Under Donald Trump’s second term as President, the United States has embarked on an expansionist, yet chaotic and erratic, aggressive phase. Vijay Prashad decodes the Trump phenomenon and the methods adopted to manage the relative decline of the United States as an economic and imperial power at a time when it still commands immense financial and military power. In his words, ‘Donald Trump is not an aberration floating above the history of US power. He is the political expression of an imperial system that retains enormous coercive capacities while losing the productive and ideological confidence that once underwrote its leadership.’
Prabhat Patnaik gives a comprehensive understanding of the impasse that neoliberal capitalism finds itself in. It is unable to come out of a period of stagnation and burgeoning unemployment. The emergence of artificial intelligence will not help it to break out of the dead end. The threat to the ruling classes from rising unemployment and austerity measures leads to their alliance with neo-fascist forces to target ethnic or religious minorities and create hatred and polarization. Contemporary neo-fascism is very much a product of the crisis of neoliberalism. The struggle against neoliberalism and neo-fascism can be waged successfully only by fighting for a socialist alternative.
Ganesh N. Devy dwells on the important issue of delimitation, which is due after the census of 2026-27. The Modi government seeks to short-circuit the process and bring about a delimitation based on the 2011 census and ensure an expansion of seats in the Lok Sabha and state legislatures by gerrymandering during the creation of new constituencies.The SIR-Census-Delimitation is one axis of BJP politics aimed at getting a stranglehold over all power structures. This, according to Devy, will reinforce the basis for autocratic rule and a single-party hegemony.
In the Document section, we publish excerpts from a Review Report of work through the Dalit platform, which was adopted by the Central Committee of the CPI (M) in January 2026.