THE hallmark of a systemic, as distinct from a cyclical or sporadic, crisis of capitalism is that every effort to resolve the crisis within the broad confines of the system, defined in terms of its prevailing class configuration, only worsens the crisis.

The debate over inequality has become hotter world-wide. While Trump had introduced substantial tax cuts for the rich in 2017, and Britain’s Boris Johnson, the front-runner to succeed Teresa May, has promised to do the same if he becomes Prime Minister, there are strong proposals for taxing the rich which have also been mooted. Bernie Sanders had such a proposal for the U.S. during the time that he was seeking the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

No matter how successful the Right may be in the short-run in mobilising people around a divisive agenda, it is incapable of leading them out of the current economic crisis. It is only the Left that can provide a way out.

A neo-liberal capitalist economy therefore does not have the instruments that capitalism earlier had for providing a bulwark against its slipping into recession and stagnation; the question is: does it have any instruments at all?

In its attack on civil liberties, its restructuring of the State to effect an acute centralization of power, and its pervasive purveyance of fear, the Modi years resemble Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. But the resemblance stops there. In fact the two differ fundamentally in several ways.

The intellectual hegemony of mainstream bourgeois economics, by invariably seeing capitalism as a self-contained closed system, serves to obscure the phenomenon of imperialism.

Nothing shows the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism more clearly than the popular uprising in France that is occurring under the banner of the “Yellow Vest” movement.

The most significant feature of contemporary capitalism which is of relevance to the world of work is its inability to provide work to a substantial proportion of persons looking for it.

NARENDRA Modi said the other day, rather disparagingly, that the “Urban Naxals” live in air-conditioned comfort. Since all who speak or write in public upholding the right to dissent from the Hindutva positions, including even known critics of the Left, which means virtually all members of the intelligentsia who display any integrity, have been dubbed “Urban Naxals” by his government, his remark in effect amounts to targeting the entire intelligentsia.

Capitalism in short was the panacea for mass poverty in the third world and not its progenitor as the Marxists had been arguing. The crisis that is enveloping the third world economies at present, is putting an end to that claim.

THE Indian economy is in a tailspin. This cannot be attributed only to innocence in economic matters of the command-centre of the NDA government. While that is indubitably a contributing factor, the current travails of the economy point to something deeper, namely the dead-end to which neo-liberalism has brought the economy.

Trump wants to resolve the crisis for America, caused by neo-liberalism, within the basic confines of neo-liberalism itself, i.e. without violating its core characteristic, which is free global mobility of finance.

Samir Amin, the renowned Marxist thinker and economist, passed away on August 13 in Paris. Born in Cairo on September 3, 1931, to an Egyptian father and a French mother, he had his initial education in Egypt before moving to Paris where he obtained his doctorate in Political Economy.

CAPITALISM’S discourse on “development” which has become quite influential all over the third world in the neo-liberal period proceeds as follows.

SOCIALISM has collapsed over large tracts of the globe. Where it still exists, the economic regimes have undergone considerable reforms. Not surprisingly therefore the old socialist regimes are objects of much vilification these days.

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.

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

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

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.

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.