Capitalism

What remains behind the repetition of brazen violence is the continuous and calibrated deployment of different techniques of power that involve the recycling of violence in various forms and continuous yet ad hoc negotiations by the state and the mining company with the affected communities that seek to contain the communities and limit the forms of resistance available to them on a day-to-day basis.

In the context of the spread of COVID-19, a number of left and progressive thinkers, scholars, and activists have deliberated upon the linkage between contemporary capitalism and epidemics. Many of them tend to argue that such epidemics originate due to tendencies inherent in the capitalist system of production. While these interventions present some useful critical analyses, they also tend to present a one-sided view of this relationship, founded on a deeper confusion regarding the human–nature relationship under contemporary capitalism.

As we mark Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary, it is clear that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.