Suchergebnisse

Part of a three volume set, this volume is a critical review of macroeconomic issues such as monetary policy, fiscal policy, financial liberalization, intersectoral linkages, open economy macroeconomics, labour conditions, and intergovernmental fiscal transfers.

El artículo hace una revisión de la política económica en la India durante las últimas décadas y del impacto laboral, social y económico que ésta ha tenido. Comienza con un análisis del régimen dirigista que surgió a partir de la Independencia del país, para más adelante hacer énfasis en el periodo neoliberal, que aún continúa como régimen económico predominante. Asimismo, aborda el impacto que ha tenido la pandemia de covid-19. Concluye con un recuento de los desafíos a los que se enfrenta la India en la actualidad para unificar al país.

Value Price and Profit was a speech delivered by Marx at a meeting of the First International where he used ideas of his not-yet-published Capital to present what later came to be known as the "w-r-frontier". He argued on its basis, against the position of John Stuart Mill, that workers as a whole can obtain higher real wages at the expense of the capitalists' rate of profit. The relationship between economic and political struggles outlined in Value, Price and Profit is a novel one: the weakening of working-class capacity to intervene at the economic level is supposed to bring on the agenda greater political struggles. This novel reading of the relationship between the economic and the political also has much relevance for today's world.

Friedrich Engels' bicentenary was celebrated in 2020. As a contribution to this celebration, this article argues that Engels, among his various other substantive contributions, must be credited with his conceptualization of the worker–peasant alliance. Given that this alliance was fundamental to democratic and socialist revolutions in the Third World in the twentieth century, and continues to be so in the twenty-first, it remains important to clarify its trajectory within classical Marxism. Engels turned his attention to the sixteenth-century peasant war in Germany so as to illuminate the challenges faced in the course of the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe. He argued that, for large sections of the peasantry, the throwing off of their feudal yoke required an alliance with the proletariat. This, however, did not mean land redistribution via private landholdings but nationalization of the land. It also did not mean an alliance with the whole of the peasantry. These two questions and the antagonisms that they entailed were central to the development of Marxist theory and practice in the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions, as well as others in the Third World. Today, neoliberal globalization has shifted the terrain of struggle further by the fact of corporate dominance over the whole of the peasantry. The massive agitation of the Indian agriculturists since the end of 2020 and the alliances that have emerged should be an eye-opener.

The conflict between the interests of the people and the dictates of finance, which underlies the entire phenomenon of globalization and characterizes the entire era of globalization, has come to a head with the current pandemic. The need to reach help to the working people during the pandemic, when they are without employment and income owing to the lockdown, is urgent; but the dictates of finance, which frowns on taxing the capitalists or resorting to an enlarged fiscal deficit, stand in the way of doing so. The contradiction between the dictates of finance and the interests of the people has thus become absolutely acute during the pandemic.

Nationalism in India arose out of resistance to colonialism and thus had a different character than the bourgeois nationalism of European countries after the treaty of Westphalia. The inclusive nature of Indian nationalism has been eroded, however, as a big corporate sector has grown in the economy and the Hindutva ideology has grown alongside it. What has now happened is an alliance between the two forces, the 'neo-liberal' regime in the economy having its counterpart in a ruling semi-fascist ideology. The latter presents the Hindus as a homogenous whole, whose dominance, it aims at establishing. In reality, it serves the interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy, and so is adverse to the well-being of the vast majority of India's population.

The US's planned and financed overthrow of the Mossadegh's regime in Iran in 1953 was a classical case of imperialist intervention. Many explanations for this can be offered: US's racial fellow feeling for British, the main possible loser at the hands of Mossadegh's nationalism; expectation of economic gains for US oil interests or fear of threat from the Soviet Union. None of these, however, can stand detailed analysis. What can offer a more straightforward explanation is that anti-colonial Third World nationalism could not just be fitted into the world-view of the major capitalist powers, chiefly the USA. It has to be suppressed or thwarted wherever such possibility existed.

India had been envisioned as a federation by our Constitution makers, and so states were assigned some important subjects in which the centre could have no or only limited authority. Thus state governments run by opposition parties could pursue policies different from those of the Central Government in a number of ways. But since the onset of economic 'liberalisation' beginning with the late 1980s the financial strength and economic role of the state governments have been constantly undermined. This came, first, through the raising of interest rates to attract foreign finance capital, which created budgetary crises for the states since they fell under heavy debt simply to pay interest on existing debt. Neo-liberal policies were then imposed on them by Finance Commissions which made compliance with these compulsory for centre's financial assistance. More recently the states' powers have been further curtailed by the Goods and Services Tax, which has deprived the state government of the power to determine tax rates on goods produced within the states. Another means to the same end has been the centre's trade agreements with foreign countries, with no reference made to states whose products thereby may be priced out of the market. The demonetisation of 2016, which impacted so destructively on employment and the cooperative sector in the states, was also undertaken by the centre without any reference to the states.

The theoretical basis of the October Revolution lay, not surprisingly, in a development of Marxism, but this development occurred through three successive rounds of theoretical debate, each stimulated by the specific Russian reality but each having a relevance far wider than the Russian context itself, and a relevance that abides to this day. While these three rounds of debate appear to be on three very different themes, each of them is concerned with the same question, namely, must a transition to socialism in any society await the 'completion' in some sense of the development of capitalism in that society? And if so, then what does the term 'completion' mean in this context? This essay seeks to provide answers to the question of what sort of revolutionary strategy is necessary to achieve the transition to socialism by considering the debates that took place at the time of the October revolution.

The October Revolution was the first such event in human history that was theoretically conceived and executed according to a plan. It is this theoretical comprehension of the underlying historical conjuncture that explains the revolution's sweep and energy, the profound changes it wrought in the world, and the extent to which it threatened the very existence of capitalism.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.