India has already seen barbarism for forty years too many. It’s time we put socialism back on the agenda.

I am speaking here of the the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925—the mothership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Its founding fathers were greatly influenced by German and Italian fascism. They likened the Muslims of India to the “Jews of Germany,” and believed that Muslims have no place in Hindu India.

The question we must answer is why the traditional middle class incubated so much hatred and resentment toward the people — leading them to embrace a racialized fascism, targeting the indio as an enemy. How did it infect the police and armed forces with its class frustrations, creating a social basis for fascistization, a basis for state regression and moral degeneration?

Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they immediately transform a society. A revolution is a process, which moves at different speeds whose tempo can change rapidly if the motor of history is accelerated by intensified class conflict. But, most of the time, the building of the revolutionary momentum is glacial, and the attempt to transform a state and society can be even more slow.

Eight are dead and hundreds injured in a week of bloodshed after Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales was forced to resign from power last Sunday.

Cuba demands an end to the instigation of violence against Cuban health care collaborators in Bolivia.

Reformists misunderstand this fundamental truth about capitalist states. States protect capital and the wealthy class, not life. Reformists who appeal to the state for change compromise our future. We refuse to comprise. Our philosophy of reform is to reallocate social wealth back to those who actually produce it: workers, the poor, Indigenous peoples, the Global South, women, migrants, caretakers of the land, and the land itself.

An honest look at Morales tactical dilemmas shows that the political culture of the US and its top allies is the big problem facing any democracy in the Global South.  Democratic legitimacy does very little to protect you when the US and its propaganda apparatus targets you for destruction. The coup against Morales should be an incredibly easy one for any “progressive” to unreservedly oppose – and by oppose I mean demand Morales finish off his term. People eager to highlight their “critiques” of Morales are part of the problem.