Prabhat Patnaik’s Blog

Even the blinkered BJP government sees the need for a fiscal policy that would stimulate the economy by increasing government expenditure; but it finds itself in a bind since it does not know how to finance such larger government expenditure. Simply spending more by borrowing, that is, by enlarging the fiscal deficit, is frowned upon by international finance capital, and our government, notwithstanding its much advertised “hyper-nationalism”, does not have the gall to violate the dictates of globalised finance. The question of enlarging government expenditure by borrowing therefore does not arise. At the same time, it cannot tax capitalists, whether…

Voltaire had said “one can always kill a man with incantations, plus a little poison”. Voltaire was a rationalist which the BJP government alas is not. It believes that one can revive an economy with incantations alone, for that is what the budget for 2021-22, presented a few days ago by the Finance Minister promises to do to the Indian economy. The Indian economy is supposed to have shrunk by 7.7 per cent during the fiscal year 2020-21 compared to the previous year, and it is supposed to rise by 10.5 per cent during 2021-22 compared to 2020-21 according to…

Even before taking office, Jo Biden, the new American president, has announced a rescue package of $1.9 trillion, of which as much as $1 trillion will be in the form simply of transfers to the working people. Since the estimated US GDP was $20.8 trillion in 2020, the size of Biden’s rescue package comes to almost 10 per cent of current US GDP. This is on top of the rescue package, again amounting to 10 per cent of GDP, that Trump had announced some time ago in the context of the pandemic. In fact Biden’s package is meant to continue…

In its systematic attempt to vilify the farmers’ movement against the three infamous agriculture bills that open peasant agriculture to corporate take-over, the government keeps using the argument that the opposition to these bills is confined to farmers only from a couple of states, that farmers from other states are happy with the bills. The falseness of this claim has been amply demonstrated, with the legislature in a state as far away as Kerala opposing these bills in a special session, and kisans in states like Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Maharashtra, and West Bengal, apart from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar…

We are witnessing a bizarre situation. One comes across instances where   consumers want growing of food crops for supplying to the public distribution system, while producers, lured by the apparent gains of shifting to cash crops, are reluctant to do so. The government has to mediate between these conflicting interests. But in India at present, the farmers have no desire to shift away from food crops, even as consumers want food crops to be supplied through the public distribution system. There is no conflict of interest among them that the government has to mediate between. And yet it is imposing…

At a time when peasant masses in the country are engaged in a valiant struggle for the repeal of the Central government’s three infamous laws, and have laid peaceful siege to Delhi, braving rains and bitter cold, it is worth recalling Friedrich Engels’ study of the peasant war in Germany in 1525, that also celebrated its outstanding leader Thomas Muenzer. Such a recall becomes necessary for another reason. There is an impression among many that while the idea of a worker-peasant alliance was advanced by Lenin and taken up subsequently by Mao and other third world Communist revolutionaries, both Marx…

The Modi government must be the most timid in the world vis-à-vis international finance capital. By the same token, it must be the most callous in the world vis-à-vis the working people of the country. The one is the flip side of the other; and the government’s economic policy during the pandemic bears ample testimony to its timidity-cum- callousness. All the advanced country governments provided sizeable relief packages to their populations whose income sources had dried up because of the pandemic and the associated lockdown. Even Donald Trump’s United States unveiled a package amounting to 10 per cent of GDP…

The kisans gathered around the Delhi border have unerringly put their fingers on the real issue confronting them, namely their very survival as peasants. Till now there was an arrangement in the country which, though crumbling under the impact of neo-liberalism, still kept the peasantry alive. The three laws brought in by the Modi government are meant to remove this life-line altogether. These three laws thus carry the neo-liberal agenda in this sphere to its limit. This is also why there can be no meeting ground between the protesting kisans and the government, within the ambit of these laws; they…

The Indian intelligentsia has an incredible propensity to swallow the self-serving arguments of metropolitan capitalism that are typically supposed to constitute ‘economic wisdom’; and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of India’s food economy. There is a plethora of centre-page articles in newspapers these days suggesting that Indian kisans should move away from producing foodgrains towards other crops, which is actually a demand that metropolitan countries have been making for quite some time. They want us to import foodgrains from them, of which they have a surplus, to meet the excess of our domestic demand over domestic…

The kisan agitation has become more than simply a fight for MSP or against the corporatization of agriculture. Through its practice, it is recovering a narrative that is opposed to the hegemonic narrative promoted under neo-liberalism. And as the Modi government’s skulduggery for breaking the movement intensifies in the coming days, this recovery will become more and more comprehensive, clear-cut, and oppositional. Let me illustrate the point by referring to the narrative about the ‘nation’. The concept of the ‘nation’ crystallized with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in seventeenth century Europe and acquired particular prominence with the rise of finance…