India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
The United States has 16.49% of the votes on the IMF’s board despite representing only 4.22% of the world population. Since the IMF’s Articles of Agreement require 85% of the votes to make any changes, the US has veto power over the decisions of the IMF.
A study came out in December that made me cry. Written in a clinical style, nothing about the language should have impacted me in the way that it did. Put simply, the study said: every single child in Gaza feels that they are going to die. What more needs to be said? But there is more to say.
The bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza continues. Amongst the dead are many of Palestine’s painters, poets, writers, and sculptors. One of the striking features of Palestinian life over the past 76 years since the Nakba of 1948 has been the ongoing richness of Palestinian cultural production.
In a referendum on December 3, 2023, the Venezuelan people voted to affirm the sovereignty of their country over Essequibo. While doing so, they saw this less as a conflict between Venezuela and Guyana and more as a conflict between ExxonMobil and the people of these two countries.
As the numbers of the dead and displaced increase, a sense of numbness grows. It began with a hundred dead, then a hundred more, and is rapidly escalating into the tens of thousands. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around these numbers unless there are stories attached to each of the dead and displaced.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has rightly said, “This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement.”
The negative impact of the Western policy of preventing peace in Ukraine is being felt daily by the European public. Will the European people stand up for their sovereignty or will they continue to be the frontline for Washington’s ambitions?
A new mood of defiance in the Global South has generated bewilderment in the capitals of the Triad. Governments that had long been pliant to the Triad’s wishes, such as the administrations of Modi in India and Erdoğan in Türkiye (despite the toxicity of their own regimes), are no longer as reliable.
The G7 meeting reveals the gaps between the US and its allies (Europe and Japan), but these differences of interest and opinion should not be overestimated. A discussion on the nature of the cooperation between the US, Europe, and Japan—the ‘Triad’, as Samir Amin called them.
The BRICS Bank is a young institution compared to the World Bank, but it has considerable financial resources and will need to be innovative in providing assistance that does not lead to endemic debt. Whether it will be able to break with the IMF’s orthodoxy is yet to be seen.
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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