IT is as if the fact that we still have manual scavenging six and a half decades after independence were not enough; it is as if the fact of the daily perpetration of the most horrendous atrocities on the Dalits was not enough; in the realm of nutrition itself, which constitutes the most elemental necessity of life, the condition of the Dalits has worsened quite remarkably over the decade-and-a-half between 1993-94 and 2009-10. This fact has got hidden until now by the utterly spurious “poverty” estimates that the Planning Commission under the neo-liberal regime has been putting out.

RULING class offensives against the labouring poor in conditions of economic crisis are typically sought to be justified by advancing theories that attribute the crisis to the labouring poor themselves. A theoretical exercise to justify an attack on the labouring poor is on at present, with regard to the inflation that has been raging in the country.

RAJASTHAN chief minister Vasundhara Raje is planning to reduce several government schemes of social support to the poor because she says that the “people should not become too dependent upon the State”. If she was only re-casting the schemes, or getting rid of some schemes to put in place others with similar intent but greater effectiveness, or removing support to the poor in one form to provide it in another form, then her proposals might merit scrutiny; and a discussion at an empirical level might ensue on which of the alternatives would be more effective.

IT is one hundred years ago that the first world war had broken out, a war which had been unprecedented not just in terms of the savagery and scale of destruction of human lives, but in its scope and nature as well. There are at least three ways that it differed from all previous wars.

THE social importance of the capitalist class arises from the fact that the level of activity and employment in a capitalist economy depends upon the “state of confidence” of the capitalists (or what Keynes had called their “animal spirits”). Marx had theorised that the capitalists, competing against one another (a competition or “rivalry” that does not disappear even when they collude), are caught in a Darwinian struggle where they are compelled to accumulate.