The Greek philosopher Heraclitus had said “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

Most people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real wage rate

A New York Times News Service report reproduced in The Telegraph of Kolkata (May 7), discusses the findings of a global public opinion survey carried out by the Bennett Institute of Public Policy of Cambridge University. These show that the Ukraine conflict had shifted public sentiment “in developed democracies in East Asia and Europe as well as the United States of America, uniting their citizens against both Russia and China and shifting mass opinion in a more pro-American direction”.

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.

JANET Yellen, the U.S. 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 U.S. is hostile to, runs the risk of jeopardizing the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

While discussing about primary accumulation of capital, Marx did refer to a process of alienating direct producers from the means of production and this has been done by the use of coercion.

GOVERNMENT officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world.

SUMMER has well and truly set in all over India. Monthly average temperatures in February have been the hottest since 1901.

Except in war-time, capitalism invariably seeks to control inflation by creating a recession; and this is so even when the inflation has been caused by an autonomous increase in capitalists’ profit-margins which are downward inflexible and hence would not be reduced by a recession.

THERE is a commonly-held view that while capitalism in its early stages brings about unemployment and hence an accentuation of poverty, this initial damage is subsequently reversed as it keeps growing

Kailath, originally from Kerala but settled in the U.S., is one of the foremost names in the world in communications, control and signal processing. I remembered his words while reading the recent startling headlines that China has become the world leader in 37 of 44 critical technologies evaluated by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

There is an overwhelming asymmetry between the level of “development” and the possession of natural resources among countries of the world.

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.

THE newsfeeds from the US seem to be completely insane. First, an F22 Raptor, the most expensive U.S. military aircraft, is used to shoot down a Chinese balloon over the Atlantic ocean.

CHATGPT–THE AI-POWERED CHATBOT–HAS TAKEN THE TECH WORLD BY STORM. LAUNCHED AS A PROTOTYPE AND MADE AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC TESTING TWO MONTHS AGO, ON NOVEMBER 30, 2022, IT HAS GENERATED QUITE A BUZZ. IT GATHERED ONE MILLION SUBSCRIBERS IN LESS THAN A WEEK. PEOPLE WORLDWIDE HAVE BEEN AMAZED AND AMUSED AT ITS ALMOST HUMAN RESPONSES ON A WIDE RANGE OF TOPICS.

Gautam Adani’s calling Hindenburg’s allegations of fraud against him an attack on the Indian nation is a matter of particular significance.

The Hindenburg Research, a short selling firm, brought out a 129-page report on the Adani group marshaling evidence of all the funding operations and offshore activities of the 578 subsidiaries and shell companies linked to the seven listed companies of the Adani group.  The report states that this is the “biggest con in corporate history”. 

A “rent good” is one whose supply cannot be augmented at will, simply through investing more on its production; its supply is subject to constraints imposed by nature, because of which there is a certain maximum rate of long-run growth which is exogenously given and cannot be altered at will.

Under the Modi government, India’s ruling classes have joined the ruling classes of the rest of the world in intensifying exploitation and earning super profits.

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”.