2020

The COVID-19 crisis has appeared this year as one of the great disruptors of our times. To minimize distress and formulate the best policy it is important to have a proper understanding of the threat. This paper is written in six parts with the aim of promoting understanding for better policy. A basic theme of this paper is that there is need for precautions but not for panic. A balanced response based on combining essential precautions with protection of livelihoods and food security is (…)

Migrant workers are backbone of the society in developing countries. They have been jobless from the first day of nationwide lockdown for out breaking coronavirus disease pandemic. For starting the third stage of lockdown they have began to come back to own houses by their continuous efforts and assistance of government also. We have emphasised the misery condition of the migrant workers who were engaged in jewellery making in Ahmedabad and Surat cities of Gujarat state for a long year. After reaching to native village they are also in poor economic condition being jobless. As the lockdown is going on still now all the economic activities are stand still, they are not getting any job at this time. They are fighting against both survival of life and Covid -19 pandemic. Despite of government assistance they are unable to maintain their families adequately. This paper aims to understand the socio-economic conditions that ensure the standard of living of gold making ornaments workers who have recently returned home.

by Kingshuk Sarkar*
State has issued direction to employers to pay wages and salaries and not to retrench workers during the period of lockdown in the present covid-19 pandemic. Still, there are many instances where wages and salaries are not paid. Few workers got retrenched too. Employers have said that they did not have money to pay wages and salaries. They are demanding fiscal bailout. The legal options are there but those are complex. Whether workers benefit from government’s direction (…)

by Kingshuk Sarkar*
States are providing industries exemptions from the application of labour laws and also extending the period of working hours. The apparent reason is that this will boost investment and employment. Are there any credible evidences to support this presumption particularly when the entire economy and working class in in dire straits? Or this good crisis is a pretext to implement a pre-designed agenda?
Keywords: Labour Law, Labour Reform, Labour Flexibility, Labour (…)

by Zahoor Ahmad Dar and Debdutta Chakraborty
Keywords: Power, Populism, COVID-19, Public Sphere, Politics of stupidity, Alternative Communities.
A global crisis in the face of a pandemic has engulfed the world. The systemic structures of the world and its rulers have been thrown into a whirlpool of chaos and cacophony. Since the spread of Covid-19, the heads of states are declaring their response as a ‘war’ against coronavirus. In February 2020, the Chinese President Xi Jinping, (…)

by Prem Singh
The country is one and a half months into the lockdown but the plight of the toiling labourers at the country-wide level continues unabated. Every day huge crowds of workers suffer from hunger, insult and alienation/ignorance in their own country, from their own countrymen and the images are for every one of us to see. It may be noted that these labourers mostly comprise of young men and women; their children are so small that they are either in the age of playing in their (…)

You dare not make us the nowhere people You dare not stop us from reaching our hearths We are the harvests and the grains and all the food We are the furnaces and the smelters and all the steel We are the mills and the looms and all the fibre We are the factories that cast and mould the future We are the fires that stoke and alight the economy Remember never to push us against the wall Remember without us there is nothing Only you are in your antiseptic and sensitised bubbles Only you are (…)

by Badre Alam Khan & Sanjay Kumar
‘[The] Virus is a product of nature; the crisis is a product of neo-liberalism’ [(Salas and Silverman, 2020); Cited by Vijay Prasad, EPW, March 2020].
The Covid-19 lockdown has not posed serious challenges in health and socio-economic sectors, but also curtailed civil liberties and freedom of speech (especially dissenting voices of subaltern masses) in the so-called both democratic and authoritarian regimes across the world. Before coming to the (…)

by Shubham Kumar
The outbreak of COVID-19 is arguably the biggest threat mankind has faced since World War II. The economic consequences of the pandemic may even outweigh the crises triggered by the Great Depression. It has been projected that Indian economy could contract further by about 20 percent in the first quarter of fiscal year 2021 if lockdown continues till mid-May 2020, which seems inevitable now. Recently, USA after a lot of furor passed Families First Coronavirus Response Act (…)

Review Article
Which Way Lies the Future? KK Theckedath, Ma-Le Prakashana, Bengaluru, 2017. Price Rs 60/-
Publication of Volume III of Capital by Karl Marx began series of controversies on value/price relationship. Bourgeois and even some Marxist economists tried to show that there is a contradiction between labor theory of value of Volume I and the determination of price and profit in Volume III.
They are also trying to prove that the Law of the Tendency of Rate of Profit to (…)