M Aseem // “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of one?”, asked Bertolt Brecht. But there are many different ways of robbing a bank. Recommendation by an RBI Internal Working Group to allow industrial houses and NBFCs owned by such houses to promote banks is one of these many ways.... Continue Reading →
YE WORKERS! PLACE YOUR DEMANDS AND BARGAIN HARD AT ALL POINTS BEFORE YOU RETURN TO WORK
Migrant workers across the big industrial cities, since the past few weeks, have been defying government diktats and demanding that they be allowed to go back to their homes and villages, despite facing widespread humiliation, oppression and even death. The time is ripe that the workers, with all their courage, should step into direct negotiations... Continue Reading →
RESIST THE NEW NORMAL OF 12-HOUR WORK DAY
Almost a dozen state governments have quite recently adopted a slew of anti-worker labour law reforms with the main feature common to all of them being the increase of the work hours for workers from 8 hours per day to 12 hours. While the prevailing law, the Factories Act 1948, with respect to overtime mandates... Continue Reading →
KEEP HUMILIATING THE WORKERS, AT THE END YOU MAY HAVE NO ECONOMY AT ALL
This year Labour Day (May Day) came at a time when laborers were struggling to even survive. The unbelievable humiliations and tortures meted out to them when they tried to walk home is not only heart breaking, it rings a very coarse warning. The heart-rending story of the death of 16 workers, sleeping on rail... Continue Reading →
ECONOMY IS DRIVEN BY MIGRANT WORKERS, NOT BY CAPITAL
S V Singh // Heart wrenching tales, each more gory than the previous one, of the atrocities, the migrant workers were subjected to, don’t cease coming. The trail of their death and devastation is unbearable to fathom to any sane and sensitive mind, to any living individual. Newer and newer scripts of their colossal sufferings... Continue Reading →
‘CALAMITY TO OPPORTUNITY’ NEO-LIBERAL ONSLAUGHT INTENSIFIES
M Aseem // When, after the Lehman Brothers collapse, many well-meaning people thought that neo-liberal project would now retreat, it was Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff and former financial sector top executive who made the famous comment, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that... Continue Reading →
COVID-19 & THE ECONOMIC CRISIS
M Aseem // It was Karl Marx who enriched humanity by developing the scientific methodology of historical materialism to analyse the system of social production. But even ancient Greeks in the time of Aristotle knew that no value could be produced without employing human labour. Capitalist owners, shareholders, managers and their courtiers from the ‘intelligentsia’... Continue Reading →