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.

THE vision of a capitalism that is “stabilised” through a rectification of its “excesses”, and hence pre-empts any social challenge to its existence, has always endured in one form or another among economists. This vision is in sharp contrast to the Marxist perception which holds that the only way that the so-called “excesses” of capitalism can be got rid of, is through a transcendence of capitalism itself.

DONALD Trump’s tariffs are being discussed in the media in a routine manner without considering their specific context. This context is one where the US government is unwilling to spend the revenues accruing from higher tariffs on buying goods and services – a matter that is explained below. Other countries that may be losing the US market owing to the consequences of Trump tariffs are also unable to compensate for this loss by enlarging their own domestic markets.

THE World Bank has recently published a list of Gini coefficients for 61 countries relating in some cases to income distribution and in others to consumption expenditure distribution. In that list India had the fourth lowest Gini coefficient in 2022, on the basis of which the Modi government has gone to town declaring India to be the fourth most egalitarian economy in the world. The ludicrousness of this claim has already been exposed by several researchers; and spending more time over it would appear like flogging a dead horse.

THE Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy which broadly underlay the entire dirigiste period is now being intensely vilified, not just by the Modi crowd, but even by neoliberal elements within the Congress and outside.