left

In all this, we cannot ignore the strong support shown for Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL, Socialism and Liberty Party) and its leaders on social media as a result of the 6×1 issue. This support will no doubt also express itself politically and electorally. But it is up to PSOL’s left wing to organise this support into a militant social force.

The support on social media has been incredible, especially for PSOL MPs Sâmia Bomfim and Fernanda Melchionna, but also for PSOL MP Erika Hilton and PSOL Rio city councillor Rick Azevedo, who founded the VAT Movement. Sâmia’s ironic takedown of far-right MP Nikolas Ferreira went viral. It takes a lot of nerve to deal with the sheer audacity of such far-right leaders.

We need to mobilise if the Senate threatens to weaken the bill. Trade unions, the UNE (National Union of Students) and the UBES (Brazilian Union of Secondary Students) would need to call for a plan of action and strikes.

Although the working class is not yet mobilised enough to organise a general strike in the immediate term, this option should not be ruled out if the Senate seeks to undo the victory. In that scenario, the social majority that supports ending the 6×1 work week could generate the conditions for a more decisive national action, with large marches and demonstrations. The idea of ​​paralysing the country could serve as a demonstration of the need to go all the way in order to achieve victory, as proposed by STILASP, the trade union who led the successful Pepsico strike.

But we cannot stop there. The millions who have been discussing options for the country and workers in schools, neighbourhoods, shopping centres, universities, factories and workplaces, could become a fundamental asset for building a real instrument of the new working class, one that would vote for Lula as a containment tactic against the far right, but go much further in terms of agenda and methods of struggle.

Trump’s action the day after the significant victory indicates that the polarisation will continue, including in the election campaign. We must throw ourselves into it, taking advantage of the enormous support PSOL has received, to build a movement that guarantees Lula’s victory and the election of a parliamentary bloc committed to present and future struggles.

The Bolivian rebellion teaches us that the far right and capitalists must be defeated through the strength of the working class and the people as a whole, and its program.

Israel Dutra is a sociologist, PSOL Secretary of Social Movements, a member of the party’s National Committee, and a Socialist Left Movement (MES/PSOL) leader.

by Utkarsh Mishra

When Mongolia petitioned the United Nations to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, India was among the countries that formally backed the proposal. The UN General Assembly declared the IYRP on March 15, 2022, with 103 countries and 300 organisations in support.

That was the endorsement. The implementation has been a different story entirely.

The IYRP was formally launched by the FAO in December 2025. Since January 2026, civil society groups and volunteers have held awareness events across several Indian states, often without government funding. Yet not one central ministry—not Environment, not Rural Development, not Animal Husbandry—has launched a dedicated programme. The country that championed the proposal has, so far, remained absent from the year it helped create.

The people bearing the cost of that silence are India’s pastoralist communities — Gujjars and Bakarwals in Jammu and Kashmir, Rabaris and Maldharis in Gujarat and Rajasthan, Gaddis in Himachal Pradesh, Kurubas in Karnataka, and dozens of others whose livelihoods rest on seasonal migration with livestock. How many of them exist is itself a revealing question. India has conducted livestock censuses every five years since 1919, but has never counted the people doing the herding. Estimates range widely — the League for Pastoral Peoples puts the figure at around 13 million, while organisations working in the sector cite figures as high as 20 million. The 2024 Pastoral Livestock Census — the first of its kind in 105 years — may finally change that.

This invisibility did not emerge by accident. It has a colonial root. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 notified entire nomadic and pastoral communities as hereditary criminals, subjecting them to compulsory registration, pass systems, and forced settlement. By the time of independence in 1947, 13 million people across 127 communities were living under this legislation.

The Act was repealed in 1952, but its successor—the Habitual Offenders Act—continued to stigmatise many of the same communities. The bureaucratic suspicion of mobility that the British embedded in law never fully disappeared. Today, when a forest official blocks a traditional grazing route or a village officer refuses to register a nomadic family, the same mindset persists: people who move are seen as difficult to govern, and therefore as a problem.

The land these communities depend on is disappearing at a pace that makes that historical grievance sharply current. About half of India’s common grazing lands have been lost over the past five decades, forcing ex-pastoralists out of herding and into wage labour at construction sites — migrating now with tractors instead of animals. There is no national commons policy in India.  Grasslands and scrublands managed by pastoral communities for centuries have been classified as ‘wastelands’ or ‘degraded forests’ under conservation law, making them legally available for diversion to infrastructure, plantations, and industrial use. Village commons are routinely grabbed by authorities and village elites without recourse, because herders lack the documentation, residency claims, or political access to contest it.

The Forest Rights Act 2006 was meant to address precisely this kind of dispossession. It explicitly recognises habitation and grazing rights for nomadic and pastoralist communities. In practice, pastoralists are still treated as encroachers in forest areas, their seasonal access curtailed for conservation and development projects. The structural problem is that the FRA was designed around sedentary communities. Pastoralists move between alpine pastures, arid expanses, and village commons across different seasons. They are perennial visitors to any given area, which means they cannot establish the documented residence that the FRA claims-making requires. Their traditional routes fall between jurisdictions; their rights fall between laws.

The consequences of this gap are not abstract. In Kachchh, Gujarat, four endangered Kharai camels drowned in a coastal swamp in 2024; 33 more were caught in a sea tide off Jamnagar shortly after. Both incidents were linked to the shrinking of mangrove grazing areas, blocked by the Gujarat Forest Department, the Border Security Force, and the expansion of illegal salt pans. In Rajasthan’s Neemuch district, Raika herders are now walking nearly 300 kilometres across highways and fenced farms in search of fodder. Routes that once passed through open commons have disappeared, forcing pastoralists onto longer, riskier, and more uncertain journeys.

Zoom out, and the economic stakes become clearer. The livestock sector contributes 5.5 per cent of India’s total GVA and has grown at a CAGR of nearly 13 per cent between 2014-15 and 2022-23. India is the world’s largest milk producer, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of global output — 239 million tonnes in 2023-24 alone. For small and marginal farm households, livestock contributes over 16 per cent of total income, higher than the rural average. Pastoralists maintain the hardy indigenous breeds that support much of this productivity, steward grassland ecosystems that store carbon, disperse native seeds across landscapes, and keep ecological corridors alive across fragmented habitats. The sector’s numbers appear in every government press release. The people behind those numbers rarely do.

Against this backdrop, two state-level interventions stand out — not as solutions, but as evidence that policy recognition is not impossible when there is political will. In January 2025, the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department issued a landmark notification identifying 1,637 pastoral routes and halting sites across the state, directing forest officials to avoid planting trees in these corridors under any afforestation scheme. It was the first such official mapping of pastoral routes anywhere in the country. In March 2026, Himachal followed up with a Rs 300 crore plan that includes digital IDs and formal grazing rights for shepherds. In Jammu and Kashmir, the tribal affairs department has initiated free livestock transport for Gujjars and Bakarwals during seasonal migration — a small measure, but one that acknowledges the cost of mobility rather than penalising it.

These remain isolated exceptions. For many pastoralist communities, recognition is still something to be hoped for rather than expected. That this conversation is still about visibility, legitimacy, and belonging in 2026 speaks to how far policy has lagged behind reality.

India was among the countries that championed the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. To make that commitment truly meaningful, India should urgently adopt a national commons policy, legally recognise pastoral mobility as a legitimate form of land use, and ensure the full implementation of pastoral rights already existing in law. The time for symbolic gestures has passed; concrete policy action is now essential.

The year is already half over. For pastoralists, the question remains: will India take deliberate action to recognise and support their rights, or will 2026 be remembered as another missed opportunity?

by Hugh J. Curran

Photo caption.  Photo of Sudan by MIGUEL BAIXAULI on Unsplash

Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Until gaining independence, the Sahell nations of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have been among the poorest countries in Africa. They were known as French West Africa, having been colonized during the “Scramble for Africa” in the 1880’s and 1890 s and after gaining independence in 1960 formed an “Alliance of Sahel States”(AES).

Having taught courses on “conflict resolution” concerning the Sudan, DRC Congo, Cameroon and Nigeria, it was clear to me that almost all African nations share a similar history of having been colonized by Europeans with the primary intention of resource extraction. The Congo was the most notorious in this respect, led by Belgium’s King Leopold between 1885 to 1909, a man who made a pretense of being humanitarian while extracting wealth in the form of rubber during the “rubber boom”.  Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” explored some of the themes of European imperialism and racism prevailing at that time, while Irish born Roger Casement, a British Consul, revealed in published articles, the pillaging by Leopold’s agents and his private mercenary army’s systemic brutality

In a similar vein Sudan suffered from an 1898 invasion of Khartoum by a joint British-Egyptian force under General Kitchener. The British colonizers favored South Sudan by encouraging Christian missionary endeavors while allowing the north Sudanese to be governed by an Arab-Muslim elite.

Britain’s method of control of Sudan followed their colonial policy of encouraging division among indigenous groups in order to maintain control, thus exacerbating civil unrest between north and south Sudan. When they departed in 1956 the British left a deeply divided country with South Sudan eventually separating from north Sudan.  We now see the consequences of these divisions with the two Sudans devastated by a series of armed conflicts, recently described as the “world’s largest displacement of indigenous people with an inevitable hunger crisis.”

In terms of the Sahel region, other causes of conflict include control of gold mines, the extraction of fossil fuels, and newly developed lithium deposits, as well as climate change throughout the Sahel, a  savannah stretching from Senegal to Sudan. This has turned marginal areas into sparse grazing for nomadic livestock herders, while outsiders, such as the UAE Emirates and Russia have been supplying military equipment to favored factions, thus increasing the violence in conflict areas.

More beneficial assistance has come from China, which has provided much-needed infrastructure, offering loans and humanitarian assistance in exchange for access to mining and resource extraction. In the AES Alliance in West Africa, they have begun investing heavily in Lithium mining.

The Sahel nations of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso (AES) share some of same the extreme conditions experienced by Sudan and the Congo in terms of European colonization. In 1960 they declared Independence from France and in 2022-2024 the military juntas of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) rejected U.S. and France’s military aid in favor of military aid from Russia, China, Turkey and the UAE. But terrorism and poorly planned trade agreements have brought serious difficulties.  Having survived  the Mali War and Boko Haram insurgency, the  AES states have expelled not only the French military presence but also U.S. drone facilities. It has also pledged to suspend military rule and return to civilian rule,

The  U.S. has several thousand personnel in East Africa under U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and up to 30 bases in Africa carrying out “security, surveillance and counterinsurgency missions”. Up until recently, one of the most beneficial organizations for aid in Africa has been  USAID, which provided economic and security support, so its loss, following the U.S. “Shutdown” of health and humanitarian aid programs, has resulted in the rise of insurgencies and the increase of regional violence.

What the Sahel Alliance (AES) is facing beyond internal problems and insurgencies is desertification. Prolonged droughts are endemic in the Sahel savanna, a 600 mile-wide swath of northern Africa. The Sahel reaches to Northwest Cameroon and includes Lake Chad which has been a main provider of water to indigenous people for generations, but now has lost 90% of its capacity due to climate change and over-grazing.

There are serious attempts at re-invigorating the Sahel with the “UNCCD Great Green Wall Initiative” which spans 22 African countries. This international project uses traditional as well as newly applied forestry & farming practices and has raised $14 billion to “support a target of completion by 2030. There are numerous localized success stories as it continues to expand to a projected 8,000 km x 15 km wide strip extending across Africa. Already 30 million hectares of land have been rehabilitated and 350,000 “green jobs” created.

Africa is a vast continent with 54 nations and a population of 1.5 billion inhabitants in an area that could fit Canada, the U.S., China, India and Europe, with room to spare. It is all too easy for American media to misunderstand the larger context and to focus only on civil wars and other forms of conflict while distorting  the nature of a resource- rich continent where many highly-motivated people have survived centuries of brutal colonization.

In Nigeria alone fossil fuel extraction provides a major part of its economy. It also has the largest seminary in the world, with many of its graduates serving in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. Nigeria has been humorously described as having an “edifice complex” with very large churches and mosques built for its 100 million Christians in the South and 100 million Muslims in the north.

There are over thirty nations investing in Africa who are benefiting from its rich resources. Some, under pressure from humanitarian organizations, provide educational opportunities as well as healthcare benefits. Canadian mining corporations, for instance, have invested $40 billion in Africa, but have had to face civil lawsuits before being compelled to be more accountable and to provide help to families of miners.

Africa can find its way to conflict resolution if only those who foment violence would stop providing weapons to extremists and to the “grievance culture” that divides small countries such as Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso into militant factions. It would be more helpful if Western media focused on the more positive side of indigenous cultures and the high levels of optimism and aspirations that motivate the youth of Africa.

by David Montgomery

Photo image.  Havana,  foto: Bill Hackwell

The administration is targeting travelers who criticize US policy.

The Trump administration has begun to weaponize long-standing restrictions on freedom to travel to Cuba, focusing on travelers who criticize the US policy of asphyxiating the Cuban economy and threatening a military attack.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the arm of the Treasury Department that enforces US economic sanctions against other countries—has sent a “request for information” to the advocacy group Code Pink about its participation in the international humanitarian convoy that brought 500 people from more than 30 countries carrying an estimated 35 tons of food, medicine, solar panels, and other aid to Havana in March. As part of the convoy, Code Pink chartered a plane for 170 participants that also carried 6,300 pounds of medical supplies worth $433,000 arranged by Global Health Partners.

Treasury officials are demanding to know “everything you did while you were in Cuba, who went, how did you go, how did you pay for everything, all the receipts, the detailed description of everything you took for donations…what hotel did you stay in,” Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink, told The Nation.

Benjamin suspects the May 21 OFAC inquiry aims to quell dissent against President Donald Trump’s increasingly harsh approach to Cuba, which has triggered the worst humanitarian crisis on the island in memory. An American oil blockade imposed in January set off a chain reaction of daily blackouts, food shortages, water shortages, medical emergencies, and reported deaths. “I think it’s intimidation, totally, and we don’t want to be intimidated,” Benjamin said. “We’re telling all the people who went with us don’t be intimidated. Just use this as another spark in the fire to challenge this sadistic policy.”

Code Pink has started to compile the information requested by OFAC, Benjamin added. “We think we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Federal scrutiny of the trip has implications beyond one group’s mission to Havana. It’s another blow to Cuba’s already devastated hospitality industry—a major pillar of the economy—and represents an additional tool for turning up pressure on the Cuban government, according to experts in travel to Cuba. “This will certainly serve to chill travel to Cuba by well-meaning Americans who have every right under the current structures and categories to go to Cuba,” said Peter Kornbluh, co-author of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana, who has led tours to the island. “But it also is a warning to anybody that opposes the cruel and anti-humanitarian nature” of the current approach to Cuba. “The Trump administration is weaponizing a humanitarian trip to Cuba to persecute, not just to prosecute, those who are speaking out against the cruel and malicious US policy and trying to help the Cuban people.”

The Treasure Department’s press office didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment for this story. The existence of the inquiry was previously reported by Fox News Digital, which also said others received a “subpoena,” including left wing influencer Hasan Piker who traveled to Havana on the Code Pink charter. As of last week, “your boy has yet to receive a subpoena,” Piker told his audience on Twitch.

Official inquiries into American travelers’ activities in Cuba were not uncommon in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, since President Barack Obama sought to thaw relations between the nations and visited Havana himself in 2016, the assets control office has generally left travelers alone. “Obama basically decided that OFAC should be out of the travel curtailment business,” Kornbluh said.

Even during Trump’s first term, US travel to Cuba continued to soar, reaching a record 638,000 visitors in 2018, according to the Cuban government, despite Trump’s tightening some categories of travel. There were few, if any, reports of the US government demanding the records of travelers to Cuba during Trump’s first term and President Joe Biden’s term, said Robert Muse, a Washington, DC, lawyer with long experience counseling clients on OFAC compliance issues.

Americans can travel to Cuba for any of 12 authorized reasons, including “support for the Cuban people,” “humanitarian projects,” and “educational activities.” The Code Pink group traveled under the category of support for the Cuban people, Benjamin said. That means having a schedule of activities that yield meaningful interaction with the Cuban people, according to the regulations. Some members of the group spent all their time painting a mural with Cuban artists, as reported by The Nation from Havana, while others participated in a daily schedule of activities posted in their hotel, including visiting neighborhoods to meet residents, listening to speakers, and making art with children in a playground.

The March humanitarian aid convoy came under withering attack in right-wing news accounts and social media, with headlines like “The Flotilla of Shamelessness in Cuba.” The commentators highlighted a gathering of hundreds of convoy participants one afternoon in the Havana convention center, where Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel addressed the visitors: “Your presence on the island constitutes a profound demonstration of friendship, sensibility, and human commitment to the Cuban people.” The recent Fox News report on the OFAC inquiry claims it is part of a “broader dragnet…of anti-US Marxists, communists and socialists.”

Demands for records like the one to Code Pink “go through cyclical periods depending on US-Cuba relations generally, and we’re clearly in a downdraft here,” said Muse. The winds started to change again in June 2025 when Trump issued a national security memorandum that, in part, instructed the Treasury to ensure that travelers comply with regulations and keep records of their activities for five years. Indeed, participants in the convoy faced lengthy questioning when they landed in Miami on their return from Havana in March. At least 18 travelers had their electronic devices searched, and some phones and laptops were confiscated for several days.

The maximum civil penalty for, say, engaging in tourism, which is forbidden, rather than permitted activities is $111,000, while the criminal maximum is $250,000 and up to 20 years in prison—though lawyers say actual sentences would likely be far lower.

Muse is focused on whether escalating aggressive enforcement against travelers turns out to be the latest screw that Trump has found to tighten on Cuba, along with the oil embargo, the recent indictment of Raúl Castro, threats of military action on the island, and the campaign against Cuban doctors serving in other countries. “If they do an across-the-board set of administrative proceedings, maybe go criminal in a case or two, then they’re fitting it into maximum pressure,” said Muse. “Rights of US citizens then become implicated. This then extends the embargo beyond Cuba and brings it home in aggressive examination of broadly First Amendment–protected activity.”

Benjamin vowed that the scrutiny of the trip would not deter activists advocating for a change in Cuba policy. Last week, Code Pink has been on Capitol Hill advocating for resolutions in the House and the Senate that would force votes on requiring the Trump administration to win congressional approval to launch military action against Cuba. The federal inquiry “is taking time and energy and money,” she said, “but it’s not going not take us away from the main issue,” which is “Cuba and what they’re suffering.”

by Marwan Asmar

Israel’s government, soldiers and settlers destroyed between 13,000 and 14000 olive trees in the occupied West Bank in the first five months of 2026. The figures are based on different Palestinian and Israeli sources.

In May 2026 alone Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he had ordered the uprooting and destruction of 3000 trees in northern Palestine. The uprooting of these trees were ordered to be felled in a single day.

In early February, 2006 human rights’ groups reported that over 8000 trees were destroyed and a report by the Palestinian Wall and Settlement Commission (PWSC) released last Mid-May showed that 4,414 had been uprooted, destroyed and/or poisoned.

The uprooting of “Palestinian trees” by Israeli settlers backed by the Zionist army has become a normal state of affairs as it has increased viciously since October 2023 when over 37,200 olive trees were “uprooted”, “broken” and “burned” in conjunction with the Israeli war and slaughter of Gaza.

The situation spelled disaster for Palestinian farmers. In cahoots with Israeli soldiers, settlers would go down on Palestinian villages and towns and start uprooting olive trees out of sheer vandalism.

At the end of last April, this is exactly what happened when settlers from the “Adi Ad” settlement descended on the Turmus Aya village that lies to the north-east of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and started to destroy and vandalize 400 olive trees.

As they did this, on Saturday night, they were guarded by the Israeli army. This attack came days after the settlers descended on the village and set fire to a house and a car there.

The attack on Turmus Aya is not an isolated incident. The village has been targeted for the past few years. The PWSC, a monitoring organization of such attacks said the Israeli army had been responsible for 1,322 of such attacks while the settlers involved for 497 acts of vandalism on different Palestinian cities with Hebron topping the list at (321), Nablus (315), Ramallah (292) and Jerusalem (203).

Statistics point out that Israel has destroyed between 800,000 and 1 million olive trees in the occupied Palestinian territories from 1967 till now. However, since that year, when Israel effectively occupied all of the Palestinian territories, it destroyed 2.5 million trees.

Besides olives, they included orange (different varieties), lemon, grapefruit and clementine trees. The Palestinian territories are known for their varieties like almond, figs, apricots, peaches and plums trees.

These trees were destroyed by the Israeli occupation for basic military takeover to expand the Palestinian lands with Israeli settlements – about 147 settlements and 224 outposts – and create the required infrastructure and roads for these since some of them resemble big cities.

In the case of the Smotrich announcement for example, and the uprooting of 3000 trees on Palestinian lands in the north West Bank, the purpose there was to expand the Israeli Shaked Industrial Park which is next to the settlement there that has the same name.

Gaza, another story

Gaza is another sad story for the Israeli genocide has affected the whole of the agricultural sector. During the last war on the Gaza Strip, Israel destroyed 1 million trees according to Fayyad Fayyad, head of the Palestinian Olive Council. The destruction literally decimated the agriculture sector of the enclave.

Prior to 7 October, 2023, Gaza had 1.1 million trees roughly producing 50,000 tons of olives every year but no more.  About 98 percent of Gaza’s tree cropland has been destroyed.

Dr Mazen Qumsiyeh, a biologist at Bethlehem University, calls the destruction in Gaza an “ecocide” as statistics show that over the past two years and more, Israel has destroyed between 500,000 to 700,000 non-olive trees.

Today in Gaza everything has been razed to the ground. There had once been 35 olive oil presses in the Strip but most of these have been destroyed with only five left as of the end of last year.

The loss of a million olive trees is a $50-million-plus-loss since the total olive oil sector (West Bank and Gaza) contributed between $160 and $190 million to the Palestinian national economy as a direct result of exports to regional and international markets.

The olive oil sector accounts for roughly five percent of the Palestinian GDP and 20 percent of the agricultural sector. Further olive oil production sustains 100,000 families in the Palestinian territories.

by Domingo Pérez Valenzuela & Serhii Shlyapnikov

The labour movement is in crisis across much of the world. One exception is Chile. Since the mid-2000s, the South American country has seen a sustained upward trend in strikes and labour mobilisations. But does this represent a genuine revitalisation of trade unionism — and what are its limits?

Domingo Pérez Valenzuela is a Chilean sociologist whose research focuses on labour geography, trade union movements and strike dynamics in contemporary Chile. He is an academic at the Institute of International Studies (INTE), Arturo Prat University, in Iquique, Chile, and Director of the Observatorio de Huelgas Laborales (OHL, Labour Strike Observatory), which has systematically recorded strikes in Chile since 2010. He is co-author, with Rodrigo Medel, Diego Velásquez, Francisca Gutiérrez, Pablo Pérez and Maurizio Atzeni, of Huelgas laborales y revitalización sindical en Chile (Strikes and Trade Union Revitalization in Chile, OHL, 2025).

Pérez Valenzuela spoke with Serhii Shlyapnikov for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal to discuss the resurgence of Chilean trade unionism in Chile, strengths and limitations of its strike model, and what lessons the country’s recent labour struggles offer for labour renewal internationally.

How did the OHL project come about?

The OHL emerged as a result of three factors.

First, there used to be a database for recording major strikes in Chile, which registered a huge number of labour stoppages that did not figure in official statistics and were little known about in the social sciences. This database stopped being maintained after 2010, because its creator [Alberto Armstrong, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile] unfortunately passed away.

Second, the 2010s saw the consolidation of a steep rise in strikes and social mobilisations, which had a significant impact on labour and social class studies.

Third, a group of researchers concluded that strikes were essential for reading capitalist society, as they facilitated a structural estimation of social conflict. So, around 2014–15, this group, together with the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and Alberto Hurtado University, founded the OHL.

The main objective was to register and study, from a social sciences perspective, all workers’ collective actions involving a deliberate withdrawal of labour over demands, requests or claims, regardless of their legal status.

When did the trade union movement’s resurgence begin? The “Summary of Labour Strikes in Chile 2022–23” graph (below) shows that the strike wave peaked in 2015–19. Was it a consequence of the huge social protests between 2006–19?

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Many researchers and union leaders have sought to understand to what extent this trade unionism resurgence was, on the one hand, the product of one or several specific events and, on the other, the product of a long cumulative process.

There is a broad consensus that the first clear signals or revival came in 2006–07 when subcontract workers at Codelco [the National Copper Corporation of Chile], and then subcontractors in other strategic primary industries, staged strikes and radical actions that shook entire sectors, forced contracting companies to negotiate and exposed to the country what lay beneath economic growth: tens of thousands of precarious and discriminated workers, earning a fraction of what plant workers earned, under worse working conditions and without access to serious negotiations [with contracting companies]. Those strikes were a turning point for labour and society, and one of several “mobilisation milestones” achieved by different labour sectors in subsequent years, all of which we explore in the book.1

Then, 2006 saw an unprecedented school students’ rebellion and strong residents’ mobilisations for housing, followed by university mobilisations in 2011. After many other events, the October 2019 explosion finally occurred — a true popular rebellion in which Chilean society rediscovered that protest was possible and that the established order could be challenged on the streets.

During this protest cycle, many strikes evolved into stoppages at the comuna [local council] level, as well as general strikes for specific demands. Evidence suggests that trade unionism managed to become dynamic mainly through the labour strike wave that grew sharply from 2007, peaking with the largest mass political strike in the country’s history in 2019.2

Of course, the strongest unions — those covering miners, public employees, and industrial and port workers — built their power through patient and sustained organisational work, often in silence and at high cost (including deaths), during years of centre-left and right-wing governments. But union forces also emerged for the first time in the service sector, covering bank, supermarket, telecommunications, warehouse and transport workers, among others. Here, social protest amplified what had been built from below.

What lessons can be drawn from the strikes in Chile? What can be replicated in other countries? Developing trade union culture through the use of the media? Developing workplace organising? Developing mutual support groups at the neighbourhood level?

The Chilean experience suggests that none of these three paths works alone. And that unions must also be prepared to mobilise, which was the most dynamic factor we observed. That said, there is a sequence that appears to show a way forward. Workplace organising is the foundation without which all other aspects become fragile, especially when a repressive and anti-union environment prevails at work and when the collective bargaining system is fragmented (as in Chile). A union that has no power in the workplace, that cannot stop production, that workers do not respect or trust, that employers do not fear, cannot sustain any of these other strategies for very long.

Neighbourhood mutual support networks, or even forms of community unionism, are an indispensable complement to creating a union movement at the local scale, sustaining long conflicts and uniting workers in various companies with similar conditions. Strike “resistance funds,” union halls shared between organisations, and community solidarity with workers’ organisations — all of this is real, not rhetorical, infrastructure that builds strength. The media — and today social networks — can be used against companies. They are also needed to spread information among dispersed workers and useful for communicating concrete victories. However, a union without a base will have nothing to communicate, or not be able to do so clearly. In turn, leaders or members without training in managing social networks can fall into traps and disorganisation.

All these factors, and others, allow us to tell when a union is strong and when it is not. But this opens up another huge debate: strong for what? The big debate is really about strategy: what do different unions want to achieve? This determines whether such factors will benefit a group, a sector or a portion of the working class.

In Chile, trade union strategies have historically been shaped by a high degree of organisational fragmentation. The predominant form of action has been isolated activity at the enterprise union level, in a context where only a minority of organisations (about a quarter) are affiliated to federations, confederations or national labour centres. At the same time, at the national coordinating level, the second predominant strategy has been a socio-political form of trade unionism, with these coordinating bodies being closely linked to the historic centre-left and left-wing parties. The main institutional expression of this has been the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile (CUT, Workers’ United Centre of Chile), the country’s largest labour confederation. However, even at this level there have been significant fractures, reflected in the existence of other labour centres, confederations and movements operating outside the CUT’s orbit, though without any broad transversal unity among them.

During the 2019–20 uprising, this scenario evolved dynamically. The outbreak was rapidly transformed into a popular revolt by social movements, especially neighbourhood class-struggle organisations and the feminist movement [Coordinadora Feminista 8M or March 8 Feminist Coordinating Committee] that focuses on building a general strike. The CUT took several days to interpret the situation and define its position. But thanks to its greater organisational stability and coordinating capacity, it managed to lead a broader Trade Union Bloc, with forces outside its traditional sphere, which called the largest political mass strike in the country’s history, constituting the rebellion’s high point.

This process bears important similarities to what Alexander Gallas and Jörg Nowak have written regarding contemporary mass strikes. Such mobilisations are no longer led primarily by the traditional, stable, industrial worker, but rather by precarious and frequently non-unionised sectors. Similarly, along the lines of the authors’ conclusion, the 2019 mass strike in Chile was initially a defensive response to a neoliberal offensive and deepening social precarisation. However, ultimately driven by the broader social rebellion, it took on an offensive character and advanced multiple structural demands, nearly bringing down the government.

The book looks at trade union resurgence along the four dimensions proposed by Behrens, Hamann and Hurd: membership, economic influence, political influence and institutional changes. Which of these dimensions contributed the most and least to the resurgence in Chile? Why?

In our book, we show how membership — in successful but initially limited experiences — and mobilisation energised the political and social dimensions. On the other hand, collective bargaining was not so successful; it did not lead to any major legislative changes nor the construction of broad alliances with political forces. Outside this general framework, strong Chilean unions — particularly large industry-wide federations — have managed to directly influence the creation of new unions, government programs, legislative agendas and constitutional negotiations, since 2019.

Membership remains weak, marked by unionisation rates in the private sector of about 15–20%. This structural situation, together with the difficulty of achieving unity, is what most limits or conditions the scenario I have described. Finally, the economic dimension, perhaps naturally, remains key. Chile is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This fuels workplace tensions. In turn, financial precarity makes unions generally poor. Therefore, sharing resources has become vital for them to project themselves into the future.

Is it easy to start a strike in Chile? What is the procedure? Is it true that the strongest unions (with the best contracts) resort to strikes more frequently?

Quite the opposite: it is always an intense and difficult process to carry out successfully, so its execution must come from a careful strategic analysis by the union.

Strictly speaking, in any society with high inequality, workers will begin to feel the first conflict simply because they want to organise at work. From there onwards, the conflict occurs under unequal conditions. Then, if a group of workers manages to establish a union after long silent, underground, hidden work, they find that the legal procedure to hold a strike is regulated and limited: the union must be in a formal process of collective bargaining, which has strict deadlines; there is a mandatory mediation stage; and the vote to go on strike requires an absolute majority of members.

Until the 2016 labour reform, companies also had the right to replace striking workers, which made work stoppages much more ineffective. After the reform, this changed to only allowing companies to maintain “minimum services,” which still means a total stoppage cannot occur.3

This explains why so many of the most significant strikes in recent decades have been technically illegal: powerful unions (primarily in terms of their size) have called strikes when needed or in response to urgent demands, while protecting themselves from possible reprisals.

That said, in comparative terms, the OHL found that conflict arises at an intermediate level of strength relative to employers, because if power is high, the union imposes its demands even before sitting down at the negotiating table. Due to the lack of institutional power, unions in Chile have to compensate for their lack of legal power through the power of mobilisation. When this power is high, you can choose to take legal or non-legal strikes, or alternate between them, depending on need and context.

When reading the chapters on specific strikes (Codelco subcontractors, teachers), one gets the impression that Chilean unions use the strategy of “trade unionism as a social movement” (street mobilisation, coalitions, direct action). Is this impression correct?

This impression is accurate for the most dynamic and long-standing sectors but not the majority of unions, given that in Chile union affiliation with federations, confederations and central bodies is a minority phenomenon.

What the literature calls “trade unionism as a social movement” — the combination of workplace negotiation and public space mobilisation — describes well the effect that subcontractor mobilisations had from 2006 onwards, but it does not describe these germinal events themselves. Rather, it was only in the 2010s that unions began to receive greater social support and to unite with other social sectors — still insufficiently — to achieve results.

What have been the most important strikes in Chile in the past two decades? Could you point to any strike that was a turning point?

The strikes from 2006 to 2008 unleashed deep labour unrest and produced real changes: a greater predisposition to unionise, legislation on subcontracting, new forms of alliances, and increased scientific research on workers’ power.

After that, I would say that a series of mobilisation milestones took place. Many of these had a large community impact when they occurred within key industries in a region. Other milestones had strong public repercussions when they took on a mass character in cities, such as the mobilisations by education and health workers. But among this series of milestones that were fundamental, the most powerful were the local council-scale mobilisations, such as the regional strikes in Aysén or Calama, where unions and communities paralysed an entire city to put forward their demands.4

The book also shows that the strongest unions are in the public sector and mining. Why does the public sector have strong unions, despite the lack of a legal right to strike?

This is one of the most striking paradoxes of the Chilean case, although, to be precise, the strong levels of unionisation is limited to permanent public employees, and does not extend to fee-based contract workers, where the challenge of achieving unity remains.

The explanation has several layers. The first is institutional: public sector workers have job stability that private sector workers do not, because they benefit from much more effective regulations regarding grounds for dismissal. This reduces the individual cost of organising and going on strike. A public employee who participates in a work stoppage will not fear dismissal in the same way as a worker in a private company, where firing someone is very easy.

The second layer is historical: public sector unions covering teachers, healthcare workers, municipal employees, etc, have decades of organising culture and a national structure. They know how to hold assemblies, manage internal conflicts or share organisational resources with other groups seeking to unionise or with social movements.

The third layer is socio-structural: a strike by teachers or hospital workers receives immediate public visibility, which tends to politicise these movements. If the employer state is also a political state that sometimes seeks to make public work precarious, public employees respond as a union movement. Unity, then, is and has been their greatest strength.

What about mining? Why has this sector also seen a sustained resurgence?

Mining concentrates conditions that are almost unique for union power. The strategic position of Chilean copper in the global economy — the country produces about 25–30% of the world’s copper — means that a stoppage at Codelco or at Escondida is felt in international commodity markets.

Added to this are the cohesive nature of mining communities. Cities such as Calama, El Salvador or Chuquicamata are largely mining towns, where the union is not just a labour institution but the centre point of social, sporting and cultural life. This community implantation is what allows long strikes to be sustained. Union communities also have a strategic advantage: companies depend on vulnerable transport routes and facilities located in geographical areas where workers’ power has pushed back police forces through united mobilisation. The unions themselves, in turn, have been very strategic in analysing the potential for mobilising labour in these communities.

In many countries, mines are closing and workers are trying to leave such places. In Chile, is it older workers that mainly work in mines or are young people also seeking employment there due to high wages? What can you tell us about the social profile of miners?

The profile of miners is heterogeneous and changing. High wages in large-scale mining attracts many young people with technical training from institutes and universities. Once in the mine, they learn from older generations of the unionised working class, both plant workers and contractors. This, however, poses a challenge for classical trade unionism. The new generations often bring very specific practices and are focused on wages and working conditions, rather than solutions to the broader challenges of uniting different labour groups across thousands of contracting companies and within the plant itself. There are different paths to politicisation.

Chile had a left-wing government when Gabriel Boric was president. To what extent did this help trade unions and social movements?

At the OHL, we have not analysed this, as we have concentrated on researching workers’ agency and conflict in the labour process. That said, personally, I believe it is a mistake — one often made in the international media — to associate Boric’s government with the left, given that its main reference point is “progresismo” (progressivism), which seeks a broad alliance between the centre-left and liberals. Its driving force, moreover, was the middle classes. Even so, many left-wing people organised to support this government. But the relationship was more complex than a simple sum of its parts.

Boric came to power in 2022 with an agenda that included historic trade union demands, mainly advocated by the Communist Party: reduction of the workday, better protection for platform workers, collective bargaining reform. Some of those promises were fulfilled: in 2023, the work week was reduced to 40 hours. This was an advance that the trade union movement applauded.

The government had to deal with deep tensions, an unprecedented pandemic, market pressures, a radical sector that refused to support it, the defeat of the constituent process in the September 2022 referendum, and public opinion, which grew more conservative as changes (either minor or radical) failed to materialise. This led the government to moderate its agenda, with structural reforms, such as industry-wide collective bargaining, left pending until the last days.

There is broad union consensus that bargaining across entire occupational sectors, instead of company by company, would have radically changed the balance of forces. Some, however, also warned this was not a panacea, and could result in union bureaucratisation if the balance of forces at the grassroots did not change.

What threat does the new right-wing José Antonio Kast government pose to trade unions?

Kast and the Republican Party, although only one portion of the ruling class, represent an ideological right-wing force that is not afraid to confront other political sectors. This threat is not abstract. The most direct threat is to reverse or weaken recent labour reforms: roll back the 40-hour work week law, enable employer irregularities, and provide fewer resources for labour inspection. But the government has already accumulated multiple tensions, and many issues remain on the table, from the significant weakening of real wages to the privatisation of state-owned companies.

Today, the far right is once again proposing a wave of anti-popular initiatives. But recent history teaches us that trade union movements can not be easily dismantled by governments. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship tried to destroy trade unionism through direct repression but never fully succeeded. The government of mega-capitalist Sebastián Piñera militarily repressed a social uprising, but he too failed to dismantle union forces.

What films or books on the Chilean labour movement can you recommend?

Tejedores de la revolución (Weavers of the Revolution) by Peter Winn is one of the best books on Chilean labour history. It follows the Yarur textile factory workers during the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) period: how they organised, how they pushed beyond what then-president Salvador Allende wanted, and how they experienced defeat. It is history from below.

In terms of more recent developments, El renacer de la huelga obrera en Chile (The Rebirth of the Workers’ Strike in Chile) by Antonio Aravena and Daniel Núñez, details the resurgence of union mobilisation, looking at the struggles of subcontract workers between 2006–08. It highlights the new forms of organisation and collective action that converted spontaneity into organisation in the sector.

From a broader perspective, there is Building Power to Shape Labor Policy: Unions, Employer Associations, and Reform in Neoliberal Chile by Pablo Pérez, which delves into “class power” to explain why Chilean trade unionism has struggled to influence institutional power, despite the country’s political changes.

Rodrigo Medel and Sebastián Osorio’s Sindicalismos en Chile: Desde la reestructuración neoliberal a la posdictadura (Trade Unionisms in Chile: From Neoliberal Restructuring to the Post-Dictatorship Era) offers a multi-sectoral study.

Finally, Guía de Acción Sindical (Trade Union Action Guide), which was recently published and is available for free and online, draws together and synthesises many of the tactics and innovations of unions in terms of membership, bargaining, and strikes.

As for the OHL, we have produced many annual reports that provide a first-hand, rigorous and accessible source of information on contemporary labour conflict. Among them is our 2018 Report, which includes an important comparative perspective, and our 2019 Report, which focuses on the general strike at the centre of the social uprising.

As for documentaries, I have to mention the feature film, Pueblo en huelga (People on Strike), which I was invited to collaborate on. It follows 11 labour struggles, in sectors such as retail, warehouses, education and industries, during the 2010s, culminating in the 2019 social revolt, all of which centred on the demand for dignity at work.

• 1Note by S.Shlyapnikov: The Codelco subcontractors’ strike took place between June 25–July 31, 2007. It involved 28,000 workers employed by subcontracting and contracting companies providing services at Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine. Subcontractors demanded equal pay with permanent workers employed by Codelco at the mine. The movement’s leader was Cristián Cuevas, President of the Confederation of Copper Workers (CTC) and, at the time, a member of the Communist Party of Chile.
• 2Note by S.Shlyapnikov: The 2019 Estallido Social (Social Outburst) was a wave of popular protest that took place from October 7, 2019 to March 18, 2020. The formal trigger was a rise in metro train fares. After the first weeks of protest, then-president Sebastian Piñera declared a state of emergency, deploying troops to Santiago and then other regional capitals. By February 2020, 36 deaths and more than 11,000 injuries were recorded. The Social Outburst also gave rise to new cultural symbols, such as the dog “Negro Matapacos” (Black Cop-Killer) and the “Dark Avengers” or “Chilean Avengers”. The protests ended after a security force crackdown, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the decision to hold a referendum on a new constitution.
• 3Note by S. Shlyapnikov : Unlike in the United States, there is no official vote to certify a union as the exclusive representative of all workers. The union represents only its members. At the same time, collective bargaining is decentralised and takes place at the company level.
• 4Note by S. Shlyapnikov: The Aysén strike began on February 18, 2012, in the city of Puerto Aysén, located 1640 kilometres south of Santiago. Residents protested against the high cost of living, the lack of quality healthcare and education, poor transportation links with other regions, and the fact that profits from natural resource extraction (mainly gas and water) went to the central government rather than remaining in the region.

by Varanasi Subrahmanyam

It is eight in the morning. Maina Devi stands at a bus stop on the sidewalk beside a large warehouse in Noida’s Phase 2 industrial belt. Her left thumb was wrapped in a fresh bandage. The day before, a wire terminal had punctured through the flesh while she worked at Gurudas Amardas International Private Limited. It is a firm that makes wire harnesses for automobiles and shielded cables for data systems. The pain is severe. But she is waiting for the company bus regardless.

A reporter asked her why she isn’t resting. She answers.  She has three children to support.  If she missed a single day of work, she would lose 530 rupees. That is the hard arithmetic of her life-  brutal, and non-negotiable.

Maina Devi is a migrant from Muradabad. It is 160 kilometres from Noida¹, which lies in Gautam Buddha Nagar District of UP, bordering Delhi. Before this job, she worked for two years in garment factories across the road in the Noida hosiery complex. Those factories, she says, paid even less-  nine thousand rupees a month. “For two years I stood at the table cutting threads in twelve-hour shifts,” she recalls, “and the company did not increase our wages by even one rupee.” When she worked overtime –  three to four hours nearly every day, she says –  she was paid twenty-five rupees per hour, in open violation of the law that mandates a minimum of twice the regular wage for overtime. Nobody complained. Because nobody could afford to lose their job, around her, her younger co-workers nod.

Lower wages; twelve-hour work is the norm in Noida factories.

The Factory Republic: The Capital and Labour in Noida

What did happen in Noida’s industrial zone in April 2026? We must first understand what Noida actually is. It is not the glass-tower city of IT parks and expressways that appears on the glossy real estate brochures.  But it is the other Noida.  The Noida of sheds and sirens, of migrant dormitories stacked six to a dungeon-like room, of factory gates that open at eight and close at nine at night- a rhythmic subjugation that makes the 181-year-old observations of Friedrich Engels on the English working class feel less like history and more like a contemporary report.

Noida-  an acronym for the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority-  is among the largest planned industrial townships in Asia. Its Special Economic Zone (NSEZ) alone accounted for over 11,000 crore rupees in exports in 2025. Across the broader industrial zone, there are more than ten thousand industrial and service units. They are small-scale establishments employing fewer than a hundred workers each, subcontracted from the factories of Indian and global monopoly corporations, such as TCS, HCL, Microsoft, Samsung, Xiaomi, and a constellation of multinational clothing brands whose labels adorn garments sold on the high streets of Europe and the US. The Noida readymade garment cluster alone, with roughly three thousand export-oriented units, generates between 18-20,000 crore rupees in annual exports. When Covid-19 froze the city in 2020, the Noida Apparel Export Centre wrote to the UP government in desperation, noting that their units needed two lakh workers to resume normal operations. Remember those heart-wrenching pictures? The workers and their families, who had fled on foot across highways and along railway tracks, were trying to get home to the hinterlands of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh during the COVID pandemic period.

There are approximately 20,000 industrial units in Noida and Greater Noida employing about 17 lakh workers.²

The production landscape of Noida spans mobile phones, electronic components, auto parts, IT services, medicines, and, importantly, readymade garments. These are the sinew of India’s manufacturing exports, sewn together by human hands under fluorescent lights, in temperatures that climb above the forties between April and June. Work is outsourced layer by layer, from global brand to Indian conglomerate to sub-contractor to labour contractor, each layer extracting a margin, each layer placing another layer of insulation between the brand and the worker. By the time a production order reaches the shop floor, the workers who fulfil it have no direct employment relationship with the company whose product they make. They are hired on a temporary contract, through a private placement agency, which pockets a percentage of their paltry wages as a service fee.

Naomi Klein demonstrated in her book No Logo, the great corporations of our era have strategically exited production altogether – Nike does not make shoes, Apple does not make phones, Louis Vuitton does not stitch its garments. What they manufacture is the brand, the logo. The commodity is made elsewhere, by someone else, through a chain of contracts so long that legal responsibility dissolves before it reaches the worker. Marx described alienation as the worker’s estrangement from the product of her labour. What Klein documents – and what the Noida factory floor makes viscerally concrete –  is a further mutation: the capitalist’s own deliberate self-alienation from production, a designed amnesia about where the thing comes from and whose hands made it.

In organised manufacturing across India, the share of contract workers rose from 38 per cent to 42 per cent between 2019–20 and 2023–242. In Central Public Sector Enterprises, excluding banking and insurance, it rose from 34 per cent to nearly 50 per cent between 2019 and 2025.³ In Noida’s industrial belt, this contractualisation has been total. Nearly all workers in the garment and electronics units are hired on short-term contracts. There is no permanent employment. No union recognition. No collective bargaining. No grievance mechanism. The Minimum Wages Advisory Board in Uttar Pradesh, the body that should have been calling for wage revisions, had been inactive for fourteen years. The Indian Labour Conference, the institutionalised tripartite dialogue between government, employers, and workers, has not met since 2015.

Even among regular wage and salaried workers in non-agricultural sectors, informality remains widespread. In 2025, about 58.2% of workers had no written job contract, while 51.7% were not eligible for any social security benefits. In addition, 47.3% were not eligible for paid leave. This means that a significant section of workers employed in formal establishments is, in practice, informally employed.⁴

It is as if the capital were a different republic with its own constitution and laws.

Women Workers

In the garment sector, women constitute nearly 60 per cent of the total workforce, according to 2025–26 industry estimates.⁵ Particular vulnerabilities compound their situation. Supervisors use the threat of dismissal to extract sexual compliance- a systemic issue highlighted by the April 2026 industrial unrest, where workers demanded safer harassment-reporting protocols. Toilet breaks are rationed and timed, a hallmark of the high-pressure production lines. Pregnant workers are often ‘quietly edged out’ to avoid maternity benefit liabilities. Women migrant workers, far from their family networks in Bihar and eastern UP, live in cramped single-gender hostels or shared rented rooms- where a single room costs between five thousand and seven thousand rupees a month in Noida’s industrial zones. This rent consumes forty to sixty per cent of an unskilled worker’s monthly wage, which, before the April 2026 strikes, was officially stagnant at ₹11,313. The rent does not leave room for illness, children’s school fees, or the bus fare home. For Maina Devi, standing from eight in the morning until nine at night- with toilet breaks as the only respite and an injured thumb that cannot be rested because rent is due- is simply the condition of being a woman worker in Noida.” A worker said: “Only our lives are cheap. And everything else is expensive”.

The migrant character of the workforce is phenomenal. Workers come primarily from Bihar and the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh, regions where agriculture has collapsed into smallholding misery and where industrial jobs do not exist. In the city, they are isolated and have no roots. The contractor knows this. The factory owner knows this. The state knows this.

Rising Prices

The wages they earned before April 2026 ranged between Rs 9000 and 11,013 per month for unskilled work –  wages that had not been revised in any meaningful sense since 2012. The Minimum Wages Act mandates revision at least every five years. Uttar Pradesh had flouted this obligation for more than a decade. Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers (CPI-IW) had risen nearly twenty-five per cent between 2021 and 2026 alone. The gap between nominal wages and real purchasing power was not a policy failure-  it was an intended policy. The state’s silence was conscious and benefited the factory owners. So, the owners could keep labour costs artificially suppressed while the rest of the economy, including the price of a thali swallowed too many times.

Labour Codes- Legalising the Illegal Practices on the Ground

And then, in November 2025, the Union government notified the four Labour Codes –  the Code on Wages, the Industrial Relations Code, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, and the Code on Social Security –  consolidating twenty-nine existing labour laws into four, in a sweeping restructuring of India’s labour regulatory framework, facilitating the Capital “for an easy way of doing business”. Central trade unions were unanimous in their condemnation, calling the codes a “genocidal attack on the lives and livelihoods of workers”. They accused the government of “imposing virtual slavery.” Their objections were substantive. The new codes allowed for “spread over” working hours of up to twelve hours a day, effectively legalising the twelve-hour shifts that Maina Devi had been working illegally for years. The threshold for factory recognition of unions was raised, making collective bargaining harder. The definition of “worker” was narrowed, excluding more categories of contract labour from statutory protection. On the promise that the codes would rationalise wages from April 1, 2026 –  a promise that was then quietly left unfulfilled as the Iran war disrupted oil supplies and the cost of everything from cooking gas to cooked food surged –  the workers’ patience ran out. The Central government fully operationalised the Labour Codes from 9 May 2026, with the notification of the rules. Rules of Code failed to come out with fixing of minimum wages, saying: ‘.. a special order shall separately specify criteria..’.

The Spark from Manesar (Haryana)

It did not begin with any trade union’s strike call. There was no leader. No stage. No microphone. It began with a single act of collective refusal that caught fire because the conditions for the strike had been building for years.

The spark came from across the state border. In the industrial hub of Manesar, Haryana, home to Maruti Suzuki and hundreds of auto-component and garment-export units, workers had been protesting through late March and early April 2026. The protests spread from factory to factory like a wildfire. It spread from Honda to Munjal Showa to Satyam Auto to Roop Polymers by early April. Garment companies like Richa Global and Modelama saw workers walk out. By April 9, the Haryana government had to come down.  It announced a 35 per cent increase in the minimum wage for unskilled workers, from roughly Rs. 12,000 to over Rs. 16,000 per month, effective from April 1. It was the first revision in nearly eleven years. Who would then deny that it is the people who create history and change things?

The news reached Noida. Workers who assembled auto components and stitched garments in Noida discovered that their counterparts doing identical work twenty kilometres away in Haryana would now earn a third more. The injustice was too stark. The simple arithmetic that workers who laboured twelve-hour shifts could perfectly understand.

On April 9, 2026, workers gathered near the NSEZ Metro Station in Noida’s Phase 2 industrial area. Hundreds came out. They sat down. They raised slogans. They demanded the same wage revision that Haryana had conceded. They were peaceful. The police watched.

What are workers’ demands?

The primary demands include a minimum wage of ₹20,000 to 26,000 per month for unskilled workers to match the rising cost of living, and direct company hiring to prevent contractors from skimming wages. Workers are also demanding strict implementation of double pay for every hour worked beyond the standard shift, immediate clearance of pending bonuses from the previous financial year, and retrospective payment of wage arrears. They have called for a significant increase in the House Rent Allowance, citing skyrocketing rents in Noida’s sectors and villages.  They also insist that any work beyond eight hours be voluntary and compensated as overtime, and that employees be guaranteed paid weekly holidays. Additionally, they seek the establishment of functional Internal Complaints Committees to address workplace harassment and verbal abuse by managers, as well as the withdrawal of FIRs and unconditional release of those arrested during the April 13 protests.

Over the next three days, the protests spread from factory to factory. Workers at Richa Global, which operates five garment factories in Noida (and three more in Manesar, where the earlier wage hike had already been won), walked out demanding parity. Workers at Motherson Sumi Wiring, the automobile components giant, joined. Domestic workers, gig workers, even the invisible army of home-based piece-rate workers who stitch elastic bands and cut threads in their single rooms in Sector 63 –  all of them began to move out from the factories. While the strike began in the second week of April 2026 with factory workers in industrial phases, it saw a significant spread to many categories of workers, as domestic workers- maids, cooks, and cleaning staff- launched their own protests starting from 14–15 April 2026.It was an unprecedented general strike, so to speak, in Noida.

The Battlefield

And then the morning of April 13 arrived.

The factory owners had not been responding. The state government was too adamant. The workers had been sitting peacefully at factory gates and road intersections for four days, and the only answer they had received was more police officers. On April 13, the crowds were larger, the anger wafting in the air, the desperation flowing more acutely. In the industrial sectors of Phase 2 and Sector 60, the situation escalated.

The Week wrote that the violence escalated in Phase 2 after a lathi struck a female employee during a police action, which enraged the crowd. Then the use of tear gas and lathi-charges to disperse large crowds in the Hosiery Complex area transformed a protest into a street battle.

Vehicles were set on fire. Stones were hurled. Police motorcycles were attacked. The police responded with lathi charges and tear gas shells. By nightfall, the images had gone countrywide: flames rising from police vehicles, workers running through smoke, the satellite city thirty kilometres from Parliament as if in a state of insurrection. Castigating the police’s accusation that violence was the “well-orchestrated syndicate activity”, the trade unions said that the violence was a spontaneous outburst of “simmering anger” from workers who have seen their real wages decline due to inflation. At the same time, their working hours increased to 12-hour shifts.

Behind the fire and fury, the unscrupulous exploitation and the horrible conditions in the factories and the unlivable conditions in the jhuggi-jhopdis were undeniable facts.

Unless we hear the voices from within the agitation, we cannot get the real picture of those conditions.

Vinay Mahoti is thirty years old, from Bihar, and a worker at a hosiery company in Noida. He describes how he first protested inside his manufacturing unit, and then joined the throngs from other companies who had taken to the streets. His demands were elemental: “Duty hours should be fixed, overtime hours should be paid.” Just imagine. He was not asking the moon. He was demanding that the law be applied.

A young woman worker at a garment factory said, her voice recorded and shared widely: “They tell us there are no funds for wages, but the owner just bought a second house in Greater Noida. We can see who is poor and who is not.” Another worker, who had migrated from Gorakhpur, said: “We are not criminals. We pay our rent, we send money home, we buy food. And they haven’t changed our wages in ten years. Ten years! What were we supposed to do?”

According to multiple estimates, nearly 50,000 workers have come out onto the streets in Noida by April 13. This was not a riot. This was not a conspiracy. This was decades of accumulated anger against the exploitation of their sweat and blood. This was a reminder of the agitation of 1997, when more than a lakh workers in Noida protested and went on strike, attracting countrywide attention.

Response in Repression

The Yogi Adityanath government’s first response was not a wage committee. Or talks with the agitating workers. Nor the involvement of the Labour Commissioner. It was an FIR. Shreya Ghosh of the Centre for Struggling Trade Unions said in an interview to G Sampath of The Hindu: Why do labour disputes get treated as ‘law and order’ issue?⁶

Within hours of the events of April 13, Noida Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh announced the registration of seven First Information Reports and the arrest of more than three hundred individuals. By April 14, the count had risen to over 300. Over three hundred and fifty people were, according to police, “rounded up,” with more than two hundred formally arrested, including those accused of “arson in a methodical and pre-planned manner.” Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath described the events as a “conspiracy” aimed at derailing the state’s development.

And then came the political vocabulary that the Bharatiya Janata Party has deployed with such practised fluency in the post-2014 years: “Pakistan hand.” “Urban Naxals.” “Anti-national forces.” Uttar Pradesh police sources announced to the media that the violence was “no spontaneous protest but a meticulously orchestrated conspiracy.” According to the police, phones seized from the arrested accused revealed WhatsApp groups circulated by “external” organisations with “incendiary and provocative” messages. Two contact numbers, traced by the police to Bigul Mazdoor Dasta, a workers’ organisation, the police said. Some trade union leaders were put under house arrest.

The subsequent arrests tell the real story of what was happening.

On April 13 itself –  before the violence had even fully erupted –  Rupesh Roy, an auto-rickshaw driver associated with Mazdoor Bigul, the workers’ newspaper, was taken into custody. According to his colleagues, Roy was at the protest site as a reporter, covering the workers’ movement for the journal. His family later filed a formal complaint with senior UP Police officials, alleging torture in custody, fabrication of evidence, and that the police had taken him to a location within NSEZ where bottles of kerosene and torches had already been “pre-positioned” –  a chilling allegation of evidence-planting that could not be independently verified but could not be dismissed.

On April 18, twenty-four-year-old Himanshu Thakur –  a young man preparing for his PhD, who had cleared the National Eligibility Test –  was taken into custody. His sister Neha says neither a warrant was shown nor were grounds for arrest stated.

On the same day, Satyam Verma –  a senior journalist, formerly with the United News of India (UNI), and the son of renowned retired historian Professor Lal Bahadur Verma at Allahabad-  was, according to the Countercurrents report, “abducted by Noida police for two days and then imprisoned.” Verma was neither a factory worker nor a union organiser. He was a journalist, a man of letters, a public intellectual. The message his arrest was meant to send was not lost on anyone: even bearing witness to this movement would be treated as participation in a conspiracy.

And then there was Aditya Anand. The police named him as the “prime mastermind” of the Noida violence. He was arrested on April 19 –  not in Noida, but at the Tiruchirappalli Railway Station in Tamil Nadu, by the UP Special Task Force acting on a lookout notice. The image of the state deploying squads to a railway junction in the deep south to arrest a labour activist from Bihar, for attending workers’ protests in Noida, speaks volumes about the geography of state power and its fragility.

Also arrested was Akriti, a NET-qualified young woman. The police accused her of being a criminal conspirator.

The arrested are not the factory owners who violated the minimum wage law for fourteen years. They are not the contractors who paid twenty-five rupees an hour for overtime, even though the law mandates double the regular wage. They are the people who helped workers understand their rights, who circulated their newspaper, who organised door-to-door campaigns explaining what workers in Haryana had won.

Central Trade Unions Call for a Nationwide Demand Day on May 12th!

Mazdoor Adhikar Sangharsh Abhiyan (MASA), the coordination of fourteen workers’ organisations and unions, issued statements demanding the immediate release of all arrested. The Samyukta Kisan Morcha, continuing its tradition of workers-and-farmers solidarity, expressed support for the Noida workers and condemned the repression. Central trade unions –  CITU, AICCTU, AITUC, HMS, INTUC, and others –  jointly called for a nationwide “Demands Day” on May 12, 2026, describing the events as a “state-backed corporate offensive” against democratic labour rights. They demanded the rollback of the Labour Codes, a statutory minimum wage of twenty-six thousand rupees per month, an eight-hour workday, and the abolition of contract labour in permanent jobs. More than a thousand workers, they estimated, had been arrested across the recent wave of labour unrest. They demanded the immediate withdrawal of all cases.

The ruling party-affiliated BMS Union did not support the workers’ agitation. It opposed the imposition of a uniform minimum wage on the industrial working class. It said: “The recent unrest in Manesar Noida was a matter of serious concern. Disagreeing with the other central trade unions about a uniform wage structure, and the idea of a uniform wage structure across the country is neither practical nor economically sustainable.” It condemned the workers’ “violence”.

The UP government, under this combined pressure, moved –  grudgingly and partially. On April 17 and 18, 2026, the state notified revised minimum wages. Unskilled workers would now receive between twelve thousand three hundred and fifty-six and thirteen thousand six hundred and ninety rupees per month, up from eleven thousand three hundred and thirteen. Skilled workers would receive between fifteen thousand two hundred and twenty-four and sixteen thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight rupees. A high-powered committee under the Infrastructure and Industrial Development Commissioner was constituted to develop a “permanent wage revision framework.”

The workers received the news with cautious satisfaction. “Our wages were stolen, and we forced a correction,” said one woman worker in Noida’s industrial complex. But union leaders and labour analysts pointed out that even the revised wages lagged far behind Haryana’s levels and were nowhere near the 26,000 rupees the trade unions had demanded as a living wage. The Minimum Wages Advisory Board in UP had been inactive for fourteen years. What guarantee was there that the next revision would not take another fourteen?

Meanwhile, as of early May 2026, scores of workers and activists remained in custody. Many –  including workers who are women and in some cases minors –  faced serious criminal charges under provisions that carry heavy sentences. Opposition leaders, human rights organisations, and lawyers reported being prevented from meeting those detained. The cases registered against labour organisers like Aditya Anand and Rupesh Roy remain active, with the UP Special Task Force pursuing what the state has framed as a conspiracy case.

Lessons

The Noida uprising of April 2026 will be remembered as a watershed –  not because it won a complete victory, but because it was irreducible. Fifty thousand people coming out of factories in a city that is the showcase of UP’s industrial development, spontaneously and without central union direction, cannot be dismissed as a “planned conspiracy.” It was lit by 14 years of minimum-wage stagnation. It was lit by twelve-hour shifts made legal by the Labour Code. It was lit by twenty-five rupees per hour of illegal overtime. It was lit by a woman standing at a factory gate with a punctured thumb, doing the math.

In the era of the Labour Codes, amid the backlash of capital against the working class, with the state’s help, the working class is fighting back. As people fought against CAA and NRC, as the farmers did against the farmers’ laws, the working class is fighting the effects of the Labour Codes regime. Samsung workers in Sri Perambadur fought against low wages, unpaid overtime, and the company’s refusal to recognise the union two years ago. Workers at Baruani, Panipat, and Hazira struggled against the parasitic contractor system and for better working conditions in February.  Workers at Patratu Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (PVUNL) plant- a joint venture between NTPC and the Jharkhand government- held protests against unpaid wages and long hours in February and March. The workers struggled at Raikheda, at the Adani Raikheda Power Plant in Raipur, against contract labour rights, safety concerns, and unfulfilled land-for-job promises.

A spectre of workers’ struggles is haunting the capitalist class. Suchvaliant expressions of direct class confrontation are bound to increase in the coming days, especially the burden and ramifications of the US- Israel war on Iran, and the resultant price rise all over for the common masses.

The Noida ‘uprising’ remains etched in the memories of the working class for long, long years. Workers will learn the hard lessons of unity, the strength in the organisation, the collusion of state and capital, and the irreconcilable contradiction between capital and labour. All the workers’ actions are rehearsals for the final acts of liberation, Lenin said.

There is Maina Devi, standing at the bus stop with a bandaged thumb, still going to work, still doing the math. She has won something –  a small, inadequate, but real increase in her monthly wage. She has won it not through any institutional process but through the collective courage of fifty thousand people who took to the streets and refused to be invisible. She will go on standing for twelve hours a day, handling forty to fifty pieces an hour, rushing back from the toilet so that production targets do not pile up. The fight she and her co-workers lit is not over –  it is only beginning.

The fire in Noida will not be easily extinguished as long as the exploitation of workers like Maina Devi continues. Working-class people all over India certainly take inspiration from Noida, Manesar, and the refinery workers’ struggles at Barauni, Panipat, and Hazira.

I owe to The Migration Story (Anumeha Yadav, April 22, 2026); The Wire (Shruti Sharma, May 2026); Countercurrents, April 2026; The Federal, April 21, 2026; Groundxero, November–December 2025, for writing this piece.

1 Okhla was a village in Delhi city bordering UP and Faridabad of Haryana. Around Okhla and Industrial Estate was planned in 1958. The UP counterpart, as an extension of the Okhla industrial belt, began in 1976. Okhla Industrial Estate (Delhi), Noida (UP) and Faridabad (Haryana) form a vast contiguous belt of industrial activity where 10 lakh workers labour in various kinds of factories.

2 The Hindu, How the War on Iran set off worker protests around Delhi, April 18, 2026.`

3 Weaving Futures: A Study on Women’s Employment in India’s Textile Sector”, VNGSU Journal of Research and Innovation

4 The Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) 2023–24 report, released in August 2025, confirmed that contract workers now account for 42% of India’s organised manufacturing workforce – the highest level recorded in at least 27 years. This represents a steady rise from the approximately 38% observed during the 2019–20 period.

5 The Hindu, Why Noida’s factory unrest is about more than just wages, 20 April 2026

6 Economic Times, April 19, 2026

by Ranjan Solomon

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” Karl Marx

India’s growth story is often narrated through numbers – GDP expansion, rising markets, increasing foreign investment, and the steady rise in the number and wealth of billionaires. These indicators are presented as evidence of a thriving economy, a nation on the move, and a system delivering prosperity. Yet beneath this narrative of success lies a quieter, more disquieting reality—one that reveals not a temporary imbalance, but a structural condition.

The workers who sustain this growth are increasingly excluded from its rewards.

In a billionaire-driven economy, labour is not failing; it is being systematically undervalued. Workers today are more productive than ever before. They generate higher output, adapt to technological change, and sustain the expansion of key sectors. Yet their wages do not reflect this rising productivity. Instead, the value they create is funnelled upward – into corporate profits, executive compensation, and the expanding wealth of those who own capital. This is not an incidental outcome, but a defining feature of contemporary capitalism.

Across the world, workers in such economies face stagnant wages despite high productivity, with wealth increasingly concentrated through ownership of capital and corporate profits. Billionaires control major employers—from large retail chains to global technology firms—while workers confront rising costs of living, growing inequality, and persistent job insecurity. The contradiction is stark: workers are more productive than ever, yet the value they create is increasingly diverted away from them.

This phenomenon, widely described as the productivity–pay gap or “decoupling,” is well documented. Since the late 1970s, productivity in developed and emerging economies has grown multiple times faster than typical worker compensation. As of 2026, this trend continues, creating a widening disconnect between the value created by employees and their actual earnings. The economy simultaneously witnesses rising productivity and wage stagnation—a combination that undermines the very premise that growth benefits all.

In India, this contradiction takes on a particularly sharp and complex form. The current economic landscape reflects what can be described as “jobful growth,” where both productivity and employment are increasing, but real wage growth remains subdued. While India is projected to lead global salary increases at around 9.1% in 2026, these gains are often neutralized by inflationary pressures. The result is a “nominal wage trap,” where salaries rise in absolute terms, but purchasing power declines or stagnates.

This pattern is visible across both rural and urban economies. Real wages in rural areas have shown alarming stagnation since 2014, a trend that has persisted through 2023–24 and continues into 2025–26, despite India maintaining a GDP growth rate of 6–7%. In urban areas, households face a similar squeeze, as rising incomes fail to keep pace with escalating living costs, creating a silent but widespread erosion of economic security.

Even where productivity rises, workers are not proportionately rewarded. In the informal sector, Gross Value Added (GVA) per worker grew by 4.54% in 2025, compared to a 3.88% increase in nominal wages. This gap illustrates a broader pattern: productivity gains are not being equitably shared. Instead, they are absorbed into corporate margins and capital accumulation.

Inequality data reinforces this reality. According to recent estimates, the top 10% of earners in India capture 58% of national income, while the bottom 50% receive only 15%. Corporate compensation trends mirror this imbalance. Median CEO compensation in Nifty 200 companies reached between ₹7–9 crore in 2025, reflecting a 12–15% increase, significantly outpacing the average employee salary hike of around 9%. In effect, those at the top capture a disproportionate share of economic gains, while the majority experiences stagnation.

Corporate profits have consistently outpaced wages. Factory output per worker has risen sharply, but worker pay has failed to keep pace. The share of national income going to wages and employee benefits has declined, while a growing proportion is captured as profits, dividends, and returns to investors. This shift signals a fundamental redistribution of economic gains – from labour to capital.

This divergence is not accidental—it is structural. Economic power is increasingly concentrated among a small number of large firms and conglomerates, particularly since 2015–16. As capital consolidates, so does the ability to influence markets, shape policy, and determine wage structures. Companies are narrowing the pool of top performers eligible for significant salary increases, reducing it from 10% to around 7%, and tightening evaluation systems under the rubric of “performance differentiation.” This allows firms to justify limited wage growth for the majority while rewarding a select few.

At the same time, there is a pronounced shift toward skill-based pay. Workers with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cybersecurity command premiums of 30–40%, while those in traditional roles see minimal or no real wage growth. While this reflects changing economic demands, it also deepens inequality within the workforce, creating a divide between a highly paid minority and a stagnant majority.

Technology plays a dual role in this transformation. While increasing efficiency and productivity, artificial intelligence is also enabling the replacement of entry-level roles and reducing demand for certain categories of labour. This creates a bifurcated labour market in which only workers with specialized skills experience wage growth, while others face stagnation or displacement. Without deliberate policy intervention, automation risks undermining a people-centred economy.

The weakening of labour institutions has further exacerbated this imbalance. Trade union density in India has declined to around 6.3%, significantly reducing workers’ ability to bargain for higher wages and better conditions. At the same time, the rise of the gig economy and the expansion of contract-based employment have increased informality. A large proportion of workers are now engaged in precarious, unregulated work with low wages, minimal security, and limited access to social benefits.

Today, approximately 82% of India’s workforce operates within the informal sector. These workers often earn poverty-level wages, lack formal contracts, and remain excluded from social protection mechanisms. The informal sector has also borne the brunt of successive economic shocks—including demonetization, the implementation of GST, and the COVID-19 pandemic – which have suppressed wage growth and intensified economic vulnerability.

In such conditions, labour markets increasingly resemble what economists describe as monopsony structures, where a limited number of employers dominate hiring and are able to set wages below the true value of labour. Workers, constrained by limited alternatives and weakened bargaining power, are compelled to accept these terms. This dynamic results in lower wages, reduced employment quality, and higher profits for employers.

At a deeper level, the accumulation of wealth at the top reflects the nature of capital ownership itself. A significant portion of billionaire wealth is derived not from labour, but from inheritance, monopoly power, or ownership of productive assets such as factories, land, and technology. Economic theory has long suggested that labour generates surplus value, much of which is appropriated by owners rather than returned to workers. This structural extraction lies at the heart of modern inequality.

In a globalized economy, this imbalance is further amplified. Workers in lower-income regions contribute significantly to global supply chains but receive only a fraction of the value they help create. Reports have consistently highlighted how billionaire wealth expands rapidly even as ordinary people struggle to meet basic needs such as food, housing, and healthcare.

In India, these dynamics have produced an increasingly oligarchic economic structure. Wealth and economic power are concentrated among a small group of conglomerates, shaping policy outcomes and reinforcing forms of crony capitalism. The high cost of electoral politics ensures that governance aligns more closely with the interests of financiers than with the broader population. As a result, the welfare-oriented character of the Indian Constitution is gradually undermined.

As economic power concentrates, governance structures have increasingly shifted toward maintaining a cheap and compliant workforce. Labour protections are weakened, and policy frameworks often favour capital accumulation over worker welfare. The consequences are visible not only in economic inequality, but also in the erosion of democratic accountability.

This concentration of power extends into the political sphere, where exclusion operates along both class and gender lines. Women, despite gains at the Panchayati Raj level, face significant barriers in accessing political power at the state and national levels. Electoral politics is shaped by high financial costs, party gatekeeping, and deeply entrenched patriarchal norms. It is often characterized as a “masculine mob” culture, marked by aggression, intimidation, and violence.

Women encounter what can be described as “nomination exclusion,” where political parties prioritize dynastic and elite networks over broader representation. Financial barriers, lack of institutional support, and systemic bias further limit their participation. Even where women enter political spaces, they face targeted harassment, including online abuse, which acts as a deterrent to sustained engagement.

The intersection of class and gender ensures that women – particularly those outside elite circles—remain marginalized within both economic and political structures. Addressing this requires more than incremental reforms; it demands a fundamental challenge to the entrenched systems that define power and participation.

What emerges from this complex landscape is not a set of isolated issues, but a coherent economic and political order – one that systematically transfers value from labour to capital, from the many to the few. Productivity has not failed; it has been appropriated. Wages have not merely stagnated; they have been constrained within structures that prioritize ownership over effort.

This is no longer only an economic issue. It is a democratic one. When wealth shapes policy, when labour is fragmented and weakened, and when inequality becomes normalized, the promise of a welfare state begins to hollow out from within.

India today stands not at the threshold of a crisis, but within one—quiet, normalized, and deeply entrenched. It is a crisis that does not erupt suddenly, but deepens gradually, widening the distance between those who produce wealth and those who accumulate it.

The central question, then, is not whether the economy can grow faster, but whether it can grow more justly. Until that question is confronted with honesty and political will, India’s growth story will remain profoundly incomplete – impressive in its scale, but deeply unequal in its substance, and increasingly unsustainable in its promise.

by P J James

Introduction

Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) was conceptualized by Marx mainly in his writings on Asia, more specifically India, during the 1850s. Through AMP, Marx pointed out the incompatibility of European mode of production (social formation) and class analysis in the case of non-Western/non-European societies like India. To be specific, the theory of AMP suggested how India is run by an ‘elite’, ‘despotic’ ruling clique that directly expropriates surplus from village communities. Marx also tried to explain the absence of European model of feudalism or land ownership in India, and instead pointed out how an elite state class always runs the regime or the ruling system with specific linkage between agriculture and manufacturing based on socio-cultural relations whose “solid basis” being the Indian Caste system.

Of course, the theory of AMP has been one of the most controversial and hotly debated Marxist conceptualizations. Academic and scholarly debates on AMP among a whole set of Leftist scholars and Marxist historians, and a large body of writings on the concept are there in the public domain. However, and very revealingly, the Communist parties in India, ranging from the revisionists to the sectarians, including their entire cadres, are totally insulated or immune from this discussions and debates regarding AMP, as they are often taking place in the form an intellectual discourse. As such, this note is not for adding any new information to the theory of AMP, rather it  intends to point out two inter-related issues, viz., a) the context for the altogether abandoning of AMP by International Communist Movement (ICM) and Indian Communists, and b) the consequent failure on the part of Communists in accomplishing the revolutionary tasks according to the concrete conditions of caste-ridden Indian society.

Marx and Engels’ observation on Indian Caste system and conceptualization of AMP, are spread across German Ideology (1845-46), Articles on India in New York Daily Tribune (1853-61), Marx-Engels Correspondence (1852-62), Economic Manuscripts (1857-1859), Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital Vol.1 (1867), and even in the 454-page Ethnological Notebooks (which Marx compiled during 1880-82, edited by Lawrence Krader and printed by International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam in 1974). In the theory of AMP, Marx and Engels distinguished Asiatic production from all other pre-capitalist production forms. In fact, in the beginning, Marx was also using the generally accepted term “Oriental Despotism” popularized by French philosopher Montesquieu, to refer to the ruling system in Asia. However, it was in conformity with his historical-materialistic interpretation of society that Marx later modified Oriental Despotism as the theory of AMP. This was based on his understanding and analysis of production/class relations (or Oriental Despotism) with respect to the unique Indian caste system that acted as their “solid foundation”. Accordingly, surplus labor always belongs to the despotic class or the ruling class (often identified with the elite, upper, Brahmin caste in India) which has exclusive rights to extract surplus from peasants and toiling people in the form of a “tribute”, and irrespective of the changes in regime or political power, “the structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remains untouched…”

The AMP that did not fit in with the ‘European feudal model’ was also in conformity with Marx’s rejection of a “unilinear” theory of history, as Marx never suggested a “master-key” or “general path of development” applicable to all societies. After Marx and Engels, the Second International (1889-1916), on account of its Eurocentric and unilinear orientation, and inability to grasp the concrete social relations in non-European societies like India and China, often collapsed into a European model of slavery and feudalism, and tended to ignore or sideline AMP. However, while acknowledging Marx’s AMP in most of his analyses including in “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are”, Lenin used it according to the concrete Russian situation through such terms as “semi-Asiatic” to characterize Russian monarchy and bureaucratic structure. Of course, till the completion of October Revolution, Lenin had little time to go into the details of Indian caste system and its link with Marx’s AMP. Other Russian leaders like Plekhanov had also embraced AMP, more or less in a way applicable to Russia. On the other hand, after the October Revolution, Lenin’s pre-occupation was with global anti-imperialist tasks in the epoch of imperialism. At the same time, Lenin’s modification of the earlier slogan, “Workers of the World, Unite” that was applicable to industrial capitalism (pre-monopoly capitalism) to “Workers and Oppressed Peoples of all Countries, Unite” at the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920, was sufficient enough to include other oppressions including that from Indian caste system. For instance, Lenin’s emphasis that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded” in general highlighted the strategic significance of the struggle against caste, race, nationality, etc.

Leningrad Conference of 1931 and Banning of AMP from Comintern Documents

However, the 1920s witnessed intense debates within the Comintern about the nature of Asian societies, mainly regarding the course of Chinese Revolution, though the trend was firmly toward belittling relevance of the concept of the AMP. Soviet scholars have rejected AMP on the ground that the socio-economic formations of pre-capitalist Asia did not differ enough from those of feudal Europe to warrant special designation. Still the concept of AMP was there in the official documents, and during the 6^th Congress of the Comintern held in 1928, following the adoption of its “class against class” policy, the entire orientation was towards a disapproval of AMP as the Asian societies could be interpreted in class terms as “feudal” or “semi-feudal”. The understanding was that Eastern societies like China (and India) were essentially feudal and hence were amenable to the unilinear stage theory of Marxism as applicable to Europe. As such, everything began to be included in the broad framework of anti-colonial/anti-imperialist, anti-feudal struggles without any emphasis on AMP, though the concept still prevailed in the deliberations.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Academic Conference held in Leningrad or the so-called Leningrad Discussions in 1931 which focused on AMP, took a qualitative turn in this regard. In a way, it culminated in standardizing ‘Soviet historical materialism’. Amid differences from minority sections, the strong Soviet-backed anti-AMP faction that got majority in the Conference argued that the use of AMP as a separate category is a deviation from ‘official’ Marxist class approach, and a negation of the 5-stage theory – primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism/communism – of historical development. This was contrary to Marx’s unequivocal position as stated by him in 1877 that there is “no general path of development prescribed for all nations”. Differing with self-professed Marxists who stood for a “general path”, which is European path in essence, in his Letter to Vera Zasulich in 1871 itself, Marx had clearly stated that his analysis of capitalist mode of production was limited to the countries of Western Europe. It was against this perspective of Marx himself that, the Leningrad Conference rejected AMP interpreting it as a non-Marxist artificial category in direct opposition to standardized European/Soviet framework. This Soviet intervention to remove AMP has prompted critics to allege the close similarity between AMP and “despotic”/bureaucratic nature of USSR, and anti-Soviet theorists of the time also used AMP against Soviet Union itself.

Following this, the Comintern which came under the control of Soviet Union completely rejected AMP and depicting it as obsolete, expunged the entire concept of AMP from official Marxism altogether, and superimposed European feudal/semi-feudal model on Asiatic societies since 1931. To put it differently, according to Comintern, the ‘specific features’ of “feudalism” attributed to Asian countries were secondary or unimportant and hence did not fundamentally change the basic mode of production in them. At that time when almost all parties upheld the rejection of AMP by Comintern, Mao Zedong, while accepting the general framework of Comintern, diverged from the 5-stage European-model unilinear orthodoxy and began focusing on formulating Marxist praxis according to Chinese conditions. For instance, while Comintern insisted on focusing the urban working class, led by Mao, the Communist Party of China (CPC) after rejecting the Eurocentric 5-stage model, mobilized the peasantry in rural base areas as the primary force of Revolution in tune with the concrete Chinese situation. Interestingly, questioning this Chinese line, the “Soviet Marxists” had even labelled Mao’s strategy as “oriental” error. Thus, bypassing the traditional standardised capitalist development that has to precede socialism as put forward by the then Comintern, the CPC led by Mao proposed “New Democratic Revolution” for moving towards socialism.

Discarding AMP as Tragic Failure of the Indian Communists

Obviously, unlike the stance taken by CPC under the leadership of Mao, which enabled China to successfully complete revolution in 1949, the Communist leadership in India being tied to  Soviet policies, and often depending on the advice from British Communist Party, miserably failed in applying Marxism-Leninism as suited to caste-ridden Indian society. Of course, despite these limitations and while facing severe colonial repression through a series of conspiracy cases during the 1920s, the Indian Communists, in general, were pursuing the Comintern line, and based on the Leninist slogan “Workers and Oppressed peoples, Unite”, moved forward building up class and mass organisations uniting both workers and the oppressed. After all, the solid ideological-material basis of Marx’s AMP being caste, the theory was more specific to India. However, as noted above, influenced by the main orientation of Soviet-led Comintern in the 1920s, there was no ideological-political intervention on the part of CPI to apply the concept of AMP in India.  At the same time, even without reference to AMP, the CPI was seeking to mobilize the toiling masses including the oppressed “outcastes” (pariahs) into a united front against British imperialism and feudalism.

It was in consonance with this orientation that the “Draft Platform of Action” prepared by CPI in 1930, resolutely put forward the complete abolition of the Indian caste system with special relevance to Indian social structure.  For instance, the Draft Platform of Action, in its Part 2, Subsection D, says: “Emancipation of the Pariahs and the Slaves:  As a result of the rule of British imperialism in our country there are still in existence millions of slaves and tens of millions of socially outcast working pariahs, who are deprived of all rights. British rule, the system of landlordism, the reactionary caste system, religious deceptions and all the slave and serf conditions of the past throttle the Indian people and stand in the way of its emancipation. They have led to the result that in India, in the twentieth century, there are still pariahs who have no right to meet with all their fellow men, drink from common wells, study in common schools, etc…  The CP of India calls upon all the pariahs to join in the united revolutionary front with all the workers of the country against British rule and landlordism. The CP of India calls upon all the pariahs not to give way to the tricks of the British and reactionary agents who try to split and set one against the other the toilers of our country. The CP of India fights for the complete abolition of slavery, the caste system and the caste inequality in all its forms (social, cultural, etc.).”

It was this Draft Platform of Action with its clear-cut perspective on “complete abolition of … caste system” that served as the foundational ideological framework for CPI’s alliance with Dr. B R Ambedkar in the 1930s. This was based on a shared focus on bringing together workers and India’s oppressed castes (“depressed classes”) in a “united revolutionary front” against colonial oppression and Indian caste system. Though Ambedkar was not a Communist, his Independent Labour Party formed in 1936 (the same year when Ambedkar released “Annihilation of Caste”) became a left force working together with CPI. For instance, the CPI-affiliated All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party jointly called a massive strike of over 100,000 workers in Bombay in 1938 to oppose the Trade Disputes Act of 1929. This merger of the politics of “caste and class” jointly addressed the demands of the workers and the need for abolition caste practices in factories. However, towards the end of the 1930s, the upper-caste orientation of the Communist leadership became pronounced, leading to serious ideological differences and accusations between Ambedkar and Indian Communists, the details (for instance, Communist leaders labelled Ambedkar a “stooge of imperialism” while Ambedkar branded Communists as ‘Brahmin boys”) of which are already available in the public domain.

In fact, the roots of this ideological difference between Indian Communists and Ambedkar lay deep in CPI’s withdrawal from its stand on “abolition of caste” as laid down in Draft Platform of Action in the context of the rejection of AMP by Comintern following 1931 Leningrad Conference. While the Comintern leadership was busy with the Anti-Fascist Struggle of the 1930s, there was a time-lag for the conclusions of the Leningrad Discussion, especially its ‘sectarian class approach’ to reach India and take on a dominant position among the Indian Communist leadership. To be precise, the worsening of CPI’s relation with Ambedkar was coterminous with the abandonment of the approach to “abolition of caste”, as laid down in the 1930 Draft Platform of Action. As already pointed out, following Comintern’s rejection of AMP and embrace of sectarian, unilinear “class only approach”, CPC led by Mao Zedong differed from it and took an independent position based on the concrete analysis of Chinese society. On the other hand, the CPI, on account of its heavy dependence on Comintern and Soviet advice, was unable to take an independent position on AMP, though the concept was of strategic importance and more suited to caste-ridden India than China.  While this operational independence enabled CPC to correct the mistakes made by Comintern and adapt Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions, due to CPI’s dependence on the then British communist leaders who interpreted Comintern guidelines, it failed to apply Marxism-Leninism according to the ground realities of caste-ridden India.

Conceptualization of Caste as Superstructural Phenomenon

As already stated, the context of the cordial relation between CPI and Ambedkar (symbolizing the strategic unity between workers and oppressed in the Indian context) during the 1930s was in accordance with the position in the 1930 Draft Platform of Action that unequivocally upheld “abolition of caste” as an integral part of the anti-imperialist People’s Democratic Revolution (PDR) in India. Conversely, this unity ended when the CPI embraced sectarian ‘caste-only’ approach following Comintern’s rejection of AMP, and the consequent freezing of the Draft Platform of Action by CPI. Thus, in gross disregard of India’s historical caste-class integration or inseparable link between caste and class, the mechanical and reductionist approach to caste as a superstructural phenomenon started dominating the Indian Communist movement since the early 1940s. Of course, though the usual condemnation of caste-oppression, caste-discrimination and caste atrocities had been there, the CPI documents kept a revealing silence on annihilation or abolition of the caste system. No doubt, this was a serious mistake that did immense damage to the cause of Indian revolution.

Meanwhile, rejection of AMP by Comintern and consequent CPI’s move away from its earlier approach to Caste, logically led the Communist leadership since the beginning of 1940s, to conceptualise caste as part of the superstructure, or as a remnant of pre-capitalist feudal relations, and hence secondary to class struggle. Put it differently, identification of caste with cultural superstructure rather than political-economic base also resulted in a mechanical text-copying of the European class analysis to India, which Marx himself had said in the 1870s as inapplicable to non-European societies like India. For instance, if we make a concrete analysis of the Indian society based on objective facts, it is easy to comprehend how ownership of wealth including land and means of production, division of labour, wage structure, surplus value extraction and profit accumulation together with cultural and political power, etc., are essentially caste-based. There are sections who still argue that caste solely belongs to (or a legacy of) Indian feudalism. Hence, they argue that the march of modernity and advancement of capitalism will lead to a withering away of caste altogether. Of course, then the question comes how caste is safely and comfortably sitting on the throne of modern industry, and in scientific and higher institutions of learning?

Thus, caste can easily cut across both economic base and cultural superstructure, it can cut through religions, can migrate from one socio-economic system to another or from feudalism to capitalism and even penetrate into modern science and technology, and even capable to migrate to Silicon Valley, the so-called citadel of modern technology. This inherent laws of motion of Indian Caste system, where both caste and class are inseparable and interpenetrating, point to a qualitatively different social formation (mode of production) compared to Western societies, where people belonging to the oppressed and lower castes form the real working class of India. It’s the greatness of Marx that, in spite of lacking personal and direct experience, or any first-hand information, and merely based on historical facts and secondary data from colonial documents and writings, he could clearly realise that the mode of production conceptualised by him in the context of Europe, was not applicable to India. And, it is in this context that he put forward Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) with caste as its solid foundation. This ideological-theoretical breakthrough regarding India proposed by Marx, was totally abandoned by Communists leading to grave political setbacks suffered by them in course of time.

Conclusion

As stated at the outset, instead of adding any new theoretical formulation on AMP, the scope of this note is limited to bring to the attention of all genuine Communists the immense damage inflicted on them due to the abandonment of Marx’s AMP and consequent neglect of the task of annihilating Caste, the most inhuman social institution in human history. Contrary to the perspectives of both mechanical materialists and sectarians that economic transformation coupled with scientific-technological advancement will weaken Indian caste system, untouchability and casteism in all their manifestations are flourishing without any let up. On the other hand, in continuation of the mechanical approach towards caste and ideological antagonism towards Ambedkar, the Communist parties themselves have alienated from the caste-oppressed people who comprise vast majority of the real proletarians of India. Further, if the Communists and the oppressed caste-movement led by Ambedkar that prevailed in the 1930s, had unitedly proceeded ahead as a strategic united front of working class and the oppressed in consonance with theory of Marx’s AMP, the history of India would have been different now.

Today this issue becomes all the more significant in the fascist context when RSS, world’s largest and longest-running fascist organisation, is now engaged in a maddening pace towards its ultimate goal of establishing a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra. While Muslims are its declared enemy number one (as identified by Golwalkar), the ideological basis of Indian fascism is “Casteism” as laid down in Manusmriti, according to which the most oppressed Dalits are subhuman. Regarding this, it was Ambedkar who resolutely came forward uncompromisingly resisting Hindutva and its ideological foundation. As exemplified through such historic moves and initiatives as burning of Manusmriti on 25 December 1927, publishing of “Annihilation of Caste” in 1936, drafting of Indian Constitution against which RSS proposed Manusmriti, proposing the Hindu Code Bill for which RSS burned Ambedkar’s effigy along with that of Nehru on 12 December 1949, and so on, Ambedkar stands head and shoulders above everyone as the undisputed ideological enemy of casteism and Hindutva. As such, it is high time on the part of Communists to have a self-critical evaluation of their ideological clashes with Ambedkar. At this critical juncture, and to be precise, for taking up both the strategic task of caste-class annihilation, and immediate duty of overcoming RSS fascism, it is the solemn task of Communist revolutionaries in India to have an objective evaluation on the inherent ideological-political convergence between Marx’s AMP and Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, as a precursor for relentless ideological-political offensive in the days ahead.

by Lachlan Williams

Photo caption: Brazil Defense Up 13%, Guyana 16%: SIPRI’s LATAM Picture. (Photo Internet reproduction)

Key Points

— The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported Monday April 27 that global military spending reached US$2.887 trillion in 2025, a 2.9 percent real-terms increase from 2024 and the 11th consecutive annual rise. Global military spending now stands at 2.5 percent of world GDP — its highest share since 2009. Per-capita global military spending reached US$352 in 2025.

— Europe drove the surge with a 14 percent rise to US$864 billion — the sharpest annual increase in Central and Western European spending since the end of the Cold War. The 29 European NATO members spent a combined US$559 billion, with 22 of them now meeting the 2 percent of GDP target. Germany became Europe’s largest military spender at US$114 billion (+24% YoY). Asia and Oceania rose 8.1 percent to US$681 billion — the largest annual rise since 2009.

— South America’s total reached US$56.3 billion (+3.4%). Brazil — the regional leader — rose 13 percent to US$23.9 billion driven by naval modernization. Guyana surged 16 percent to US$248 million amid the Essequibo dispute with Venezuela. The United States declined 7.5 percent to US$954 billion as Ukraine military aid was suspended, but Trump’s proposed 2027 budget of US$1.5 trillion would set a new record. Russia, China and the US together spent US$1.48 trillion — 51 percent of the global total.

Global military spending has now risen for 11 consecutive years to a record US$2.89 trillion — and Latin America’s defense budgets are joining the wave, led by Brazil’s 13 percent jump and Guyana’s Essequibo-driven 16 percent surge.

The world is rearming on a scale not seen in decades. The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that the global military spending total reached a record US$2.887 trillion in 2025 according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report published Monday April 27 — an 11th consecutive year of growth driven by European rearmament, Asian programs responding to US strategic uncertainty, and Latin American budget increases led by Brazil’s naval modernization and Guyana’s response to Venezuelan territorial pressure.

“Global military spending rose again in 2025 as states responded to another year of wars, uncertainty and geopolitical upheaval with large-scale armament drives,” said Xiao Liang, researcher with SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. “Given the range of current crises, as well as many states’ long-term military spending targets, this growth will probably continue through 2026 and beyond.”

The Global Military Spending Numbers

The headline reading: world military expenditure rose 2.9 percent in real terms in 2025, the lowest annual rate since 2021 but still the 11th straight year of growth. Total global spending has risen 41 percent over the past decade (2016-25). The military burden — the share of global GDP allocated to defense — climbed from 2.4 percent in 2024 to 2.5 percent in 2025, the highest level since 2009.

The geographic distribution shifted. Europe drove the increase with a 14 percent surge to US$864 billion.

Asia and Oceania rose 8.1 percent to US$681 billion. Africa rose 8.5 percent to US$58.2 billion.

Middle East spending was broadly stable at US$218 billion. South America rose 3.4 percent to US$56.3 billion.

The top three military spenders — the United States, China, and Russia — together accounted for US$1.48 trillion or 51 percent of global spending. Excluding the United States, world military expenditure grew 9.2 percent in 2025 — illustrating that the US decline reflected a one-off Ukraine aid suspension rather than a structural trend.

Why Europe Drove the Surge

European spending grew faster in 2025 than any year since 1953. The 29 European NATO members spent a combined US$559 billion, with 22 nations meeting the 2 percent of GDP target — up from 16 a year earlier. Germany became Europe’s largest military spender at US$114 billion (+24% from 2024) following Berlin’s historic March 2025 debt-brake reform that opened fiscal space for rearmament.

Other European movers included Spain (+50% to US$40.2 billion), France (+1.5% to US$68 billion), and the United Kingdom (-2% to US$89 billion). Russia’s spending grew 5.9 percent to US$190 billion, equivalent to 7.5 percent of GDP.

Ukraine increased spending 20 percent to US$84.1 billion — equal to 40 percent of GDP, the highest military burden in the world. Ukraine became the world’s seventh-largest military spender despite a substantially smaller economy than larger budgets above it.

“In 2025 military spending by European NATO members rose faster than at any time since 1953, reflecting the ongoing pursuit of European self-reliance alongside increasing pressure from the United States to strengthen burden sharing within the alliance,” said Jade Guiberteau Ricard, researcher with SIPRI‘s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme.

Asia’s US$681 Billion Reality

Asia and Oceania saw the largest annual rise in defense spending since 2009, climbing 8.1 percent to US$681 billion. The driver was strategic anxiety: long-standing regional tensions plus growing uncertainty over US security commitments under the Trump administration. Taiwan increased military spending 14 percent to US$18.2 billion (2.1% of GDP) — its largest annual rise since at least 1988.

India became the world’s fifth-largest military spender at US$92.1 billion (+8.9%). Japan’s procurement focused on long-range strike and counterstrike capabilities including cruise missiles and ISR systems — a structural pivot from Japan’s traditional pacifist posture. The Philippines and Australia also recorded substantial increases.

“US allies in Asia and Oceania such as Australia, Japan and the Philippines are spending more on their militaries, not only due to long-standing regional tensions but also due to growing uncertainty over US support,” said Diego Lopes da Silva, senior researcher at SIPRI. The structural read: Asian allies are hedging against a less reliable Washington while preparing for sustained Chinese pressure.

Latin America’s Defense Picture

Latin America has historically been one of the world’s lowest-spending regions on defense, but 2025 marked notable movement. South America’s total reached US$56.3 billion (+3.4% YoY, +5.7% over the decade). Brazil — the regional leader — rose 13 percent to US$23.9 billion, driven primarily by increased investment in naval technological development plus higher military personnel costs.

The Brazilian rise has structural significance. Members of Brazil’s Congress submitted a constitutional amendment in 2023 aiming to mandate annual military expenditure of at least 2 percent of GDP — up from approximately 1.1 percent currently.

While that amendment has not progressed, the 13 percent real-terms increase in 2025 represents the largest single-year jump in over a decade. Brazil’s naval modernization includes the FX-2 Gripen fighter program, Amazonas-class corvettes, and the Riachuelo-class submarine project.

Guyana’s military spending rose 16 percent to US$248 million in 2025 — fueled by escalating tensions with Venezuela over the Essequibo region. The disputed territory contains substantial offshore oil reserves under Guyanese operation by ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC.

The Maduro government previously claimed Essequibo formally; Delcy Rodríguez’s transition government has not yet clarified its position. SIPRI noted Venezuela has not publicly reported military spending figures, making the bilateral comparison incomplete.

Mexico, Colombia, and the Cartel-War Spending

Mexico continues a structural shift. Spending reached US$11.8 billion in 2023 (latest detailed SIPRI figure), with the Guardia Nacional — the militarized internal security force created in 2019 — rising from 0.7 percent of total military expenditure in 2019 to 11 percent in 2023. The pattern reflects Mexico’s increasingly militarized response to cartel violence rather than external threats.

Colombia’s defense spending continues to absorb a large share of government expenditure as a result of internal armed conflict. The current crisis in Cauca — 21 dead in the El Túnel bombing last weekend, US travel advisory issued Monday — will likely accelerate further spending in 2026 budget proposals. Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez Suárez has already deployed 13 armored cavalry platoons and 12 infantry platoons to Cauca.

“The use of the military to suppress gang violence has been a growing trend in the region for years as governments are either unable to address the problem using conventional means or prefer immediate — often more violent — responses,” Lopes da Silva noted in SIPRI’s analytical commentary. The Mexico CJNG capture announced Monday — Audias Flores Silva, alias El Jardinero, taken down by Mexican Navy Special Forces — illustrates the operational scale of this trend.

The US Decline That Isn’t

US military spending fell 7.5 percent to US$954 billion in 2025 — the first decline in years and the headline contradiction in an otherwise rising-spending world. SIPRI attributed the drop almost entirely to the suspension of new Ukraine military aid: in the previous three years, Washington had approved US$127 billion in such packages.

The decline is structurally short-lived. US Congress has already approved over US$1 trillion for fiscal 2026 — a substantial increase from 2025. President Trump’s fiscal 2027 proposal of US$1.5 trillion would mark the largest defense budget in US history, with funds going toward the Golden Dome missile system, AI capabilities, and a new class of battleships.

Despite the 2025 decline, US strategic priorities remained stable. Washington continued investing in nuclear and conventional capabilities aimed at maintaining dominance in the Western Hemisphere and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific — both core objectives of the new National Security Strategy. The structural framework is one of US strategic continuity at higher spending levels with one-off Ukraine accounting noise.

What This Means for Investors and Markets

Defense equity performance in 2025 reflected the spending wave. Hanwha Aerospace surged 193 percent in 2025 (after 154% in 2024). Hyundai Rotem rose 278 percent.

Germany’s Rheinmetall climbed 154 percent and ThyssenKrupp gained 215 percent. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries rose 72.7 percent and IHI Corp spiked 107.1 percent.

BAE Systems rose 49.2 percent. The pattern: defense equities are pricing in multi-year sustained spending growth, not just war-driven peaks.

For Latin American investors, the structural read is mixed. Brazil’s 13 percent rise creates opportunity for Embraer (whose Q1 backlog hit US$32 billion) and select naval-defense suppliers.

Guyana’s surge benefits regional defense logistics providers. Mexico’s continued Guardia Nacional growth supports specific equipment categories.

Colombia’s structural conflict-driven spending supports rotorcraft and surveillance equipment.

The geopolitical read is sharper. Eleven consecutive years of rising global military spending, with no sign of inflection, indicates a structural rearmament cycle that pre-dates Trump’s specific decisions and will outlast them.

The 2.5 percent of GDP global military burden — highest since 2009 — places defense spending firmly back in the macroeconomic conversation. For Latin American economies that have historically invested defense budgets at one-third or less of European levels, the question is whether 2025 marks the start of regional convergence with the global spending wave or remains an outlier moment.