Growing Militarisation of Imperialist Countries

IN a declaration at the NATO summit held at the Hague in June this year, all NATO countries agreed to increase the share of military expenditure in their gross domestic product to 5 percent by 2035. The proportion in 2024 in the US was 3.5 per cent and in the European Union 1.9 per cent, which means a substantial step up, especially in the EU, in military expenditure.

“Bubbles” and Neo-Liberal Capitalism

NEO-liberal capitalism has an immanent tendency towards stagnation, which arises because of the operation of two factors: the first is the growth in income inequality that it continuously spawns; since the poor consume the bulk of their incomes while the rich “save” (that is, do not consume) most of it, consumption demand, and hence overall aggregate demand, tends to fall below the growth of producible output, resulting in a rise in unemployment and unutilized capacity that drives the economy down.This continuous tendency towards a rise in income inequality arises from the fact that, owing

Deindustrialisation, Technology and Crisis in US

THE desperation of US establishment to restrict imports and revive manufacturing is a futile attempt to create jobs for high school educated labour force who otherwise enjoyed a decent living in the twentieth century. The jobless growth which the US embraced during the neoliberal regime was a strategy to consciously relocate manufacturing to the global South taking advantage of cheap labour and natural resources while emerging as the financial centre of the world attracting profits from across the globe.

Globalization Famines

ON October 11 in New Delhi Prime Minister Narendra Modi advised Indian farmers to grow more “export-oriented crops”. This amounted to saying that Indian farmers should move away from growing foodgrains, and the country should import foodgrains instead. This is precisely the advice that institutions like the World Bank, and Indian economists who generally echo its positions, have been giving for some time; and it is what the imperialist countries have been demanding.

Fascism is a Thoroughly Modern Phenomenon

ALL over the world there is an upsurge of fascistic forces. This includes India too where the fascistic Hindutva elements have been not just on the rise, but in power for more than a decade now.

Two Expressions of Capitalism’s Cul-De-Sac

WORLD capitalism has reached a cul-de-sac. The immense rise in income inequality in every country under the neo-liberal regime has brought about a stagnation of the system: since consumption out of a unit of income is higher for the poor than for the rich, the rise in income inequality means that the rise in demand does not keep pace with the rise in productive capacity, causing a slowdown in growth leading to stagnation and much higher unemployment. This is the situation in which the world economy has been caught ever since the bursting of the housing bubble in the U.S. in 2008.

Trump Tariffs and GST Rate Adjustments

TRUMP’s tariff aggression against India will indubitably have a contractionary effect on the Indian economy. Even if Trump reduces tariffs from the 50 per cent he is currently levying, this will only be in exchange for India reducing its tariffs on American goods, especially agricultural goods and dairy products, which would mean larger imports from America and the hence reduced incomes in India.

Opening the Door to Foreign Ownership of Banks?

THE Reserve Bank of India has a limit of 15 per cent on ownership by non-residents of the equity of an Indian bank, a limit that is augmentable on a case-to-case basis but remains on the statute books to this date. And yet in 2018, the Mauritius-based Holding Company of the Canadian company Fairfax was allowed to purchase 51 per cent of the equity of the Catholic Syrian Bank of Kerala.

How Does Socialism Avoid Depressions?

DURING the anti-colonial struggle, many activists in India got attracted to socialism by virtue of the fact that while the capitalist world was reeling under the Great Depression and mass unemployment, the Soviet Union appeared completely untouched by it; Comrade EMS Namboodiripad was one such person and has written about it. They understood that there was something immanent to the functioning of a socialist economy that enabled it to avoid Depressions, and indeed any situation of generalised over-production, in contrast to capitalism.

Trump’s Tariff Terrorism and Its Lessons

ECONOMICS textbooks tell us that a country imposes tariffs when it wants to protect domestic producers of the imported goods. Donald Trump’s tariffs however serve a broader objective: they are like a military intervention, or a coup d’etat or a terrorist attack, to make nations bend to his will. Indian garment exporters for instance are being hit by 50 per cent tariffs not for the protection of any American garment producers but to make India bend to Trump’s will.This explains the anomalies in Trump’s tariff policy.

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