In this book, Das presents a class-based perspective on the economic and political situation in contemporary India in a globalizing world. It deals with the specificities of India’s capitalism and neoliberalism, as well as poverty/inequality, geographically uneven development, technological change, and export-oriented, nature-dependent production. The book also deals with Left-led struggles in the form of the Naxalite/Maoist movement and trade-union strikes, and presents a non-sectarian Left critique of the Left. It also discusses the politics of the Right expressed as fascistic tendencies, and the question of what is to be done. The book applies abstract theoretical ideas to the concrete situation in India, which, in turn, inspires rethinking of theory. Das unabashedly shows the relevance of class theory that takes seriously the matter of oppression/domination of religious minorities and lower castes.

Love and truth are important aspects of culture. Signifying the crisis of capitalist culture in the contemporary world are their opposites, i.e. hate and lying, respectively. There is rampant lying for ideological/political purposes. There is also an increasing absence of genuine love, i.e., love as caring and solidarity, which, under certain conditions, takes romantic forms. Ideological-political lying is connected to the corruption of love, with its confinement to the private sphere of individuals and consequent isolation from the wider unequal society. This connection is via capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism resorts to ideological-political lying to cover up its contradictions that cause alienation/suffering of the masses. Lying and alienation/suffering are not conducive to genuine love in society. On the other hand, a crisis-ridden capitalism produces the right-wing politics of lying (‘post-truth’ politics). This is also a politics of hatred (or, ‘post-love, or, anti-love’) against minorities, democrats and socialists, a politics that is justified by lies about these subjects. The fight against hate-politics and post-truth politics must be part of the fight for a post-capitalist world (socialist democracy), imagined as a truthful and caring world.

Understanding the drivers and inhibitors of economic growth is critical for promoting development in less developed countries, including India. This book examines economic growth in India from 1951 to the present, challenging many accepted orthodox views.

Marx’s Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State examines the capitalist state in the abstract, and as it exists in advanced capitalism and peripheral capitalism, illustrating the ideas with evidence from the North and the South. The volume unpacks the capitalist state’s functions in relation to commodity relations, private property, and the crisis-ridden production of (surplus) value as a part of the capital circuit (M-C-M′). It also examines state’s political and geographical forms. It argues that no matter how autonomous it is, the state cannot meet the pressing needs of the masses significantly and sustainably. This is not because of so-called capitalist constraints, but because the state is inherently capitalist. Each chapter begins with Capital volume 1. And each chapter ends with theoretical/practical implications of the ideas which taken together counter existing state theory’s focus on state autonomy and reforms and point to the necessity for the masses to establish a new transitional democratic state. But the book goes ‘beyond’ Marx too, as it deploys the combined Marxism of 19th and 20th centuries. Marx’s Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State will interest scholars researching state-society/economy relations. It is suitable for university students as well as established scholars in sociology, political science, heterodox economics, human geography, and international development.

By drawing on her extensive fieldwork in India and on the adjacent theoretical literature, Barbara Harriss-White describes the working of the Indian economy through its most important social structures of accumulation. Successive chapters explore a range of topics including labour, capital, the state, gender, religious plurality, caste and space. Despite the complexity of the subject, the book is vivid and compelling. The author's intimate knowledge of the country enables the reader to experience the Indian local scene and to engage with the precariousness of daily life. Her conclusion challenges the prevailing notion that liberalisation releases the economy from political interference and leads to a postscript on the economic base for fascism in India. This is an intelligent book, first published in 2002, by a distinguished scholar, for students of economics, as well as for those studying the region.

JAIR Journal of International Relations (JAIR J. Int. Relat.) is a biennial, peer-reviewed, refereed journal of International Relations published by The Jadavpur Association of International Relations with the financial assistance from the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi.

This book explains the continuity of economic openness using India as a case study. Arguing that open-economy policies in India were made, justified, and continued on the basis of the idea of openness much more than its tangible effect, it explains what sustained the idea of openness, what philosophy, interpretations of history, and types of rhetoric gave it support, justification, and persuasive force.

During the last two decades, rapid economic growth and development in India has been based upon the mass employment of informal labour. Using case studies from three urban regions, this book examines this growth in modern India’s cities and towns. It argues that India has undergone a process of uneven and combined development during its integration with the world economy, leading to a distorted form of urban development. This book is about work and resistance in India’s massive ‘informal economy’. It looks at the growth of informal labour in Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi during an era of neoliberal economic policymaking. Going beyond mainstream accounts, it argues that India’s rapid economic development has been based upon the mass employment of workers on low wages who lack basic social protection and rights at work. It discusses how urban development in India is characterised by a combination of industrialisation, industrial relocation, restructuring and informalisation. Departing from some existing studies of de-industrialisation, it re-frames informalisation as a process that complements, rather than contradicts, contemporary industrialisation in rapidly-emerging economies. The book adopts a ‘classes of labour’ approach, classifying each case of informal labour as a specific ‘form of exploitation’: as a different way for employers to lower production costs, control workers and increase enterprise flexibility. Offering a critique of existing data on the measurement and monitoring of informal labour and employment, the book is relevant to students and scholars of Development Studies, International Political Economy and South Asian Studies.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The Politics of Distributing Social Transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia provides a systematic analysis of the political processes shaping the distribution of social transfers in six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In doing so, the book addresses a notable gap in recent research on social protection concerning the politics of implementation. While considerable attention has been devoted to debating the merits of different policy designs and the political factors shaping the adoption and diffusion of different policy models, ultimately the ability of any social transfer programme to deliver on its promises is dependent on the effective implementation and distribution of social transfers in line with intended objectives. The chapters in this book examine international and sub-national variation in programme implementation in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, and Rwanda, drawing on a common analytical framework that highlights the importance of state capacity and reach, rooted in histories of state formation, and contemporary political competition in shaping the distribution of social transfers. Comparative analysis of the case studies supports the view that variation in the capacity and reach of the state within countries is a centrally important factor shaping the effectiveness and impartiality of distribution. Yet state capacity alone is insufficient. Rather political competition and power relations shape how this capacity is actually deployed in practice. As such, the book underscores the inherently political nature of implementation and questions common technocratic efforts to improve implementation by de-politicizing the social protection policy process.

This volume looks at the ways in which governance in the exercise of its strategies also acts as a process of production of subjects. It argues that governance is not a one-sided affair starting and ending with those who rule and govern, producing fiats, decrees, and diktats, but a productive process — one that produces subjects of governance who in turn respond to the process, and make the field of governance a contentious one. Against the backdrop of the first transition of democracy in India from its origin in a colonial polity to the first phase of its independent life after the promulgation of the Indian Constitution in 1950, this volume explores the second transition towards developmental democracy, examining the interrelations between globalisation, development and structures of governance. The volume suggests that while there is need to reflect on the governance of transition, it is important to question how democracy negotiates this transition.