Liberal opinion holds that the international monetary and financial system is a device for promoting the interests of all participating countries by providing a convenient payments arrangement within which trade can be carried on. The reality however is altogether different: the international system is founded upon the hegemony of western imperialism, and in turn sustains this hegemony.

KARL Marx had once said that all criticism must begin with the criticism of religion.

The CJI refrained from giving “socialism” an institutional character. All over the world the term “socialism” has been taken to mean social ownership of the means of production, at least of the key means of production; but the CJI, defining “socialism” in terms of outcome rather than the institution of ownership suggested that private enterprise was not incompatible with “socialism”; what really mattered was the creation of a welfare state ensuring equality of opportunity for all citizens.

It is common for governments these days to provide fiscal transfers to capitalists, whether through reduced corporate tax rates, or by providing direct cash subsidies, to encourage greater investment by them and thereby stimulate the economy. During Donald Trump’s first presidency there had been a cut in corporate tax rate with this objective in mind. In India the Modi government, as is well-known, has given massive tax concessions with the same objective.

The political philosophy of classical liberalism, which provided the basis for liberal political praxis, was sustained by a long tradition of bourgeois economic thought, straddling both classical political economy and neo-classical economics.

The BRICS declaration presumes that the international institutions in their current state are flawed because they are dominated by imperialist countries and are not representative enough; but they are flawed because their very essence is flawed, no matter how they are governed.

THIS year’s Nobel Prize in economics (the Riksbank Prize to be more precise) has been awarded to three U.S.-based economists for their research into what promotes or hinders the growth of wealth among nations; and they assign a crucial role to institutions, arguing that western institutions like electoral democracy are conducive to growth.

Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”.

The further development of the centralisation of capital, leading to its consolidation, has on the one hand muted inter-imperialist rivalry, since capital now wants the entire world, not broken up into spheres of influence of rival powers, as the domain for its unrestricted movement; on the other hand it has also led to an attempt on the part of now-united imperialism to reassert its hegemony over the territories that had broken off from it earlier.

The fact that the world economy has slowed down since the financial crisis of 2008 is beyond dispute.

WEST Africa, which had been largely under French colonial rule, never saw decolonization of the sort that India did.

The policies favoured by the ruling class in other words are being pursued despite public opinion being palpably and systematically opposed to them.

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.

Right until 2021 Bangladesh was considered a success story of export-led growth within a neoliberal setting.

The French economist J B Say had believed that there could never be a problem of aggregate demand in any economy, that whatever was produced was ipso facto demanded.

In his opus ‘The Wealth of Nations’ published in 1776 Adam Smith drew a distinction between the progressive state, the stationary state and the declining state.

There are roughly four proximate features of capitalist poverty.

This problem, it must be noted, relates exclusively to the application of AI under capitalist conditions; but, capitalism being the reality over much of the world, the threat of AI to the working people remains extremely serious.

THERE has been a significant diffusion of production occurring in the world economy. Many call this phenomenon a shift from a U.S.-led world economy to a “multipolar world economy”, but no matter what one thinks of this description, the fact of diffusion is indubitable.

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).