The abrogation of labour laws in -ruled states (which could not have been done without Modi’s approval) is meant to make the more insecure rather tha… - Prabhat Patnaik

Far from the pay cheques of employees coming out of the budget, the government has robbed s of workers, including 14 crore migrant workers (of whom around 10 crore are inter-state migrants), of their incomes, jobs and accommodations, without giving a paisa by way of compensation. This is partly no doubt the result of the utter inhumanity of the Modi government; but partly also it expresses its utter pusillanimity vis-à-vis finance capital, which it seeks to sustain through negating and and promoting a communal agenda that aims to divide people. But following the same track as was being followed in the "last four decades" and not recognising the dead-end of neo-liberalism, also means remaining stuck in that dead-end, which in turn would mean even greater recourse to authoritarian-fascistic measures and even more odious attempts to promote a communal divide. The working people will have to struggle against this entire endeavour and to show the way out of the dead-end of neo-liberalism.

Just as in the 1930s, world capitalism, as it had existed until then, had reached a dead-end, and the need for it to be altered for the sake of preserving the system itself, was emphasised by many perceptive bourgeois thinkers, exactly in a similar manner contemporary world capitalism too has reached a dead-end and cannot continue as before. [...] Any change in capitalism, however, including a revival of the so-called "" of the period, will entail a loosening of the hegemony of international and hence will face stiff opposition from it. The fact that the need for such change is clear to bourgeois thinkers, does not mean that finance capital will simply voluntarily make a sacrifice of the hegemony it currently enjoys. Indeed the history of the 1930s itself bears witness to this fact. [...] Boosting for overcoming mass unemployment finally got accepted as government policy only after the war when the weight of the working class in the advanced countries became much greater than before (of which the victory of the Labour Party in the British post-war elections and the vastly increased strength of the and Italy were obvious markers), and when the came right up to the very doorsteps of creating fears of a “communist takeover”. This conjuncture finally forced concessions from finance capital that had been unobtainable till then. Finance capital, in other words, does not voluntarily make concessions even when such concessions are seen by major pro-capitalist thinkers as being essential for the preservation of the system itself.

The ruling formation in India, however, is totally oblivious of the world conjuncture. The dead-end of neo-liberalism, which is visible to even bourgeois thinkers in the metropolis, is invisible to our brigade. Not only is the Modi government still wedded to the neo-liberal agenda in general, but it has not even deviated from this agenda in the midst of the acute humanitarian crisis unleashed by the pandemic and its own mindless response to it.