A Socialist Critique of the Bbc, Albert Einstein Amartya Sen and Muhammad Yunus

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The author of this book, Binay Sarkar, exposes the futility of reformism under production for profit that is capitalism. He communicates to the readers the subtle methodological differences between idealist and materialist conceptions of history. He puts forward with precision the argumentations, which promote the case for socialism that is production for use as the urgent need of our time and as the necessary outcome of the ongoing class struggle.

He leaves no room for ambiguity about what Marxism really is and how it is to be applied to analyse current events and social evolution.

For him socialism - the negation of capitalism can succeed safely only by peaceful and democratic organization and action by the immense majority of the working class of the world. He makes the point that anything less than universal ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution cannot address the problems the world faces today.

He shows how necessary it is today to avoid personalities and to work to establish democratically a world without classes, wages, money, banking. poverty and famines, wars, terrorism and the state, replacing production for profit with production for use, a place where freedom really means free. It deserves a mention that these essays dealing with some of the burning questions of the day have drawn world-level attention in that Adam Buick a socialist from London - has penned an essay length Introduction.

Binay Sarkar is a retired Selection Grade Lecturer in and Head of the Department of Economics and the co-author of a recent book Marxian Economics and Globalization A founder member of the World Socialist Party (India) he is the General Secretary of the Party. He lives and works at the Head Office of the Party at 257 Baghajatin 'E' Block (East), Kolkata-700 086, India.

Adam Buick is the co-author of a study of the economy of the now former USSR, ""State Capitalism The Wages System under New Management."" He is also the co-author of the book Marxian Economics and Globalization. He is currently one of the editors of the ""Socialist Standard"", a monthly socialist journal that has been published continuously in London since 1904

When the first edition of this book was published in November 2007 2007 the current world economic depression was only just beginning. Some see this depression as the failure of capitalism. However, in so far as it is a failure (as opposed to capitalism going through the downturn phase of its normal economic cycle, even though a deeper one than usual), it would have to be the failure of one particular ""model"" of capitalism the deregulated capitalism that was pioneered in the 1980s under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Britain, or ""neo-liberalism"" as it has been called.

It is, however, wrong to identify capitalism with ""neo-liberalism"". Capitalism is a system of production for sale on a market with a view to realising profit extracted from the unpaid labour of those who work for wages, a class system based on one class monopolising the means of production and the other obliged to work for them. Because states intervene, nationally and internationally, to further the interests of one or other section of the capitalist class, capitalism can exist - and has existed with varying degrees of state regulation, including as in the former USSR almost complete state ownership of the means of production. Seeing capitalism as an ultimately uncontrollable economic system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit is in fact the only basis on which to properly understand the current world depression.

This is why Professor Amartya Sen, in a recent article on the current world depression [""Capitalism Beyond the Crisis"", www.nybooks.com/articles/22490], is wrong to suggest that ""the idea of capitalism did in fact have an important role historically, but by now that usefulness may well be fairly exhausted"" because state intervention in the economy has changed it into something else (he doesn't say what). This is to mistakenly identify capitalism with ""neo-liberalism"", or the ""free market"", and to ignore the fact that states have always intervened in the capitalist economy. As opposed to Professor Sen, Binay Sarkar re-asserts the usefulness of the concept of capitalism for an understanding of the world in which we live. Seeing capitalism as an ultimately uncontrollable economic system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit is in fact the only basis on which to properly understand the current world depression.

As Karl Marx was the first to provide a credible analysis of the way capitalism works, and in particular why it regularly passes through periods of reduced productive activity, Binay Sarkar has expanded, for this new edition, the chapter on Marxism and has added a new chapter on what Marx saw as the next stage in social development beyond capitalism: a classless, stateless, wageless world society in which the world's resources would have become the common heritage of all humanity. This Marx called ""communist society"". Engels later called ""socialism"". However, as Binay Sarkar explains in detail in the new chapter, this was not at all the same as the state capitalist society envisaged and established by Lenin in Russia. There is also a new chapter on Professor Amartya Sen's views on the current crisis and on economics and ethics.

many people famines are caused by not enough food being available. This seems reasonable enough: why would people have to starve if there was enough food to feed them? It's a good question, but it assumes that today food is produced to feed people whereas in fact this is not the case. It should be, but it isn't. And it isn't, because we are living in a capitalist society where food is not produced simply to satisfy people's need for it but like everything else to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. Food is a commodity which, like all commodities, can only be acquired if you have money (or something else) to exchange for it. If you don't, then you starve. It's as simple as that.

In 1981 the International Labour Organisation in Geneva published a study on famines by Amartya Sen, an Indian academic working in England, entitled Poverty and Famines. An Essay in Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen studied five famines: the Great Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the Sahel famines of the 1970s.

His conclusion was that the widespread ""food availability decline"" theory of famines was mistaken. In its stead he proposed that they should be explained on the basis of a failure or a decline in some people's ""entitlement"" to food, i.e., in the end, on their not being able to acquire enough money to buy it or enough of it:

""Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat"". (p. 1, his emphasis).

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