Ankit Sharma and Paresh Chandra

In the 19th century, the one time British Prime Minister, and renowned novelist, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote a novel called Sybil: The Two Nations; this was one of the first explorations of the polarisation of wealth and power that capitalism breeds, how inside a single country, coexist the fabled halls of plenty and extreme hunger. Today, in India, one does not even need to compare the metropolis and the margin (the “Maoist afflicted territories”) to comprehend the existence of two such nations – it is to be seen in the Capital itself.

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(Translated by Arjumand Ara)

POETESS

God does not give sufferings
Greater than the broadness of one's bosom.
But in my heart He has put the vastness
Greater than the earth and heavens.

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 John Holloway

(1)

At the heart of the social movements of recent years, at least in their more radical variants, is a drive against the logic of capitalist society. The so-called social movements are not organised as parties: their aim is not to take state power. The goal is rather to reverse the movement of a society gone mad, systematically mad. The movements say in effect "No, we refuse to go in that direction, we refuse to accept the mad logic of the capitalist system, we shall go in a different direction, or in different directions."

The anti-capitalist movements of recent years give a new meaning to revolution. Revolution is no longer about taking power, but about breaking the insane dynamic that is embedded in the social cohesion of capitalism. The only way of thinking of this is as a movement from the particular, as the puncturing of that cohesion, as the creation of cracks in the texture of capitalist social relations, spaces or moments of refusal-and-creation. Revolution, then, becomes the creation, expansion, multiplication and confluence of these cracks.(1)

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 Shankar Gopalakrishnan

As central India's forest belts are swept into an ever-intensifying state offensive and resulting civil war, there has been a strong convergence of left, liberal and progressive arguments on Operation Green Hunt. This note argues that this 'basic line' is problematic. The line can be summarised as:

• The conflict is rooted in resource grabbing by corporate capital, in the form of large projects, SEZs, mining, etc.
• Such resource grabbing leads people to take up arms to defend themselves, resulting in the ongoing conflict.
• The conflict thus consists of a state drive to grab people's homes and resources, with people resisting by taking to arms as self-defence.

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 Paresh Chandra

The New and the Primitive: the New is the Primitive

I

In India, the effectuation of the New Economic Policy in 1991 is seen as a move forward, a move out of the "mires" of public sector enterprise, a "mandate" for privatization and against public and state ownership of industries. It is a short-sightedness characteristic of our times, our inability, Fredric Jameson would say, to historicize, which speaks when we make such utterances. Unable to look beyond the immediate we are unable also to make logical generalizations and connections that are needed to contextualize what occurs. Before putting forth my arguments I feel the need to make two assertions: (a) The NEP was not adopted because 'Plan 1, public sector,' failed and (b) state ownership does not mean public ownership, hence the seeming failure of public sector enterprises is by no means evidential of the problems of truly collective ownership of means of production.

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 Deepankar Basu

Introduction

The Eurozone seems to have temporarily averted a serious sovereign debt crisis in its periphery - which had the potential to quickly spread from Greece to Portugal to Spain and possibly even wider afield and to morph into a full-blown banking and financial crisis - with a nearly 750 billion euro bail-out plan. The plan requires European governments to commit about 500 billion euros for emergency loans through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), the IMF to promise another 250 billion euros if the need arises, countries receiving emergency loans to agree to harsh "austerity measures" and the European Central Bank to agree to purchase bonds of member countries. With the real fear of contagion spreading across the Atlantic, the US Federal Reserve has reopened swap lines to provide dollar funding to European banks, again, if needed.

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Cyrus Bina, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota (Morris Campus), USA is a prominent Marxist political economist. His work, The Economics of the Oil Crisis (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985) pioneered a Marxist understanding of the political economy of the oil sector. In this book and his subsequent papers he has developed a value-theoretic approach towards the energy sector, OPEC, oil rent and oil crises. He has co-edited Modern Capitalism and Islamic Ideology in Iran, London: Macmillan, 1991 and Beyond Survival: Wage Labor in the Late Twentieth Century, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. He has worked on value theory, rent theory, theory of imperialism, globalisation theory, capitalist competition, technology and skill formation, Iran's political economy, and US foreign policy, among others, over the last three decades. He has been a longstanding member of the editorial board of the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE).

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 Pothik Ghosh

"The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk" is a Hegelian maxim that permeates our reflection on the everydayness of our modern living. Thinking for all of us here, thanks to this maxim, is now a process that is self-conscious - some would say painfully so - of its retrospective fate vis-à-vis an event, which this process of thinking seeks to make sense of, explicate and give a discursive rationality to, after it has happened. Thought and reason can then be said to be traces left behind by an event that has occurred and in occurring has disappeared. What we, given our specific conjuncture, ought to do now is complete this Hegelian awareness by comprehending the fact that the "dusk" of post-facto cognition is a movement, yet again, towards the dawn of the event and its non-rational return. The flapping of the Owl of Minerva's wings in flight should, in fact, be envisaged not merely as the thought on an event that has occurred thereby anticipating its return, but as the re-enactment of the event - which occurred in the moment of so-called political action - and its singular, synthetic, critical processuality in the moment or condition of human thought itself.

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 Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar

A spectre is haunting India, the spectre of Maoism. It represents the Gandhian counterpart in the field of state-centred Marxism in so far as it cultivates extra-parliamentary politics. The similarity however ends there; since (i) even Maoist politics remains 'in the last instance' state-centric; capture of state power remains its ultimate goal and (ii) its political practice is circumscribed by the barrel of the gun, which has increasingly become its customised mode of communication. In Marxian parlance, it seeks to establish a self-reliant economy through the capture of state power using violence without much ambivalence or self-reflexivity. While its chosen means is violent revolution, the content of its politics is to overthrow the "class of comprador bureaucrat capitalists" that consists of "a nexus of top politicians, top bureaucrats and the big business house" who are in direct alliance with semi-feudal forces in the countryside and indirect alliance with the imperialists particularly the USA (Arvind 2002; also see Indian Maoists 2009).

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 Rohit

Presentation of a budget is generally assumed to be indicative of the financial statement that a government makes. But what is often lost sight of is that the budget is more a political statement than a financial one. It clearly exposes the socio-economic policy orientation of the government. The class orientation of this government was made very clear by the Finance Minister in his speech when he argued,

The Union Budget cannot be a mere statement of Government accounts. It has to reflect the Government's vision and signal the policies to come in future. With development and economic reforms, the focus of economic activity has shifted towards the non-governmental actors, bringing into sharper focus the role of Government as an enabler. An enabling Government does not try to deliver directly to the citizens everything that they need. Instead it creates an enabling ethos so that individual enterprise and creativity can flourish. (Emphasis added)

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