Retotalising Capitalism

Retotalising Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction to its History https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/retotalising-capitalism-a-very-short-introduction-to-its-history/ Jairus Banaji  In my Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, I argued that, in retrospect, Marx turns out to have been wrong to think of Britain as the incarnation of industrial capital that subordinated commercial capital, since the latter was entrenched at the heart of the British economy (as Geoffrey Ingham argued in the eighties) and a much better incarnation would soon emerge with the Second Industrial Revolution when modern vertically integrated firms would undercut the position of merchant firms in both the U.S. and Germany.

Chayanov’s idea of the vertical concentration of capital as the form in which capitalist firms tended to establish a more widespread domination over household producers in the countryside.

Rural exodus has been a major theme of the postwar decades...in China, whole villages are demolished and peasants expected to cope with the resulting loss of land by buying unaffordable social insurance.   In India, the state would like to be able to have comparable powers of coercion, but the caste ties of most farming communities gives them considerable leverage politically and makes widespread coercion impossible. What we are witnessing is the end of the peasantry in any viable sense of that term, but not in the straightforward ways that were once seen as key drivers of this process in many predictions on the Left.

https://files.libcom.org/files/brenner.pdf peasantry’s failure : landlords  create large farms and to lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capitalist investments’ and cultivate them with wage-labour

1% Controls 60% of Total Wealth in India, Rich to Get Richer: Report

Only one per cent households control around 60% of the total wealth in India, indicating to the highlt concentrated nature of household wealth in the country. 1% Controls 60% of Total Wealth in India, Rich to Get Richer: Report - The Wire

According to a recent report by brokerage firm Bernstein, the super rich in India, estimated to be around three million households hold $2.7 trillion in liquid financial wealth, reported Business Standard.

“Although growth will continue to create opportunities across the pyramid, we think the rich will get richer. India’s uber-rich – an estimated nearly three million households – hold $2.7 trillion in liquid financial wealth, by our estimates,” observed Bernstein, reported Mint.

This rise of the uber-rich is also expected to increase the demand for professional wealth managers.

04/08/2025

 

ICJ on states’ responsibilities to halt climate change

ICJ delivers an unambiguous order on states’ responsibilities to halt climate change https://scroll.in/article/1084853/icj-delivers-an-unambiguous-order-on-states-responsibilities-to-halt-climate-change  Meena Menon  The United Nations’ judicial organ paved the way for states to be held accountable for fossil fuel emissions and the resultant climate harm. failure of states to take measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by continuing fossil fuel production, granting exploration licences or fossil fuel subsidies constituted an internationally wrongful act. States also have an obligation to regulate private actors as a matter of due diligence. in the event that restitution should prove to be materially impossible, responsible states have an obligation to compensate.  

the court held that it was scientifically possible to determine the emissions contribution of each state in both current and historical terms.... states were obliged to adhere to both customary and international laws as well the climate treaties: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement and other United Nations conventions on biodiversity, desertification as well as human rights and the Law of the Sea.