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.…
India’s economy may be heading to recession, but India’s leading business group Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), controlled by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, appears to be holding out well. Though revenues of the group in the last quarter of 2019…
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…
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…
If a head-load worker were to ask a bourgeois economist “Why does Ambani have so much wealth but I do not?”, that economist’s answer would be that Ambani has certain “special qualities” which the headload worker lacks. Bourgeois economists however…
The universe of Indian startups is teeming with ‘unicorns’, industry slang for firms with valuations in excess of $1 billion. But most have yet to show the profits that legitimise that valuation, and many are bleeding. That was ignored till…
Even while the effort to resolve the crisis resulting from non-performing assets in the banking sector was underway, India’s financial sector was overwhelmed by failures of large non-bank financial companies. In the discussion that followed the collapse of these NBFCs,…
An interview with Jayati Ghosh (by G. Sampath - The Hindu) The leading development economist speaks out on the predicted global recession this year and why the extremely adverse environment for small and medium enterprises is likely to continue Jayati…
“Mainstream” economics does not appear to understand the functioning of the bourgeois economic order; and nowhere is this more evident than in matters relating to fiscal policy. It holds to this day that a fiscal deficit “crowds” out private investment…
The idea is an old one, but the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai clearly conceptualized it, by drawing a distinction between a “demand-constrained system” and a “resource-constrained system”. A demand-constrained system is one where employment and output in the system are…
