The Making of a Tragedy
The tragic irony could not have been more complete. The country is under lockdown, but thousands of migrant workers are thronging bus stands or marching on the roads, making a mockery of it; the aim of the lockdown is to…
Pandemic and Socialism
It is said that in a crisis everybody becomes a socialist; free markets take a back seat, to the benefit of the working people. During the second world war for instance, when universal rationing was introduced in Britain, the average…
Some Basic Lessons from the Pandemic
The coronavirus attack has so far been much less deadly than the Spanish flu of a century ago. That had affected 500 million people worldwide, about 27 per cent of the world’s population of the time, and had a death…
Why have Indian Banks become Financially Fragile?
The crisis at Yes Bank is only the concentrated expression of a deeper malaise afflicting the Indian banking system as a whole, namely its vastly increased financial fragility. The Chief Economic Advisor is no doubt right when he assures depositors,…
Economy Sliding into Stagnation
Changes in estimation methods have of late made statistics on the Indian economy increasingly bewildering; besides, whenever the statistics show the performance of the economy in a poor light, the BJP government simply suppresses them. Nothing however can suppress the…
The uses of “Populism”
Class struggle occurs in the realm of concepts too. The World Bank for instance systematically counters Left concepts by employing a novel tactic: it uses the very same concepts as are used by the Left, but gives them a wholly…
Capitalism, Socialism and Over-production
These notes are meant to clarify a point made earlier (Peoples’ Democracy, June 30, 2018) about the erstwhile socialist economies not having over-production crises as capitalist economies do. It is in the nature of capitalism to have “over-production crises”, i.e.…
Budget 2020-21: Short-term “Fixes” endangering the economy
The budget figures these days mean very little. The difference between what the budget provides and what actually happens does not come to light even after a time- lag of two years, while earlier two years were the limit. And…
Layers within the Corporate-financial Oligarchy
Marxism teaches us that every totality is composed of elements which are different and hence among whom there are contradictions. Even when the totality is conceptualized as a totality, there must be an implicit awareness of these contradictions. This injunction…
India’s Shameful Record on Wealth Inequality
Wealth data are quite unreliable; and wealth distribution data even more so. Not much faith can be reposed on the absolute figures; but cross-country comparisons, and also movements in the shares of the top decile or percentile of the population…