I have known Comrade Thankappan since he was leading the Kamani Employees’ Union. I interviewed him extensively about his pioneering work forming the Kamani Tubes Cooperative, and later worked with him in the Centre for Workers’ Management.
What comes through to me is his truly revolutionary view that workers can manage production. Not just running production in the workplace, but also procuring the necessary raw materials and machinery, and finding outlets for what they produce, the whole circuit. Under capitalism, this means looking at costs and prices, but even without capitalism, it would be necessary to find suppliers of raw materials and machines and users of the end product. It’s a vision of a society where working people decide what to produce in the interests of themselves, their families and other workers; where there are no employers and employees because everyone is equal, and where friendship, love and solidarity can overcome divisions created by caste, gender, community and nationality.
I know that today, when workers and unions are being pushed back on so many fronts, it seems impossible to achieve such a goal. But it’s still important to keep the vision alive so that we can find small ways of moving towards it, for example helping unorganized workers to organize themselves, or setting up workers’ cooperatives catering to local needs. This is the best way to keep Thankappan’s legacy alive, and the NTUI, which he worked so hard to set up, is well qualified to take up this task.
(Presented at the memorial meeting for D. Thankappan on 9 September 2026 at Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan, Prabhadevi, organized by the New Trade Union Initiative.)