IT is well known that the mobility of labour is essential for the survival and reproduction of contemporary corporate capitalism. This is particularly necessary to maintain a supply of surplus labour in order to intensify the accumulation process for the big corporate houses. However, widening inequalities and the economic distress arising from the unequal development of such process of big capital led industrialisation led to social unrest and conflict.

THE Modi government reconfirmed, once again, that the BJP is the political arm of the RSS. It has rolled out red carpet for the RSS chief to lecture from Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan, which is normally allotted only for government functions, or on rare occasions for non-government functions where the president, vice president or the prime minister are participating. It is unusual to permit a private organisation. Further, these lectures were beamed live telecast across the country.

IN a landmark judgement on July 17, the Supreme Court has ruled that mobocracy cannot be allowed to become the “new normal”. The judgement came at a time when incidents of widespread brutalities against dalits, adivasis and minorities were being committed by well-organised vigilante groups in different parts of India. Coming down strongly on recurring incidents of mob lynching, the Supreme Court directed that the central government should bring a separate law to deal with such incidents and parliament should pass it.

SAMIR Amin, the renowned Marxist thinker and economist, passed away on August 13 in Paris. Born in Cairo on September 3, 1931, to an Egyptian father and a French mother, he had his initial education in Egypt before moving to Paris where he obtained his doctorate in political economy. Drawn to the cause of socialism from his student days he soon became a member of the Egyptian Communist Party. Between 1957 and 1960 he worked at the Institute for Economic Management in Cairo, before Nasser’s growing repression of the Communists drove him out of Egypt.

THE social life of Assam is in for a boil over Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, a proposition to grant citizenship based on religion, in Assam. Public anxiety became visible when the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) visited the state.

Assam has always been a sensitive place when it came to questions of ethnicity and nationality. However, the intensity with which people reacted to the bill was never seen in the recent history of Assam.