India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
The 2022 Global Hunger Index shows India occupying the 107th position among 121 countries. This should come as no surprise. Several scholars have used data on per capita daily calorie intake, and per capita annual foodgrain availability to point out that hunger in the country is acute and growing.
The current fall in the rupee is structural in nature and hence non-transient. It has been caused by two specific factors neither of which is transient: one is a widening of the current deficit, and the other is a net outflow of finance from the economy to dollars or dollar-denominated assets.
A bizarre drama is unfolding in front of our eyes. The Modi government which has been giving away hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees as tax concessions to the monopolists, has expressed its opposition to what it calls “freebies”, that is, subsidies to other segments of the population.
Neo-liberalism ends up getting enmeshed in stagnation and mass unemployment from which there is no exit. Because of this dead-end, it imposes a neo-fascist political regime upon the country. Overthrowing it is a difficult task; it can be accomplished only by the widest mobilisation of the working people.
There is a common belief that since the Scandinavian countries developed capitalist economies without acquiring colonies, they refute the claim that capitalist development necessarily requires imperialism. This argument is based on a misconception, not just about Scandinavia but about imperialism itself.
Human lives in the periphery are worth less than human lives in the metropolis.
The Gotabaya Rajapaksa government’s culpability can be said to lie in steering the country into the clutches of neo-liberalism, though it may not have had a choice.
The hikes are hitting the poor the most. What is needed, therefore, is a policy mix that includes direct taxes on the rich as well as quantitative rationing of petro-products.
There is a pervasive view that growth under capitalism, though it may worsen poverty, even absolute poverty, to start with, eventually leads to a lowering of poverty. The experience of the English Industrial Revolution is invoked in this context. This entire view however is a myth.
There is a common misconception that the term imperialism is no longer relevant now. The essence of the relationship of imperialism lies in the control over the world’s resources, including land-use, by the metropolitan powers. Neo-liberal globalisation has meant that control over these third world assets have been returned to metropolitan capital.
Janata Weekly is India’s oldest independent socialist weekly.
Ever since its founding in 1946, Janata has voiced its principled dissent against all conduct and practice that is detrimental to the cherished values of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, while upholding the integrity and the ethical norms of healthy journalism. For more than seventy years now, week after week, it has continued to analyse the changes taking place in the country and the world from a socialist standpoint, and thus promote the spread of socialist ideology in the country.
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