Georgi Dimitrov, president of the Communist International, had, at its Seventh Congress, characterised a fascist State as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary section of finance capital”

In Keynes’ words: “It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments, and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary.”

The G-7 meeting that has just concluded has promised to donate one billion doses of anti-Covid vaccine to the rest of the world, consisting primarily of the so-called “developing” countries.

Ever since the outbreak of the pandemic, first recorded in India end January 2020, this Modi government’s preoccupation had never been on combating the pandemic in right earnest and saving people’s lives but on continuing to relentlessly pursue the unfolding of the RSS project.

ON March 24, 2020, Narendra Modi had announced that the country would go into a lockdown after four hours! This nation-wide lockdown was to last till the end of May, after which there were local lockdowns but not a general one.

ON October 2, 2020, even before any vaccines against COVID-19 had been approved, India and South Africa had proposed to the WTO that a temporary patent waiver should be granted on all such innovations.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package is one of the most ambitious measures to revive the U.S. and, with it, the world economy.

IN the week before the historic nationwide farmers’ struggle completed three months on February 26, the BJP has begun to pay a heavy political price for its pro-corporate adamancy.

First, it is led by over 500 farmers’ organisations in the country, who have united under the platform of Samyukta Kisan Morcha(SKM). All sections of the peasantry have joined together. 

THE historic nationwide farmers struggle that began on November 26 entered the fourth week on December 17. It was intensified and broadened even further after the unprecedented support that was expressed by the people of India through the Bharat Bandh on December 8.

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.

WEALTH distribution data are notoriously difficult to interpret. This is because variations in stock prices affect wealth distribution, so that a stock market boom suddenly makes the rich appear much richer, while a stock market collapse makes wealth distribution less unequal overnight.

THERE is a commonly-held view that the current crisis in capitalism, which has resulted in a massive output contraction and increase in unemployment, is because of the pandemic; and that once the pandemic gets over, things will go back to “normal”.

Its two major sources of foreign exchange, tourism and remittances from the Gulf and elsewhere, have virtually dried up owing to the pandemic, causing its currency to depreciate massively, its external debt to be impossible to service, and its ability to import essential commodities which are the lifeline of the population to be severely curtailed.

DD Kosambi uses a telling example to illustrate the crisis of Indian feudalism: at the third Battle of Panipat in 1761, the troops on oneside had not had enough to eat, while the troops on the other side just managed to assuage hunger by looting villages in the neighbourhood; neither side in short had arranged provisions for its troops.

Altogether, as philosopher Cornel West put it, the U.S. is showing every sign of being a “failed social experiment”. And yet there is a veritable boom in the U.S. stock market. The stock market index Nasdaq has increased by more than 40 per cent since March 23 and is now “within striking distance of all time highs” as one commentator put it.

The problem before metropolitan capitalism therefore is: how to acquire control over the use of this tropical land-mass in order to obtain the products it needs?

Radical reforms in reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investment rather than as liabilities and look for ways to make the labour market less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda… Policies until recently considered eccentric such as basic income and wealth taxes will have to be in the mix.

The war on labour is a continuation of the attacks which the BJP has been launching on the religious minorities and dalits; its economic consequences will be disastrous.

There is an exodus of finance from the third world at present, far exceeding in scale what had occurred in 2008 after the financial crisis.