WHEN the Soviet Union collapsed, liberal bourgeois writers had proclaimed the arrival of an era marked by the universal triumph of democracy and stability; they had considered the socialist challenge unnecessary and counterproductive, and believed that capitalism which had already given political independence to its colonies, and introduced universal adult franchise and welfare state measures at its core, would, in the absence of this challenge, secure for mankind peace, economic security and individual freedom.

SEVERAL employment schemes, each limited in scope and constrained by the availability of fiscal resources, had existed in different states of the country earlier; what the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme enacted in 2005 did was to introduce a uniform, nation-wide, essentially centrally-funded, demand-driven scheme: one person per rural household could get up to a hundred days of employment on demand, failing which the person demanding work would have t

IT is a well-known fact that contemporary “mainstream” economics, the only kind which is taught to students over much of the world, does not capture the reality of capitalism. What is less recognized is that this “mainstream” economics, not just in its existing incarnations, but no matter what new incarnations it assumes, is incapable of capturing the reality of capitalism. Let us see why.

ACCORDING to a report in the Times of India (November 23), the United States has asked European countries to restrict immigration in order to preserve “Western Civilization”. Many in the Third World would find the term “Western Civilization” laughable, especially if it is used in the sense of denoting something precious and worth preserving. The atrocities committed by Western imperialist countries against people all over the world over the last several centuries have been so horrendous that using the term “civilization” to cover such behaviour appears grotesque.

THE Modi government has made much of the revision in rates of the Goods and Services Tax that it has announced. Its propaganda machine has worked overtime to tom-tom the benevolence of the government, how it has lightened the load on the common man precisely when the common man needed it the most, that is, during the festive season. Every coach in the Delhi metro has multiple government advertisements, with pictures of Modi and of the Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, claiming that 390-plus goods have become cheaper because of the GST revision.