On September 2, 180 million Indian workers participated in a massive one-day strike that extended across the country and engaged employees in every economic sector. Likely the largest general strike in world history, it demonstrated the power of the Indian working class, which is increasingly underpaid, casualized, and unorganized.

To understand such a strike, we have to ask a number of questions, among them: how successful was it? What kind of material impact did it have on India’s ruling class? What was the relationship of India’s union bureaucracy to the day’s actions? What about the country’s fractured left? Or Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party?

More broadly, to what extent has globalization shaped Indian class struggle and politics for the past forty years? And what are the prospects for class struggle in India in the years to come?