ECONOMIC NOTES

The Blinkers of Bigotry

QUITE predictably, the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Nitin Nabin, has characterized the agitation launched on October 10, by Left student and youth groups and the Cockroach Janata Party, against the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, as being driven by “foreign forces”.

The Specificity of Neo-fascism

GEORGI DIMITROV, the outstanding Bulgarian Communist leader who had presided over the Seventh Congress of the Comintern and piloted the tactics of United Front to fight fascism, had earlier been an accused in the Reichstag Fire case and imprisoned by the Nazis after they had come to power in Germany in 1933. Dimitrov had rejected the offer of a lawyer provided by the Court and had defended himself during the trial. In his defence he had wanted to cross examine Herman Goering, top Nazi leader and Hitler’s war minister, and his request had been granted by the Court.

The Travails of Being Mineral-Rich

WITHIN a globally capitalist setting, for a country or even a region of the Global South, to be mineral-rich can be a source of great hardship for its people. It is ironic that the global North which is the home base of capitalism has been historically mineral-poor. This is as true of the pioneering country of industrial capitalism, Britain, as it is of Japan, the sole Asian member of the global North.

Donald Trump and His Tariffs

DONALD Trump has now got legislative clearance from both houses in the US to charge up to 100 percent tariffs on imports from countries that have been doing business with Russia in violation of the unilateral sanctions imposed upon it by the North in the wake of the Ukraine war. India and China which are substantial buyers of Russian oil are likely to be the main targets of these Trump tariffs.

The Weaponisation of The Dollar

The Bretton Woods system institutionalized the US dollar as a global reserve currency, with the US pledging to buy and sell gold from foreign governments and central banks at a fixed price of $35 per ounce of gold. The reserve currency role of the dollar was predicated on the belief that there would not be a rush to exchange dollars for gold, that is, on an expectation of stability in the gold price of dollars, which in turn was based on an expectation of stability (at least over time, barring short-term fluctuations) in the dollar prices of commodities.

Apropos GDP Estimates

THE first GDP estimate for India was made by Dadabhai Naoroji for the year 1867-68, though his estimate was extremely rough. V.K.R.V. Rao made the first careful GDP estimate for 1931-32, and subsequently regular official estimates were made from 1949 onwards. The motivation for the early estimates was to establish the material deprivation of the Indian people under colonial rule, while the regular post-independence estimates were meant to track the progress being made by the country after the achievement of independence.

A Theoretical Sleight-of-Hand

FOLLOWING decolonization, the newly liberated third world countries had sought to follow a development trajectory that consciously broke away from the colonial pattern of international division of labour. Towards this end they had pursued a policy of import-substituting industrialization and their ex-colonial masters, though disliking it, could do little about it.

A Dying Capitalism

THE signs of decay and decrepitude of a dying capitalism are all too evident at present. This of course is not the first time that the system is showing such signs; it had done so in the period between 1914 and 1945, which had confirmed Lenin’s prognostication of its being a moribund system. The difference between then and now consists in the response of the system to the crisis that had engulfed it. 

Snatching Away a Right of the People

PERHAPS the most consequential legislation in post-independence India was passed by Parliament on August 23, 2005 and came into force on February 2, 2006. It was the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, later to be renamed Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act that was enacted by the UPA-I government under Left pressure (since the government depended on Left support).

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