The limits of legality and the transformation of production together point to a single conclusion: only through expanding forms of collective organisation across the value chain can the working class convert dispersed struggles into sustained class power.

Sifar

The implementation of India’s four Labour Codes marks a reorganisation of the relationship between capital, labour, and the state. Delayed for nearly six years due to sustained working-class resistance, their enforcement is not an administrative rationalisation or mere legal consolidation. Instead, it is a deliberate reorganisation of bourgeois legality itself—a juridical response to the deepening systemic crisis of capitalism.

The present crisis is not conjunctural. It is not a product of external shocks or temporary disruptions. It emerges from the internal contradictions of capitalist accumulation—from the rupture between production and circulation, from declining productive investment, falling profitability, and the tendential crisis of over accumulation. Even as rapid technological advancements, including AI, enable intensified surplus extraction and momentary profit recovery for monopoly capital, they simultaneously accelerate the long-term tendencies toward stagnation. The crisis is structural and its depth is determining the form of the state’s response.

It is within this context that the Labour Codes must be understood. The Codes seek to constitute a new juridical architecture for surplus extraction under conditions of crisis. Bourgeois legality is being recomposed, not to restore equilibrium between capital and labour, but to manage the falling average rate of profit and the sharpening contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. The Codes therefore signal an active reorganisation in the service of capital.

Class Struggle Shapes the Labour Laws

Labour law under capitalism is not a neutral legal domain. As Marx demonstrated in his analysis of the Factory Acts, every major working-class protection—the limits on the working day, the recognition of trade unions, collective bargaining rights—was won through what he described as a prolonged civil war between labour and capital. Bourgeois legality does not determine class struggle; it adjusts, retrospectively, to the shifts in the balance of class forces. Legal protections were always concessions extracted through collective organisation, and they were always simultaneously embedded within the limits of the capitalist order.

The twentieth-century labour jurisprudence was an outcome of the working class struggle in the Fordist stage of Capitalism, as well as of the balance of power between socialism and imperialism. The emergence of Soviet Russia was the single biggest factor forcing national ruling classes to enact labour laws in the wake of the increasing militancy of working classes across various countries. Factory concentration gave mass trade unionism its social base. The capitalist state institutionalised conflict through tribunals, labour courts, and bargaining mechanisms, containing the trade union form within the limits of the bourgeois legal-institutional structure. Labour jurisprudence in this period expressed a temporary equilibrium, a product of a specific conjuncture of production processes and the balance of class forces.

Divergence between the Legal Form and the Material Reality

Neoliberal restructuring shattered this compromise. Since the profitability crisis of the 1970s, capital reorganised production through the global fragmentation of production processes, enabled by advances in communication and transport, and deepened through subcontracting and informalisation. Stable industrial employment gave way to precarious, dispersed labour regimes. Over four decades, a defining contradiction emerged: the legal form of labour regulation increasingly diverged from the material reality of the labour process. Formal protections survived on paper while capital routinely evaded them, and the state preserved the textual legitimacy of protective legislation while actively aiding its systematic violation through planned weakening of the implementation mechanism.

Labour Codes Resolve the Divergence in Favour of Capital

The Labour Codes represent the resolution of this contradiction, but on capital’s terms. Rather than closing the gap between law and practice through enforcement, the state is instead trying to do away with the gap itself by rewriting the law. Practices once pursued through evasion or semi-legality now obtain full legal sanction. Higher thresholds for layoffs, weakened inspection regimes, tightened strike procedures, expanded contractualisation, and increased working-time flexibility are no longer violations of the legal order—they are its content. This is not deregulation; it is juridical synchronisation with the neoliberal labour regime.

Widening Contradictions

Bourgeois labour laws play a major role in mediating the contradiction between labour and capital, which is inherent to the capitalist production process. They seek to contain the contradiction and working-class subjectivity within the boundaries of the state. Every legal formulation also involves the State deciding to reduce certain sections of the working class and certain forms of production processes as outside the legal boundaries. Hence, every act of containment and mediation also involves excluding certain sections of the working class from the legal boundary. While the period prior to labour codes saw a dissonance between the legal text and the actual reality; the codification takes this dissonance a step further by legally denying large sections of the working class any opportunity for mediation.

This mediating function is precisely what the Codes undermine. When legality becomes transparently identified with the interests of the capital, its capacity to generate consent erodes. The contradiction the Codes produce is therefore internal to bourgeois legality itself. Capitalist law can regulate conflict only while it appears to mediate exploitation. The more directly it serves accumulation, the more its legitimacy is eroded, and the more class struggle tends to exceed the institutional channels through which it has historically been contained by the bourgeois state.

Legality Cannot Contain the Contradiction between Labour and Capital

The Labour Codes represent the bourgeois state’s effort to reorganise legality in favour of capital under conditions of systemic crisis. In doing so, they sharpen, rather than resolve, the antagonism between juridical order and material reality. Legal restructuring cannot abolish the contradictions of capitalist production; it can only displace them, making them more visible in social life. Workers experience precarity, wage suppression, and intensified extraction not as isolated legal subjects but as collective social beings. Consequently, class struggle necessarily exceeds the legal frameworks constructed by the state.

The labour codes do not resolve class struggle; they intensify it. Legality—however thoroughly reconfigured in capital’s interest—remains contingent on the balance of class forces. Through sustained collective struggle, the working class retains the capacity not only to resist exploitation but to redefine legality, legitimacy, and social power itself.

Working-Class Recomposition and New Organisational Forms

Trade unions emerged under specific historical conditions that have been systematically eroded by neoliberal capitalism. Fragmentation, contractualisation, and labour mobility—the defining features of contemporary accumulation—limit the material basis of classical trade unionism.

This does not render unions obsolete; rather, it makes the development of supplementary organisational forms an urgent strategic necessity. As capital fragments production and disperses labour across the value chain to maximise surplus extraction, it simultaneously creates new nodes of working-class power. Workers in platform-based sectors, logistics, transport, and the informal economy now occupy strategic positions within circuits of accumulation. Their struggles possess significant disruptive potential precisely because they target the circulation networks on which neoliberal accumulation depends.

In this conjuncture, the central strategic task is not merely defensive resistance but organisational innovation rooted in the realities of a recomposed working class. The limits of legality and the transformation of production together point to a single conclusion: only through expanding forms of collective organisation across the value chain can the working class convert dispersed struggles into sustained class power. The trajectory of struggle, therefore, lies in moving beyond inherited forms while rearticulating them, towards a politics capable of confronting capital at the level of both production and circulation. The ongoing wave of working-class upsurges across the country embodies, with ferocious energy, this strategic perspective, albeit in an embryonic form.

(The author is a full-time trade union activist based in Delhi-NCR)