By Sagnik Mukherjee

On January 26, 2026, a massive fire tore through a warehouse complex near Ruby Crossing in the Anandapur area of Kolkata, West Bengal. The warehouse was used by WOW! MOMO, a large Chinese food chain, owned by Indian capitalists, operating across the length and breadth of the country. The fire reportedly broke out at around 3:00 AM, originating in an adjacent decorator's godown, before rapidly engulfing the nearby WOW! Momo warehouse. Initial reports confirm the recovery of 16 charred bodies, while 23 workers remain missing. Subsequent investigations revealed that both structures lacked even the most elementary fire-safety arrangements.

The fire minister arrived at the site only a day after the incident ; an arrival that itself stands as a damning indictment of the state's criminal indifference toward the proletariat. His statement was as hollow as it was routine: "A probe has been initiated to ascertain the cause. We are also checking if a fire audit was done." This bureaucratic phraseology is the familiar funeral chant of bourgeois governance uttered after the workers are already reduced to ashes.

Kolkata, like countless other cities across India, has a long and bloody history of such infernos. Yet instead of improvement, the situation has only worsened. This is no accident, no aberration, no "administrative lapse." It is the law of motion of capitalism itself.

Marx long ago exposed the truth: under capitalism, human life is degraded into a commodity, valued only insofar as it produces surplus value. With the incessant and intensified accumulation of capital, and with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the bourgeoisie compensates by squeezing the proletariat ever harder;　cutting wages, extending working hours, and stripping away even the bare minimum conditions necessary for survival. Safety becomes an "unnecessary cost," and workers' lives become expendable inputs.

This incident is not an exception, it is the rule of capitalism.

As always, the city will not truly mourn the deaths of "a few workers." There will be no collective rage, no sustained outrage. The event will be absorbed into everyday normalcy, swallowed by a deafening silence. A section of bourgeois liberals will perform their ritualistic protests, preaching individual boycotts of this or that corporation. Such gestures may soothe their consciences, but they strike no blow against capital. Boycottism does not threaten the system, it decorates it with the illusion of dissent.

What is urgently required is not moral outrage, nor consumer activism, but a strong, consolidated mass movement consciously directed toward revolution. The reformist left, primarily social democrats, who systematically divert every upsurge into safe, parliamentary, and ultimately sterile channels. The chasm between the anger of the proletariat and the grievances of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals i.e. the modern raznochintsy is not being bridged. The genuine historical tasks of a communist party are being abandoned. In the absence of a revolutionary vanguard, the spontaneous movement of the masses oscillates, exhausts itself, and inevitably crashes into a dead end, often leaving behind conditions worse than before.

The continuous normalization of the institutional murder of workers by big corporations is nothing but the accumulated historical frustration of betrayed struggles. It is the direct product of movements deprived of revolutionary leadership. The social democrats and reformists left obsessively catalogue the "failures" and "inefficiencies" of corporations and the bourgeois state, implying that capitalism could somehow be managed better, more humanely, and more responsibly.

This narrative is rooted in a vulgarized, distorted caricature of Marxism. Capitalism is not failing , it is functioning exactly as it must. This is everything the exhausted capitalist epoch can offer. And it will only offer more death, more misery, more barbarism.

The system is rotting, staggering forward in its death agony. It does not call for cosmetic alternatives built on the same material foundations. It calls for its complete overthrow.

Long live the World Socialist Revolution!

Lenin – Clara – Trotsky – Rosa!

Long live! Long live!