Trump's victory in the US Presidential election conforms to a pattern presently observable across the world, namely a collapse of the liberal centre and a growth in support either for the Left, or for the extreme Right, the neo-fascists, in situations in which the Left is absent or weak.

The Kazan summit of the BRICS countries was a historic one for several reasons: first, it created a new category called “partner nations” as a step towards full membership, and accepted 13 such new “partner” countries, among whom were Cuba and Bolivia.

Growing concern about defaults on unsecured retail loans reflects not just fear about the health of the banking system as a whole, but about the impact that such defaults could have on macroeconomic performance.

During the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate.

During Modi’s visit to Ukraine (why he visited Ukraine at all at the present time remains a mystery), Zelensky asked India not to purchase fuel from Russia in violation of western sanctions, that is, to fall in line with the “unilateral” western sanctions.

Recently Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge quipped that the 'U' in UPS (Unified Pension Scheme) stands for U-Turn. While that may be seen as stretching interpretative liberty, he was touching a raw nerve.

A Good deal of analysis of the recent political upheaval in Bangladesh has focussed on the high-handedness and authoritarianism of Sheikh Hasina's government; it has either missed altogether, or generally underplayed, the change that has occurred in the economic situation in that country.

The latest controversy in the South Asian University, over an interview with a philosopher mentioned in a student's research proposal that resulted in severe backlash and eventual resignation of an eminent foreign professor, would appear to be ludicrous if it were not so tragic.

India's quasi-federal democracy, which was in danger of collapsing into a centralised authoritarianism, seems to be holding up.

The popular insurrection that ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League government offers important lessons for the international community and neighboring India.

With the short-term, frenzied interest that accompanies annual budget presentations in India having ended, it is time to raise issues that were largely ignored in the debate.

There is massive unemployment in the country that especially afflicts the youth; there is a huge and persistent inflation in food prices; there is acute and unprecedented rural distress; there is a crisis in the petty production sector; and income and wealth inequality has reached levels where the whole world is talking about it.

In the search for the next country that would transit from backward to advanced nation status, India’s name sometimes features. This is partly because the idea has been mooted by Prime Minister Narender Modi, who promises to make India a ‘developed nation’ by 2047.

The coming to power of governments led by fascists is either a reality or a threat today over large parts of the world. In Europe at present there are several countries where fascists are leading governments; France was on the verge of being added to this list, in which case it would have been the second major European power, after Italy, to have a fascist government.

Figures on India's balance of payments in financial year 2023-24, recently released by the Reserve Bank of India, have added to the hype on India's growth story.

For the French elections which Emmanuel Macron has called in the wake of the impressive showing by the Far-Right in the European parliamentary polls, four parties on the Left, the Communists, the Socialists, the Greens, and France Unbowed (of Jean-Luc Melenchon), have come together to form a New Popular Front to take on the fascist challenge of Marine Le Pen.

The problems in agriculture have been reflected in slow growth of agricultural output in the years since 2011-12. Within this, the performance of particular crops and particular states may provide some insights into why cultivators have been upset with the Modi government.

The election results, which gave both the BJP and the NDA far lower seats than they had in the previous parliament and led to a coalition government, surprised many. But now, attention has shifted to assessing what that would do to the behaviour and policies in different spheres of this version of a Modi-led government.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's inability to secure a parliamentary majority in India's general election has shattered Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s aura of invincibility. Modi will now have to rely on coalition partners to pass legislation, potentially curbing his efforts to consolidate power.

Against all odds, in the elections to India’s parliament, whose results were announced last week, the opposition I.N.D.I.A. alliance managed to prevent the rampaging ruling party, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), from securing a majority on its own.

A Distinction is drawn in economics between demand-constrained systems and resource-constrained systems (which for simplicity and symmetry we shall call supply-constrained systems).

The results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections have come as a shock to those who had mistakenly believed in the problematic exit polls, which continued the narrative so assiduously cultivated by the previous Modi government.

The current protests in US university campuses demanding "divestment" from firms linked to Israel's military machine, are reminiscent of the protests that had swept these campuses in the late sixties and early seventies demanding an end to the Vietnam war.

Each strand of political praxis is informed by a political philosophy which analyses the world around us, especially, in modern times, its economic characteristics. On the basis of this analysis, the particular political philosophy sets out the objectives which have to be struggled for, and the political praxis informed by it carries out this struggle.

A spike in Overseas Development Assistance flows from OECD members is not a departure from a long history of ODA levels that have fallen far short of a 1970 promise. It is a revelation of what "aid" really is.

The India Employment Report points to worrying tendencies in terms of structural change in the Indian economy, especially in recent years.

India's government has since the year of its G20 Presidency claimed to have restored the country's role as the 'Voice of the South' in global dialogues. That is often backed up by reference to its efforts to focus attention on the problem of debt stress and default in poor developing countries, and to the induction of the African Union into the G20.

Indian federalism is on the verge of breakdown. Ministers from opposition-ruled States have taken to the streets in New Delhi to protest against discrimination by the Centre.

The BJP government holds that truth is what Modi says; if evidence points otherwise then evidence must be wrong and should be suppressed. Modi says that India never had it so good as during the last decade of his government; but since official statistics contradict him, the statistics must be wrong and the statistical system must be changed.

Recruitment drives held over the last week of January, in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh and Rohtak in Haryana, for Indian workers to undertake construction and caregiver jobs in Israel have captured global attention.

We observe a strange phenomenon everyday, so strange that its strangeness goes generally unnoticed. Government spokespersons from the prime minister downwards go on repeating ad nauseam that India is the most rapidly growing major economy in the world today, that it will soon become a 5 trillion dollar economy, and that it has overtaken China in terms of the growth rate of the gross domestic product.

Imperialist hegemony over the third world is exercised not just through arms and economic might but also through the hegemony of ideas, by making the victims see the world the way imperialism wants them to see it.

Imagine a country that is exposed to relatively unrestricted trade. There are two obvious problems that it can face because of this trade policy: the first is a balance of payments problem because its exports are insufficient relative to its imports.

One of the striking findings of the Bihar Caste Survey, which bears out what the Left has been asserting for a long time, is that absolute poverty in the country is far more pervasive than what successive governments in India have been claiming.

In an economy like ours where the work-force is not neatly divided into "the employed" and "the unemployed", and instead there is massive and growing casualisation of work, measuring unemployment is a tricky business.

All fascistic outfits have one common characteristic: they reject outright all evidence that goes against the narrative they spin; and the Hindutva elements in power in India are no exception.

India has a robust and admired statistical system. But the government is suppressing data to suit its narrative. It is perilous not to know the reality of the governed.

One of the most intriguing questions at present is why Europe's political leadership has become complicit in what appear to be US efforts at undermining European economies.

The Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover for starting projects that rake in profits.

The G-20 meeting in Delhi was occurring in the midst of an acute economic crisis of the world economy. The advanced capitalist economies are expected by the IMF to witness a growth slowdown from 2.7 per cent in 2022 to 1.3 per cent in 2023.

Liberal bourgeois writers tend to explain the problems that arise under capitalism not by the immanent tendencies of the system but by the capriciousness of particular governments.

At the Johannesburg summit of the BRICS countries, it was decided to expand the group beyond its original five, namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to include six more countries. These are: Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

When BJP rule in the country is dead and gone, a good deal of the damage it has caused to the Indian society, polity and economy will no doubt be reversed. But there are at least two areas where such reversal will be difficult.

On July 14 this year, the shaky government of a debt-stressed Pakistan, won itself a surprising reprieve. The country had experienced a collapse in foreign reserves to less than one month worth of imports and was on the verge of defaulting on its external debt of more than $120 billion.

Many economists have been advocating a universal basic income for India, an idea that was mooted even in the official Economic Survey for 2016-17.

On April 3 this year, the minister of state for planning, Rao Inderjeet Singh, said in the Rajya Sabha that the government had no data after 2011-12 for estimating poverty, and therefore had no idea how many people had been lifted out of poverty since then.

The decision to allow banks to settle with willful defaulters and fraudsters reveals the actual stance of the government on ‘rescuing’ corporate debtors. The hype around the IBC conceals that.

Fascistic elements exist in every modern society, but usually as fringe, marginal or minor elements. They move centre-stage only when they get the support of monopoly capital which provides them with ample money and media coverage; and this happens when there is a capitalist crisis that substantially increases unemployment.

How exactly is the dollar’s status as reserve currency related to imperialism? This question has two parts: how this status of the dollar is related to U.S. imperialism, and how it is related to the overall imperialist arrangement.

In its efforts to boost India's underdeveloped manufacturing sector, the government has been emphasising the role of foreign direct investment. But the strategy is not working.

The estimates of India's Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter of 2023 were released on May 31. These show a growth rate of 6.1 per cent over the fourth quarter of the previous year, which is higher than the 4.4 per cent growth that the October-December quarter had recorded over the corresponding quarter of the previous year.

The data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure which had shot up during the pandemic has not come down much despite the recovery that has occurred in the level of GDP from its trough.

Ministers, central bankers, officials and civil society activists returning home from Washington after the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held in April 2023 were not clear as to what the outcomes of the meetings, however minor, were.

Recent changes in some Latin American tax regimes, especially in Colombia, provide useful pointers for taxation strategies in other developing countries.

Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, has finally acknowledged what has been obvious to most people for quite some time, namely that the imposition of sanctions against countries that the US is hostile to, runs the risk of jeopardising the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Government officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest absolute drop in GDP among the major economies of the world in 2020-21.

Rubber prices, which had recovered a little after the fall during the pandemic, have collapsed again, with the farmers in Kerala, which grows 80 per cent of the country's rubber crop, being badly hit.

For a large part of the dirigiste period, the gross domestic product of the Indian economy grew at a rate of around 4 per cent per annum or less, which, though an improvement compared to the colonial era that had witnessed virtual stagnation, was not very impressive.

It comes close to a fairytale as one starts narrating the meteoric rise and fall of the Adani Group in terms of its changing fortunes or valuations in the market.

There is an impression shared by even progressive intellectuals that the entity that goes by the name of “physical infrastructure” is an absolute necessity in each country, and that the actual amount of infrastructure that exists is always less than what is needed.

Recently, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court put forth the idea of setting up an expert committee that could recommend ways to protect common investors from market events.

Over the past two decades, Indian multi-billionaire Gautam Adani's close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi have helped the Gujarati businessman become Asia's wealthiest person.

The IMF cannot resolve Pakistan's debt crisis, though it is influencing policy on the grounds that it can.

A strike on the Adani group by short-seller the U.S.-based Hindenburg Research has led to the unravelling of the Gautam Adani story, which celebrated the spectacular rise, in an extremely short period of time, of the wealth of a man and his business empire.

A strike on the Adani group by short-seller the U.S.-based Hindenburg Research has led to the unravelling of the Gautam Adani story, which celebrated the spectacular rise, in an extremely short period of time, of the wealth of a man and his business empire.

Gautam Adani's calling Hindenburg's allegations of fraud against him an attack on the Indian nation is a matter of particular significance. Just before this episode, the BBC documentary on Modi had been labelled a product of the colonial mindset by the government and hence also construed to be an attack on the Indian nation.

All regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own discourse and vocabulary and a key concept in this vocabulary is "populism".

To mitigate the worst effects of climate change and prevent societal breakdown, we must shift to renewable energies and reduce extreme inequality. But doing so would require massive increases in public spending, which is why governments must overhaul their outdated and regressive tax systems.

As COP27, the climate summit at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, ended after a being prolonged, assessments of what it achieved were mixed. But the overwhelming sense was that the summit had yielded little, since on most counts it had not gone beyond the pledges agreed to at COP26 held in Glasgow last year and incorporated in the Glasgow Climate Pact.

The triumph of the City of London, the one square kilometre next to Liverpool Street station that houses the citadel of British finance, is complete. Not only did it get rid of one British prime minister, whom it distrusted, in the space of just 44 days, but even got a new one of its choice installed forthwith.

The most intriguing question with regard to Liz Truss’ resignation as the prime minister of Britain after a mere 44 days in office is this: what is it about her economic programme that the ''market'' (read ''finance capital'') found unpalatable? At its core after all was tax-cuts for the rich, which the ''market'' should have lapped up.

On September 23, the value of the rupee vis-à-vis the dollar fell to a new low: it crossed 81 to a dollar after some weeks of relative stability when it hovered between 79 and 80. And it fell despite the Reserve Bank's running down of foreign exchange reserves in a bid to hold up its value.

The cessation of natural gas supplies from Russia to Europe in retaliation against Western sanctions imposed on Russia because of the Ukraine war, is threatening Europe not only with a winter with inadequate heating that will take a big toll in terms of lives among poor people, but also with large-scale closures of enterprises; such closures would push up the unemployment rate, and significantly increase poverty and destitution among the workers.

India's enforcement directorate, still preoccupied with unearthing corruption and money laundering among opposition politicians, has decided to turn its attention to those involved in the crypto business in the country as well.

A Bizarre drama is unfolding in front of our eyes. The Modi government which has been giving away hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees as tax concessions to the monopolists has expressed its opposition ironically to what it calls "freebies", that is to handing over subsidies to other segments of the population.

At the end of the five-year period in which states were being compensated for shortfalls in GST revenues relative to targets, they are on the verge of a fiscal crisis. That could spell the end of the GST regime.

The hegemony of the US dollar was based on the fact that the world's wealth-holders considered it to be "as good as gold", even when it was no longer officially convertible to gold at a fixed rate, as it had been under the Bretton Woods system, after the collapse of that system.

The craftiness of imperialism is boundless. In several countries of the world at present there are neo-fascist governments, propped up by their respective big bourgeoisies (all aligned to globalized capital), and implementing neo-liberal policies with their characteristic ruthlessness; in many other countries there are neo-fascist outfits attempting to get into power by promising to their big bourgeois patrons that they would do the same if in power.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo had been haunted by the idea of capitalism ending up in a "stationary state", by which they meant a stable state of zero growth. Marx used the term "simple reproduction" to describe such a state, where there is no net addition to production capacity and the economy just reproduces itself at the same level period after period.

The government's celebration of record levels of FDI inflows in 2021-22 as indication of the strength of the Indian economy misreads the numbers that point to several underlying weaknesses in India's external account.

The chancellor of the exchequer of Britain, whose official residence is only next door to the British prime minister's, is Rishi Sunak, a person of Indian origin. Britain's home secretary is Priti Patel, also of Indian origin.

Having embraced neoliberal reform in the late 1970s, Sri Lanka had privileged access to large borrowing from the IMF and private financial markets. Exploiting that privilege has proved to be a poison pill.

When the world's financial leaders met mid-April at Washington for the annual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the mood was one of gloom.

So much has been written on the Sri Lankan economic crisis that the facts are by now quite well-known (see for instance C P Chandrasekhar, Frontline April 22): the massive build-up of external debt; the huge Value Added Tax concessions that pushed up the fiscal deficit and made the government borrow abroad even to spend domestically;

Governments of rich countries are the ones showing the greatest panic in responding to rising global oil prices, but the relative price of petrol is already much higher is low and middle income countries with bigger poor populations.

In the five days ending March 26, petrol and diesel prices in the country had been hiked four times, with more such daily hikes in the offing. On each occasion the hike had been by 80 paise per litre, so that the total increase during the week had been Rs 3.20 per litre, bringing the price per litre of petrol to Rs 98.61 and of diesel to Rs 89.87 in the capital city, Delhi.

The IMF, it follows, has changed dramatically since its foundation. When it began at Bretton Woods in 1944, it was part of an international system based on the pursuit of a dirigiste economic agenda.

Neocolonialism was a good fit for the 1950s and 1960s. The word "imperialism" is no longer applicable because recent years have been marked by peaceful discussions between countries rather than coercion by some over others.

The SBI-Adani deal is a way of changing the pattern of land use in agriculture by channelling government institutional credit through the domestic corporate-financial oligarchy. Such nationalised banks-NBFC deals are aimed at achieving what the farm laws could not achieve; these must be vehemently opposed.

Keynes believed that mass unemployment under capitalism could be prevented through state intervention; but even in the US, the ability of the State to stimulate domestic economic activity has become constrained. This is a new basic contradiction that has emerged in world capitalism and deserves serious attention.

No matter how government spending is financed, a rupee of government expenditure is better spent on the MGNREGS than on any other expenditure item. The Modi government alas is too blind to see this.

The significance of the kisan movement extends beyond the immediate context. It obviously is a climbdown by the Modi government in the face of the incredible resoluteness shown by the agitating peasants. At another level it has been a setback for the neoliberal agenda that the farm laws were seeking to promote.

There have been significant developments in Marxist theory regarding the revolutionary role of peasantry in the transcendence of capitalism. The peasant struggle in India too is not an ordinary one; it compels the government to openly declare who it stands with - the people or international big business.

Liberal commentators related Modi's rise with the ascendency of Hindutva. However, Modi rose to power through this ascendency as the person who cemented the corporate-Hindutva alliance, meditating between corporate capital and the RSS. Modi is an intermediary used by the Indian big bourgeoisie to bring about this alliance.

Everywhere in the world, public assets that provide basic services to the people, are virtually free, but no longer in India. Behind this bizarre Indian exceptionalism is the Modi government's peculiar agenda to turn everything into a commodity. Nothing is sacrosanct, nothing is hallowed, nothing transcends the market; everything is for sale.

The anti-colonial nationalism that informed the struggle for liberation in third world countries was of an entirely different genre from the bourgeois nationalism of seventeenth century Europe. However, there is a tendency in the West to treat all "nationalism" as a homogeneous and reactionary category.

Long queues of consumers in socialist economies were a source of derision in the West and were attributed to the inefficiency of the socialist system. However, it was not caused by any inefficiencies; it reflected the fact that the system was concerned about keeping down the inequality in income distribution.

There has been an upsurge of extreme right-wing, fascist parties worldwide in a manner reminiscent of the 1930s. Fascist governments invariably serve the interests of monopoly capital. However the contemporary extreme right movements eschew any Right-radical rhetoric from the very beginning, unlike their earlier counterparts.

After the 1997 Southeast Asian crisis, the region recognized the need for a regional financial safety net independent of the United States and the IMF to mitigate future crises. The emergence of China as a regional and global power, with its independence from the US, improve the prospects for it.

The People's Bank of China's network of local currency swap arrangements provide Asian countries with a much-needed safety net, while also strengthening China's diplomatic position.

The pandemic and the associated lockdown meant a drop in GDP and tax revenue both in the West and in India. However, there is a world of difference between the support provided by the two governments. The fiscal packages need to be examined to discover the scale of discretionary fiscal support for the poor.

Blatant vaccine grab by rich countries; protection of patent rights by governments in advanced countries and the use of vaccine distribution to promote 'soft power' have exposed and intensified global inequalities; but a pandemic can be overcome only when it is overcome everywhere.

Even before taking office, US President Joe Biden announced a rescue package that involves transfers to the working people and shall be financed by taxing the rich. This is in sharp contrast to the Modi government's callous policy vis-à-vis the people.

The agricultural bills impose a shift on farmers from food to cash crops that would destroy the public distribution system, but that is not what the Indian farmers or even consumers desire at present. We are witnessing a bizarre situation of the government versus people, instead of the usual people versus people.

At a time when the Indian peasants are engaged in a valiant and peaceful struggle for the repeal of the Central government's three agricultural laws, it is important to recall Friedrich Engels' study of the peasant war in Germany in 1525.

The kisan agitation in no longer simply a fight for MSP or against the corporatization of agriculture, it is a movement against the hegemonic narrative promoted under the neo-liberal Modi government.

The November 26 strike is significant not only because it protests against the Modi government's brazen attacks on workers and peasants in the country, that carry forward an imperialist agenda, but also because it dissents against the anti-democratic and anti-secular nature of the Hindutva forces.

Ministers as well as the Reserve Bank of India have seen signs of recovery in the Indian economy, but there, of course, had to be a recovery from the deep abyss to which the lockdown had pushed the economy, as some degree of normalcy returned; it is no reflection of any virtue of the government.

Jayati Ghosh discusses the forms of discrimination and bias that are rampant in economics and enlists some networks that are challenging the rigidities and power structures within the mainstream discipline.

It is often believed that the ability to pass on property to one's progeny is an essential element of capitalism, without which the capitalists' incentives will dry up and the system will lose its dynamism and nothing could be further from the truth.

Prabhat Patnaik discusses the proletariat's relationship with different segments of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry and the Communist Party's tactics towards other political forces, over the last one hundred years of the existence of communism in India.

Federalism is one of the basic features of the Indian Constitution, but the tendency of the Centre to encroach on the domain of the states has intensified to such an extent under the Hindutva forces and the corporate-financial oligarchy, that the country is being pushed towards a de facto unitary State.

The two bills rammed through parliament last week were not only anti-democratic in nature, but also exploitative. It leaves millions of peasants at the mercy of private buyers by opening them up to monopsonistic exploitation.

The current crisis in capitalism is not because of the pandemic, but due to the operation of neoliberalism that increased the share of economic surplus in output by keeping the real wage rates unchanged, even while labour productivity increased. The existence of an over-production crisis predating the pandemic has only made things worse.

The Hindu Rastra, that the BJP wants to achieve, will eventually be an authoritarian State, suppressing Hindus and Muslims alike and eventually subjecting them to unprecendented levels of exploitation by international finance capital and domestic corporate-financial oligarchy.

A New Deal attempted by any State today through larger fiscal deficit of taxing the rich will run the risk of capital flight and hence financial crisis. Such an effective opposition by global finance will require a mobilized working class to overcome.

The contrast in responses to the BLM movement in the U.S. and the anti-CAA anti-NRC protests in India has to do with the fact that the “educated bourgeoisie” in the U.S. has been more punctilious in playing a democratic role than its Indian counterparts.

The dead-end of neoliberalism, which is visible to even bourgeois thinkers in the metropolis now, is invisible to the Modi government still on the authoritarian-fascist track. Even the revival of post-war "welfare capitalism" will require a struggle by the working class.

While state governments are expected to meet all the Covid-related expenditure, they have not even been given their legally mandated GST compensation. This centralizing tendency of the BJP govt harms not just the states but the federal consciousness of India.

Globalised finance was known to increase inequality and create economic volatility. The pandemic has shown that it can even make crucial state intervention impossible in a major crisis. People everywhere have a choice of submitting to its hegemony or striving for a new class equilibrium.

Globalized finance, by nature, prevent welfare spending by third world governments and enforces their subservience vis-a-vis advanced economies. Delinking from current globalization therefore tantamount to freedom from hegemony of finance capital.

There is ample evidences to suggest that Chinese investments in India have been a help to employment rather than to casino finance. Hence, new FDI norms which corner China do not qualify as good economics in crisis time.

To face of a pandemic created by globalization under the aegis of capitalism, most countries are taking a socialist turn. Global economic and humanitarian crises like these suggest an end-game for the free-market system.

In a dramatic post-Coronavirus-pandemic turn, the agreement between OPEC and some non-OPEC oil exporters has collapsed, causing global demand-supply imbalances and depressed prices. Back home Indian governments’ response of raising excise duty on fuel might intensify the recession.

The term "populism" which was used by the Left to refer to a perspective that saw the "people" as undifferentiated in class terms, has been transformed. It now is used as a concept that underplays the viciousness of Right-wing supremacism.

Over-production under capitalism occurs because of speculative investments and the multiplier effect that follows. As both these factors are eliminated under socialism, Soviet Union, with all its defects, never experienced unemployment.

Fascist regimes are based on solid support of monopoly capital and the contradictions within it. It is no surprise that even in the midst of crisis, Modi government’s only concern is corporate gains through massive tax cuts.

In an interview with The Hindu, Jayati Ghosh talks about her life experiences, her views about global economic slowdown and the role of fiscal deficit in resolving demand scarcity, and the importance of JNU within a system of crony capitalism.

Unemployment and food shortage that plague the neo-liberal economies of today are indeed effects of a demand-constrained system. Essentially characterised by underutilized capacity, capitalism can never have a shortage of finance, which is artificially imposed by international finance capital.

"Global Hunger Index 2019 unambiguously concludes that India ranks lowest among all South Asian countries and that there has been an alarming increase in child "wasting". The government's callous approach to this has its roots in the institutionalized inequality of the Indian caste system."

The Modi government's "fiscal stimulus" in the form of corporate tax cut is likely to aggravate the economic crisis. What needs to be done is the opposite: an increase in government welfare expenditure financed by taxing the rich.

Staying out of the RCEP is the best option for India. While damaging for some sectors, the terms would preclude measures required to raise India's export competitiveness.

The unprecedented additions to the terms of reference for the 15th Finance Commission continue the Modi government's attempts at fiscal centralisation and denial of resources to states.

Changing the terms of reference of the finance commission so as to make the states pay for defence and internal security is unconstitutional and will squeeze the state governments.

Marx saw the necessary incompatibility between capitalism and human freedom: a contradiction that is becoming all too evident today.

Instead of being an obstacle to "development" as argued by Amit Shah, Article 370 has enabled J&K to be among the states with lowest rural-poverty-ratio and among the best performing states in a whole range of other social indicators.

Growth optimism about the Indian economy and the post-election speculative boom in the stock market are reversing because the perceptions on which they were built are now proving wrong.

Ending Kashmir's special status and repealing Article 35 A will not lead to "development" or increase in employment; instead, more crime associated with land speculation and rising terrorism will make prospects bleaker.

While the government was busy celebrating cosmetic measures like 'ease of doing business' ranking, the real economy tanked.

Karnataka is the latest instance of the commoditization of politics in India. This can only change with pressure from the masses based on genuinely alternative politics.

The argument made by votaries of finance capital, that government borrowing crowds out private investment, is analytically false and driven only by ideology.

Government's strategy of leaving public employment posts vacant to save on the potential wage bill is deeply irresponsible and unjust.

The self-reinforcing pattern of high profits, low investment, and rising inequality poses a threat not only to economic growth, but also to democracy, argues Jayati Ghosh.

Prabhat Patnaik explains the reasons for the declining strength of the Left in India and suggests what the Left should do to revive itself.

Prabhat Patnaik points out that while the debate over inequality has become hotter elsewhere in the world, in India, there is very little noise about it despite a massive rise in inequality after economic liberalisation.

Indians have voted for Modi the concept, not the man. Prabhat Patnaik shows how the myth of Modi has been manufactured to fulfil people's needs, even as their lived reality worsens.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that no matter how politically successful across the world the Right is today, it is incapable of leading people out of the current state of crisis and unemployment.

A militaristic concept of nationalism that sees any questioning of the armed forces as "anti-national", is fundamentally anti-democratic. Prabhat Patnaik shows that it is far removed from the anti-colonial nationalism that founded independent India, with its emphasis on democracy and people's sovereignty.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that industrial recession in India is inevitable under neo-liberalism - and it is likely to worsen because neoliberalism makes finding resources for fiscal expansion difficult.

C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh points out that India's rising gold imports are primarily responsible for its growing trade deficit; so far no action has been taken by the Modi government to prevent these unnecessary imports.

Prabhat Patnaik explains that the transfer schemes being mooted by the congress and the BJP are indicative of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, with evidence that whatever the level of growth under the regime, the poor are unlikely to benefit. But neoliberalism also prevents the mobilisation of resources to finance such schemes, deepening the crisis.

C.P. Chandrasekhar argues that the five years of the Modi-led NDA regime was characterised not just by the consolidation and advance of Hindutva forces but a growing nexus between the state and big capital that intensified the depredations of neoliberal capitalism, camouflaged by diversionary measures like demonetisation.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that rolling back of fascification of our society requires much more than the defeat of the Hindutva forces in the coming elections; it requires above all a programme that provides relief to the people from the depredations of neo-liberal capitalism.

In a period of upsurge of fascism, narrow nationalism and parochialism, Issa Shivji calls for the social responsibility of intellectuals to construct a counter-hegemonic project that would resonate with the lives of the vast majority.

Government's suppression of all the relevant statistics is harming citizens, economy and the government itself.

Under the NDA government disinvestment is increasingly turning out to be a process in which surpluses are wrung out of PSEs or government linked institutions to support the budget, instead of the usual route of sale to private buyers. Apart from adversely affecting the modernization and expansion plans of PSEs, this change in the nature of disinvestment does not enable the government to raise its expenditure to the desired levels in a pre-election year.

The Modi government's move to provide reservation for 'economically weaker sections' is a naked attempt to fortify its electoral prospects by creating an upper caste consolidation. This measure is largely for propaganda purposes and has little benefits to offer to anyone given the Modi government's poor record even on public employment.

Agrarian crisis is a direct result of the neo-liberal fiscal regime, which advocates tax incentives for finance, the corporate sector, and the rich in general, and tight control over government borrowing; all this has resulted in long-term neglect of agriculture. Now the measures to provide relief to farmers are being opposed by neo-liberal advocates on the grounds that it will violate fiscal prudence and yet not resolve the problem created by neo liberal fiscal regime in the first place.

The Modi government's demonetization move has been universally criticized, but there are significant differences between a neoliberal critique focused on the impact on GDP and the Left's assessment that looks at the impact on people.

The resignation of Urjit Patel from the governorship of RBI raises questions about what could have possibly caused such a drastic step. While the tussle between the central bank and the government provides an immediate context, there is a need to look at the depth of the mess that the Indian economy finds itself in.

Contemporary Fascism around the world is emerging as neo-liberal capitalism’s “gift” to mankind in the period of its maturity, when it submerges the world economy in a crisis, and reaches a dead-end from which there is no obvious escape.

On November 30th, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) came out with quarterly estimates of GDP for the second quarter (June to Sep) of 2017. Predictably, analysts and spokespersons of the government spent the evening in newsrooms of various TV channels celebrating what they claimed was a sign of revival of the economy.

Why is neoliberalism bad for India and Nepal? What are its major flaws? Mahabir Paudyal and Prashant Lamichhane from myRepublica caught up with Professor CP Chandrasekhar when he was in Kathmandu last week to discuss the impact of neo-liberal economic order in the two countries, and the prospects of a socialist-oriented economy in Nepal.

The German thinker Wolfgang Streeck in his brilliant book provides a cogent critique of the nature of contemporary capitalism, and describes its ongoing extended demise without surrendering to any optimism that as it fails to deliver even in terms of its own logic all the injustice it has generated must inevitably change for the better.

Neo-liberal capitalism is marked by the hegemony of international finance capital which has many consequences, among which is the alarming upsurge of fascism, differing markedly from the fascism of the 1930s.

To describe the present upsurge of fascism as nationalist or populist would be misleading. Neither is it a replication of the fascism of the 1930s. However, it is marked by four features, which have been common to all fascist upsurges in the past, namely: rise of supremacism, apotheosis of unreason, proliferation of fascism as a movement, and intertwining of fascist movement and corporate capital.

In the discussions about GST, the class content of this new tax regime has been missed. Through an overall increase in the taxation of the informal sector i.e. of the petty producers and the small capitalists, it has unleashed the twin process of centralization of political authority and the centralization of capital, which in turn strengthen one another.

By introducing the opaque and hugely problematic system of electoral bonds, the BJP-led government at the Centre has indicated that it is not really interested in fighting corruption but only concerned with expanding its hold on power.

In a situation where the secular political leadership has lost a good deal of its credibility and "grassroots vigilantism" is becoming a widespread, veritable epidemic under growing fascism, the judiciary continues to remain a credible instrument for the reassertion of the values that the Constitution associated with a "modern" India.

While the turn of the U.S. towards fascism is unmistakable, the contradictions associated with this turn, and the complexity of the process of formation of the partnership between big business and fascist upstarts within the framework of a non-fascist bourgeois State to start with, are also clearly visible.

Democracy in India faces a severe threat from the penchant for centralization and uniformity that the Hindutva forces have and which Modi articulated in the Central Hall on July 1 through his misleading analogy between the GST and the integration of princely states by Vallabhbhai Patel during Independence. Such comparison puts a tax reform and democratic revolution on the same platform, confusing biased centralization with unity of the country.

After 150 years of 'Das Kapital', the seminal work of the 19th century economist still provides a framework for understanding contemporary capitalism. The unique social relations such as "free labour" and "commodity fetishism", that according to Marx, define capital, are reflected in the uneven and unstable development of the world market.