THE All India Kisan Council meeting held at Hyderabad had passed a resolution on August 24 against the decision of the BJP government led by Narendra Modi to change the existing labour laws and infringe upon the hard won labour rights. The AIKC opined that this attack on the working class has to be countered with all its might.

THE bad news about the economy continues to pour in. The deteriorating employment situation is becoming alarming. Around 3.5 lakh jobs have been lost in the automobile sector, with the prospect of more loss of jobs. In the consumer goods segment, the biggest biscuit manufacturer, Parle, has announced that 10,000 jobs may have to be axed. The corporates are utilising the recession to cut jobs and protect their profits.

THE hallmark of a systemic, as distinct from a cyclical or sporadic, crisis of capitalism is that every effort to resolve the crisis within the broad confines of the system, defined in terms of its prevailing class configuration, only worsens the crisis. It is in this sense that neoliberal capitalism has now entered a systemic crisis.

THE state conference of the TNUEF (Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front) was held at Thanjavur from August 15-17.  The need to strengthen this organisation and the many struggles and agitations that it organises was borne out by the fact that in just the month preceding the conference, there had been two incidents of brutal ‘honour killings’ in which both husbands and wives had been murdered because of their inter-caste marriages;  one elderly dalit had been murdered in the neighbouring district of Rameswaram;  and, on the very eve of the conference, an attack on dalits had taken pla

WHAT the first fortnight of August this year brought to a population of over a crore of people in the three districts of Southern Maharashtra – Kolhapur, Sangli and Satara was a deadly combination of nature’s wrath and the criminally insensitive attitude of a callous state government. This area, which has to its west the Western Ghats, experienced, once again, unprecedented rains. Once again, because heavy and very heavy rains are not a novelty to this region. Also not unknown is the unprepared state of governance in the face of such natural disasters.