WITH May Day approaching, and the veil of mistrust and despair being shattered, the Indian working class is rising with heroic valour at every moment; it has sent a shiver down the spine of spineless capital and instilled a deep sense of fear in the heart of the heartless state. The upsurges are coming in waves, one after another, sweeping across north and central India - the industrial workers are asserting their existence amid great agony and pain.

These spontaneous upsurges have raised key questions within trade unions and society, reviving memories of the Luddite movement and debates on spontaneity versus organisation. The relevance of May Day has re-emerged sharply, centred on the unbearable extension of the working day for millions of industrial workers. The Indian working class stands in solidarity with these struggles, seeking to understand their core and replicate them with greater intensity and consistency.

Heart of the Rage Lies in the Wage: The first phase of the movement emerged mainly among construction workers employed by large corporate contractors in new refinery, steel, and other public sector projects. The second phase spread across private manufacturing hubs such as Manesar, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, and Neemrana, driven largely by non-permanent workers.

The immediate causes included below-subsistence wages of ₹9,000–11,000, long working hours, denial of overtime and legal benefits, and widespread contractor atrocities. In legal terms, minimum wage refers to the subsistence income needed to reproduce labour power. In India’s vast informal labour regime, only a small section of workers is actually covered by statutory minimum wages. Their flexible calculation also largely favours capital, with major regional disparities - for example, wages in Noida and Gurgaon remain far below Delhi despite similar living costs. Most workers survive through excessive working hours and multiple earners within a family.

Although the Variable Dearness Allowance (VDA) is meant to protect real wages from inflation, neutralisations are often delayed or inadequate. At the same time, periodic revisions to improve the consumption basket have remained pending for decades in many states, sharply weakening the capacity of social reproduction and making the working class highly vulnerable to crises.

Then the LPG crisis emerged. Before the crisis, average fuel expenditure was around ₹1,000; it rose to ₹3,000-4,000 in the retail market. The cost of purchased cooked food also doubled. Given the existing pattern of consumption and the social cost of essential reproduction, this core inflation required immediate wage neutralisation through wage increases. However, the ruling class kept wages unchanged.

In clear terms, necessary labour was no longer fully compensated; thus under core inflation, without any wage rise, the rate of surplus extraction increased, even without any formal increase in working hours, productivity, or labour intensity. Workers increasingly failed to reproduce themselves as a class, reflected in the shrinking replenishable working life of labour.

In effect, surplus was extracted from the future share of life itself - fundamentally, a crisis of social reproduction. The LPG crisis acted as the immediate trigger. In such a situation, this non-unionised section of working class had only two options: spontaneous mass upsurge or mass exodus. The exodus of migrant workers was also again witnessed from the industrial belts of Delhi NCR and Surat.

Actually, the workers’ organisations, especially trade unions, aim to develop the consciousness that a greater share of the surplus created by the working class can be reclaimed through collective action. The reproduction of the working class is, in principle, to be sustained within the logic of the capitalist system.

However, when that very logic is distorted by the unbridled pursuit of profit, the class -though not yet fully formed through conscious collective struggle - begins to identify itself as an existentially threatened social group or community. It is the community of underpaid, crisis-stricken, largely migrant and non-regular workers.

It is a class by instinct - the instinct to survive in the face of the onslaught of capital - engaged in the process of production; and a community by utilising its communitarian networks of communication, its shared memory, and hope. Thus, it spreads like fire, with each spark carried through social media – swallowing the entire north and central India.  Social media has provided the infrastructural basis for creating the imagination of the “collective worker,” and, this modern proletariat has overturned the individualistic orientation of social media, transforming it into a tool for mass upsurges.

The ruling class believed that expanding the non-regular workforce and suppressing trade unions would prevent militant industrial action. Instead, it created the largest and most militant section of India’s modern working class - the real have-nots employed in core and highly profitable industries. This is the proletariat of 21st-century India, with nothing to lose but its chains.

Capital fragmented production across value chains and dispersed units to weaken large unified shop-floor organisation. In response, workers organised struggles across multiple units of the same company, limiting capital’s ability to shift production. This reflects a strategic form of resistance combining both consciousness and instinct.

Capital responded: Certainly, under immense pressure, the state governments of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh increased wages by around Rs 2,000–3,000; significantly, the rise is more or less equivalent to the gap between income and subsistence-level necessities that emerged from the LPG crisis. However, in the majority of cases, implementation is still pending. Meanwhile, management is exerting pressure to increase the task burden, thereby intensifying labour and enhancing its capacity for relative surplus extraction.

Along with this, an unprecedented degree of state repression is being unleashed on struggling workers and activists - hundreds have been detained without any information about their whereabouts. The state seeks to send a strong signal to capital that any further revolt will be brutally crushed and the complete hegemony of capital’s power will be reestablished in this region.

What was new? An important factor not yet discussed is the general strike of February 12, 2026. Accompanied by mass mobilisation and a broad campaign, it was a strong assertion by the Indian working class against the Labour Codes. Significantly, many of these upsurges spread during and after the general strike.

A peculiar trend has emerged in India over the last two decades. Studies show that establishment-specific economic strikes have sharply declined, while general strikes have become more consistent, participatory, and militant. At first glance, this seems to depart from the traditional understanding that political general strikes emerge from numerous economic strikes.

However, it was assumed that in a highly fragmented value chain, with a vast army of non-regular workers engaged in petty production units, a sustained establishment based economic strike to achieve a direct collective agreement is practically impossible in the majority of cases. A general strike provides these diverse constituents of the “collective worker” with a scope to express their discontent and anger; it is an uneven yet powerful expression of their lived reality.

But one thing was certain: capitalism had become a vast interconnected system, with living labour embedded at all its nodal points; a strike even at the weakest link could trigger an avalanche effect. However, these general strikes largely remained defensive.

Towards a Dual Power: And then came these massive strike actions, one after another. They were primarily economic strikes centred on wages, working hours, safer conditions, and workplace dignity. These establishment-based struggles were led largely by non-regular workers. These strikes were autonomous, without any planned or coordinated effort by the established trade unions; they went beyond the routine framework of the state and unsettled it. The repressive response of the state reflects its unpreparedness for such industrial actions. In effect, these strikes have challenged the legitimacy of the bourgeois order.

In that sense, we are living amidst dialectics. General strikes are becoming more universal, expressing the economic demands of the entire class; while these economic strikes are assuming a more political character – challenging the State. Together, this dialectic has the potential to build dual power in and around strike actions in the present period. The dialectic of autonomy and organisation is key to protecting this embryo of dual power. Trade union’s political organisations must harness the democratic spirit and autonomous energy of this force; at the same time, they must sow the politics of transformation within this mass of the working class. The fluidity of form and the concreteness of the ideological content, dialectically intertwined, can challenge the state with a transformative aspiration and open up the possibility of numerous autonomous institutions of the working class.

History does not repeat itself fully, but it offers lessons. The history of May Day bears a striking connection with the present, having emerged during an economic crisis followed by depression. Between 1881 and 1884, fewer than 500 strikes and lockouts occurred annually in the United States, involving about 150,000 workers. In 1885, the number rose to around 700 involving 250,000 workers, and by 1886, strikes had surged to 1,572, drawing in nearly 600,000 workers and affecting 11,562 establishments.

The May 1^st, 1886 strike was most intense in Chicago, then a centre of militant labour activity. Though not fully politically developed, the movement was highly combative, seeking not only immediate improvements in working conditions but also to challenge capitalism itself.

With the support of revolutionary labour groups, the strike grew significantly. An Eight-Hour Association had been formed in advance, backed by the Central Labor Union and a broad united front of labour organisations. This, in essence, represented the emergence of a form of dual power within the strike struggle - an autonomous organisation of workers existing outside the direct control of the state and challenging it. The direction was laid there.

This May Day, Indian workers pledge to develop new strategies and tactics - towards building such dual power, challenging the very legitimacy of the ruthless bourgeois order, and transforming the system - not only for survival but for a fuller life. Let these struggles lead to a new form of labour movement, breaking the barriers.