By Krishna Jha
India’s unemployment rate has risen to 7.80 per cent in June. Haryana and Rajasthan are at the top. The other worrisome data point about the rate of unemployment, seen in June, 2022, was a fall of 2.5 million jobs among salaried employees. Unemployment has risen mainly in the agrarian sector, according to data released by the economic think tank Centre for monitoring the Indian economy (CMIE).
One of the factors have been the unemployed labour migrating to rural areas registering the biggest fall in employment during a non lock down month. Then there is the privatization spree boosting monopolization that has made even the salaried jobs vulnerable. The Centre has also sought bids from merchant bankers and legal advisors for selling the residual government stake of 29.53 percent in Hindustan Zinc Ltd, an initiative that points towards greater fall of state shares and growing concentration of capital in the hands of monopolies.
It is economy in India that has arrived at a new level that needs to be interpreted scientifically. Blossoming up with several new features, it has broken away from the impact of steam power and heavy machinery with the help of scientific and technological revolution in the industrial age itself, though now giving way to new technology. In our country too, a process of concentration and centralization has been unleashed unfolding the basic feature of finance capital, a feature noted by Lenin in his work Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. In fact when capitalism reaches monopoly stage and turns into finance capital, then it seeks out the places for investment all over the world.
Finance is a technical expression, as it develops further, existing industries start shrinking as they start either dissolving in the monopoly houses or perish. As the new technology is employed in the process of production, it starts growing, at the cost of the entire non-monopoly sections. Finance capital takes shape when there is merger, of various forces, which is called concentration and the system it operates in requires its centralization, that is exclusivity. No other player is allowed. Centred around few hands, resources are getting accumulated as the process of monopolization gets sharper using lockdown with devastation and destruction of the small and medium industries and agriculture, centres of production in rural and urban areas that also provide livelihood.
Millions of small businesses getting simply shuttered down, industries closing down, employment rate diminishing, millions of workers and employees have been perishing. Humanity at a massive scale is either walking miles to meet the two ends or doing jobs that leaves them almost starving. Even the middle class employees and entrepreneurs face the same crisis as the common workers. It is not only the workers and peasants exploited, it is the entire non-monopoly section that bears the burden of such atrocities.
According to CMIE data, 70 percent of the share of wealth is today concentrated in the hands of only ten percent. In the days of lock down and in its aftermath, as there was no succor for the larger masses, hunger, deprivations and deaths were common sight. Covid 19 has polarized productive and finance capital as never before. While world economy slipped deeper into crisis, financial giants accumulated wealth as never before, mainly through speculation. The world was never witness to such accumulation of wealth, and that too so fast, and at the same time, so much deprivation and weakening of economy eating away the roots.
With production process in turmoil while monopolies keep reaping the gains, and been evolving, the basic contradiction of monopoly capitalism, which is that of banking capital and the industrial capital keeps getting strengthened. It has been the evolution of dialectics, reaching out to a stage that has both the old and new features that are getting ushered in. Development is always relative, and nothing is out of blue. Roots are there but relevant only till it spaces out for the new. As the monopolization goes further, there emerges a new socio- economic reality, which has no precedence. We are witness to each of its features.
The phenomenon is unprecedented and new. It has the new basics. The productive forces have been developing in a novel way moving towards scientific and technological revolution and democratizing the entire masses of non-monopoly sections. On the other hand, with concentration of capital, contradictions also get sharper as the capital keeps moving away from production and towards speculation and stock market.
When Lenin had written about imperialism and finance capital, he also visualised the agony of the entire non-monopoly section of the masses and the rising need for assertion of their unity to face the challenge. His `Two Tactics of Social Democracy’ was the script for the democratic revolution based on unity of all these sections.
It was on these lines that the Communist Party of India in its programme adopted in 2015 carried forward the concept of democratic revolution, and said clearly, “…This… has to be anti-feudal, anti-imperialist and anti-monopolist.” (IPA Service)