AMNESTY International has just published an investigative report titled “Made in India: the Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel” in which it details India’s arms supplies to Israel at a time when that country was perpetrating  genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International carefully excluded from its purview all shipments carrying items for civilian use; likewise it even excluded weapons and ammunition that are likely to be used as part of anti-missile defence technology that defends civilians from indiscriminate attacks.

SUCH is the pervasiveness of bourgeois ideology these days that even many who are wholly committed to the vision of socialism entertain ideas about it that are utterly erroneous. It would not be out of place therefore to go back to this basic question once again. The common perception of socialism is that it is a society characterized by the social ownership of the means of production, for which state ownership is taken as a proxy. But this, while a necessary condition, is not a sufficient condition.

ONE important feature of neo-liberal capitalism in a third world country like India is the chasm it introduces between the working people and the intelligentsia. In the colonial period in India several members of the intelligentsia took it upon themselves to highlight the misery to which the Indian people had been subjected by colonialism; and of course many joined the active resistance against colonialism, suffering incarceration and deprivation in the process.

WHEN industrial capitalism was developing in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the new machine-made goods had displaced many artisan producers, giving rise to the Luddite movement against the introduction of machines. With increased unemployment, there was an increase in the relative magnitude of poverty, as Eric Hobsbawm had argued in a debate with another historian R.M. Hartwell. But then things improved later on in the course of the nineteenth century.

PROGRESSIVE Liberals, and Social Democrats in general, have this common belief that capitalism can be “reformed” to become more humane and acceptable to society, and that this can be done by the use of state power which can be acquired through elections in a political democracy; this state of reformed capitalism can be institutionalized for ever, which makes any struggle for socialism unnecessary.