EUROPE is experiencing popular unrest one country after another. Images of outpouring of people in France, Italy, Greece, Albania, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Austria and in Latin America Argentina and Brazil, and finally the coming back to power of the Workers’ Party’s Lula for the fourth term despite a lot of conspiracies by Trump-supported agencies, the regime change in Serbia through popular student uprising, all manifest the intensifying crisis of late neoliberalism due to rising costs of living, stagnant or declining real wages and the desperation of authoritarian and fascists parties to retain power by any means. In India, we see growing protests of students, young people, workers and peasants converging towards the single goal of protecting our democratic institutions and right to dissent. The protests across the world have a common feature: a majority are denied their rights and entitlements while at the same time ruling establishments are trying to manoeuvre the state machinery including the democratic process to silence the voice of the masses.

This is neither a mere coincidence nor is it a well-thought-out conspiracy of the masses as it is often portrayed to be by the authorities as if these are hatched by foreign disruptive agencies. On the contrary, these are responses to the conspiracies of rulers against their own people being badly exposed. This is the class project of neo-fascism when the ruling class would be ruthlessly using power to suppress the people’s voice being aware of the very fact that they have hardly anything to offer to ensure popular support through consent. ‘Regime change’ is portrayed as a ‘bad’ word, as if it is something conspiratorial and an anti-national act. The right to change the regime through peaceful means is the crux of democracy. And what follows from this basic principle is the righteous courage to raise your voice and dissent against any conspiracy to hijack or dismantle existing democratic institutions. The hollowness of the slogan of nationalism of these neo-fascists and right-wing parties is thoroughly exposed by their blatant allegiance to a handful of big corporates and global finance while betraying the people of their own country.

CRISIS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

The outpouring of young people in the streets of Europe, Latin America or India adds a general dimension to these popular protests. It is not only that the real wages of workers have stagnated, and even declined in the recent past, not only that the share of the working people of our country suffers a steep decline in terms of share in GDP or that our farmers have been increasingly thrown to the vagaries of market fluctuations and a vast mass of working people are pushed to sub-human levels of super exploitation in precarious work— on top of that, the future of the working people who are in the making to join the labour force as doctors, workers, engineers, painters or farmers are increasingly losing hope in a system which is deliberately choking all possibilities of vertical movement. True that exploitation has increased for those who are employed, but the situation seems to be even worse for those who see themselves unwanted in the production of social good, who do not even see the opportunity to be exploited! This reflects the crisis of social reproduction where the system shows a lack of capacity to produce a labour force needed to be employed for the future.

Increasingly, our education system is being privatised, health service is corporatised and familial and community care system crumbles in the face of rising migration and lack of availability of employment opportunities. The system wastes the youth potential and even abandons it when it is supposed to fully utilise the demographic dividend. The students do not get the opportunity of a good public education. They face a chronic deficit of teachers and infrastructure in schools, public universities are suffocated by dearth of funds; the admission, examination and recruitment system is compromised to serve political motives. In other words, the limited possibility of vertical mobility that was created through public institutions in breaking the glass ceilings of class and caste is completely in shambles. The underclass has no options left. Crores of young people are not in employment, education or training; they are the discouraged workers, the submerged labour force who lost hope to get a job. Most importantly, amidst the new wave of technology, it is becoming increasingly clear that participating in this new production structure is going to be the fortune of the few. Public spaces hardly provide required education and skills for this new world of work. Essentially, it is going to be an elite affair while the larger mass of working youth will be struggling in gig work and low-end digital services being completely left out from the high road. This is going to increase inequality and dispossession further. Stagnating incomes, rising cost of living, joblessness and exclusion integrate the crisis of production and social reproduction.

INVOKING COMBAT MODE

The narrative which the current government is peddling through its ideological apparatus is portraying ‘regime change’ as a matter of conspiracy and peaceful protests or expression of dissent as breach of peace. The futile attempt to vilify the idea of regime change, projecting it as foreign funded conspiracy and a disruption of national prosperity is expressing the deep discordance the ruling dispensation has with the idea of democracy. In fact, regime continuation by repressing popular choice is abnormal in a democratic process rather than a regime change. What is even more important is that the denial of this idea and taking resort to unscrupulous means of distorting the electoral process itself is invoking a dissenting mode that would not be left with any peaceful means or democratic platforms of conflict resolution. The fascist rulers may like such a scenario to garner support in favour of them, and this is nothing new if one recalls the setting ablaze of the Reichstag building in 1933, which was a Nazi plot and the communists were accused for the same. Fascist forces are fond of combat mode because that helps mobilising common people against each other, justifies spending on arms and weapons and help galvanise their supporters. The terrorised masses often feel the necessity of a strong leader and that’s the way Hitler could increase his electoral support after the Reichstag incident.

It is increasingly becoming evident that the current government is leaving no space for popular protest or dissent but at the same time dissenting voices are emerging from the corridors of power itself. The protests that were kindled by the students and youth across India and also in different parts of the world essentially represent a deep sense of despair, the concern of the young people who see their future being usurped by the rentier class, the corporates and the corrupt politicians of their own country who are busy cornering their share of wealth. Also, ironically when they are raising their voice against this betrayal, they are alleged to be driven by a foreign conspiracy. This environment of suffocation has to be broken and the sustained and protracted process of regime change would really materialise when the farmers or workers, employees and teachers, intellectuals and lawyers, doctors and engineers of urban and rural India— men, women and queer who are friends and relatives of this courageous generation would stand for the common cause of saving the country from the hawkers and handlers of the neo-fascist gameplan of creating the Hindutva-corporate state.