PRAGOTI

Outlook magazine recently carried a cover story on the role of the Left in insulating India from the financial crisis that has engulfed the entire country. Although Outlook, in its attempt to appear "neutral", dilutes the above statement and makes it an open-ended question, it does carry a few articles and interviews that lay out the context behind the argument. Links are provided in this post.

Marx summarises the inherent dynamics of capitalism and its historical direction: “The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” Sitaram Yechury writes in the Hindustan Times.

[Updated: Now with complete transcript]. A wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky by Subrata Ghoshroy.

The hegemony of finance capital that underlay neoliberalism is unlikely to persist in the old form. Eminent Economist Prabhat Patnaik writes in Frontline.

The defeat of the Colorado Party in the 2008 presidential elections meant much more than a change of government in Paraguay. This defeat meant the fall of the last political party in Latin America that had been formed both politically and ideologically within the framework of the Cold War.

Wolf is a folk hero to many on the left in Colombia. Running on the platform of “Zero corruption,” he was elected mayor of the city of Pasto where he served until he ran for the national senate. He won his bid for the senate to represent the federal district of Santa Fé de Bogotá with the largest percentage of the votes ever tallied for a single senator in Colombia and only narrowly missed taking the leadership of president of Colombia’s left party, the Democratic Left Pole (PDI), the position being won by former president Carlos Gaviria. His influence on the writing of the Constitution of 1991 was significant and led to the inclusion of many progressive elements that today haunt Colombia’s right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe.

Courtesy: Upside Down World

The trust vote is over. But the manner of securing confidence in the government has undermined the trust of the people – the government has lost its moral authority. But apart from the question of ethics, there are several important issues of governance which have come to the fore. The proceedings in the Lok Sabha has not only affected the position of the government but the principal opposition and its coalition also appears completely shaken and in a state of disarray. A fresh round of realignment of political forces are also very much on the cards.

'I will never support the pax romana that the empire tries to impose on Latin America', says Fidel Castro, after reflecting on the situation in Colombia.

In perhaps the darkest day in Indian parliamentary “democracy”, the UPA government used the maxim, “if not by hook, we will win by crook” to win a trust vote that was necessitated owing to the withdrawal of left support to the government.

The Left Parties withdrew support from the Congress-led UPA Government on 9th July 2008. When the UPA Government had come into existence in 2004, the Left Parties had decided to provide outside support on the basis of its Common Minimum Programme. The aim was to fight the communal forces and undo the damage that they had caused to the secular polity of India during their years in office. This required a set of interlinked policies to bring relief to the people, to protect India’s integrity and to pursue an independent foreign policy. Yet rather than fulfilling the popular mandate, and addressing pressing concerns such as the skyrocketing prices of essential commodities, the Manmohan Singh Government preferred to expend its energy on pushing through the Indo-US Nuclear Deal. Clearly it is more concerned about fulfilling its commitment to the Bush Administration than about meeting its commitment to the people of India.