• Trump at Charlevoix (Image Coutesy: CBC.ca)

    Trump versus the rest

    Donald Trump’s leaving the G-7 summit without budging an iota on protectionism is indicative of the disunity among the leading capitalist countries on the strategy to overcome the capitalist crisis.

  • Prabhat Patnaik

    Marx after Marx

    On Karl Marx’s 200th Birth Anniversary SFI organised a lecture on Marx After Marx delivered by Prof. Prabhat Patnaik.

  • Capitalism

    Capitalism, poverty and praxis

    Capitalism is an economic system driven by its own immanent tendencies, which the State that presides over it normally supports, sustains and accelerates.

  • Books by Ashok Mitra

    Ashok Mitra: the doyen among Left intellectuals in India

    Ashok Mitra who passed away on May1, 2018, was the doyen among Left intellectuals in the country, held in the highest esteem by one and all for his absolute integrity, his outstanding intellect and his commitment to the cause of the working people.

  • Trumps protectionism

    Trump’s protectionism

    ON March 8, Donald Trump made an announcement which according to many has the potential of starting a global trade war. He announced that the U.S. would be raising tariffs on imported steel by 25 per cent and tariffs on imported aluminium by 10 per cent.

  • JNU Crisis

    Commoditisation and the public sphere

    The commoditisation of education which makes it completely incapable of providing students with the wherewithal to engage in any active and worthwhile public discourse, has proceeded apace under the neo-liberal regime.

  • Under watch.

    Enclosed thinking

    In a slave society, one can argue, the interest of the slaves lies in keeping the slave owner happy, for otherwise he is likely to flog and whip them mercilessly which would cause them great agony. Likewise in a caste society, one can argue, the interest of the Dalit lies in being as inconspicuous as possible, in not ‘polluting’ the upper castes through his presence, for otherwise he is likely to be beaten and lynched.

  • The US economy

    Bubbles, stocks and crashes

    WHAT is happening in the U.S. economy provides an object lesson on the functioning of neo-liberal capitalism. Pre-first world war capitalism which had witnessed the long Victorian and Edwardian boom had relied on the colonial arrangement for the system’s dynamics.

  • The Battle of Plassey (Palashi, India)

    Marx on imperialism

    On February 19, 1881, Karl Marx had written a remarkable letter to N.F. Danielson, the renowned Narodnik economist who had also gone under the name of Nikolayon and whose work had been much discussed by Lenin.

  • Enjoy capitalism by any means.

    Neo-liberal capitalism and its crisis

    “Neo-liberal capitalism” is the term used to describe the phase of capitalism where restrictions on the global flows of commodities and capital, including capital in the form of finance, have been substantially removed.

  • Fascist torch march in Kiev (1/28/2017)

    The current upsurge of fascism

    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.

  • Flashback Of 1997 & Today's Financial Crisis – Here's Why You Should Be Scared

    Twenty years after the Asian financial crisis

    The hegemony of international finance capital, which led to economies “opening” themselves up to the vortex of global financial flows, demolished both Nehruvian dirigisme and East Asian neo-mercantilism. And the same hegemony has now brought the world capitalist economy to a crisis from which it is in no position to recover.

  • Marine Drive in Mumbai

    Prabhat Patnaik on contemporary capitalism and the shape it takes in India

    I think Marxism analyses the contemporary world in a way which nobody else did. Lenin had said the strength of Marxism lies in the fact that it is true. The point is that it is a genuine scientific discovery.

  • Global trade from G77 to high income countries (World Bank)

    Imperialism still alive and kicking

    With the reassertion of the dominance of finance, in the guise now of an international finance capital, the third world States have withdrawn from supporting petty producers, a process of income deflation is in full swing, and the imperialist arrangement is back in place, because of which we can see once more a tendency towards a secular decline in per capita food-grain availability in the third world as in the colonial period.

  • A Theory of Imperialism

    New Perception of Imperialism

    If accumulating wealth is the basic objective of capitalism, organising production using wage labour is only one of the ways it can be achieved. What finance does is to open an alternative route to reach the same objective, that is via transaction.

  • Developing “Infrastructure”

    The term “infrastructure” covers all sorts of things, from ports to roads to canals to bridges to building railway lines. Because it covers such a range of things, many of which appear to be useful, most people look upon “infrastructure” development as an indubitably desirable thing under all circumstances. Questions are scarcely asked about its worthwhileness when the government allocates larger resources for the “infrastructure” sector, or when it instructs public sector banks to give larger loans for “infrastructure” development.

  • Migration as Revolt against Capital

    The fact that a large number of refugees, especially from countries which have been subjected of late to the ravages of imperialist aggression and wars, are desperately trying to enter Europe is seen almost exclusively in humanitarian terms.  While this perception no doubt has validity, there is another aspect of the issue which has escaped […]

  • Why Do We Have Unemployment?

    Unemployment has become so persistent a phenomenon in contemporary times that there is a common feeling that it is a “natural” state of affairs, that nothing can ever be done about it, and that the only way to have greater employment opportunities coming your way is either to oppose the system of job “reservations” for […]

  • The Challenge Before the Latin American Left

      The Left upsurge in Latin America appears to be abating.  In October 2015 Jimmy Morales, the conservative candidate in Guatemala, defeated the Left-leaning Sandra Torres in the presidential elections.  On November 22, Mauricio Macri, the conservative presidential candidate in Argentina, defeated Daniel Scioli, his Peronist rival, by a narrow margin, to bring to an […]

  • The Devaluation of the Yuan

    The Chinese central bank’s decision last week to let the yuan depreciate, in three stages by almost 4 percent against the US dollar, was officially explained as a move towards greater market determination of its exchange rate.  Though this explanation pacified stock markets around the world, China’s devaluation of the currency portends a serious accentuation […]