Prabhat Patnaik’s Blog

In the context of the on-going country-wide kisan movement for repealing Modi’s three Agriculture Bills, while an overwhelming majority of commentators have stood with the position taken by the kisans, a few, though not necessarily agreeing with Modi, have raised the question: why shouldn’t agriculture operate within a free market? It is worth recapitulating here the answer to this question which is well-known but can bear repetition. The free market solution is of course patently sub-optimal for the economy as a whole as Keynes had shown; but let us forget the Keynesian argument for the moment. Even so, the market…

It is ironic that government spokespersons should exhibit so much euphoria over the second quarter (July-September) Gross Domestic Product estimate, which shows a drop “only” of 7.5 per cent compared to second quarter 2019-20. The expectation had been that the drop would be larger, about 8 to 9 per cent; and as the first quarter drop had been 23.9 per cent, the talk has been of a “stronger recovery” than anticipated. The irony however is that on closer look the recovery appears both dubious, as well as immiserizing and hence fragile. It is dubious because there is a substantial increase…

The November 26 strike is significant not only because it protests against the Modi government’s brazen and unprecedented attacks on workers and peasants in the country, not only because these attacks carry forward an imperialist agenda, but for a deeper and less discussed reason as well which can be seen as follows. The ascendancy of the Hindutva elements derives from the success they have achieved in shifting the public discourse in the country. The discourse they displaced had occupied centre-stage for close to a century, indeed ever since 1917 when Gandhiji had visited Champaran to investigate the condition of the…

Ministers from Narendra Modi to Nirmala Sitaraman are talking about a recovery of the Indian economy from the pandemic-induced crisis. Even the Reserve Bank of India which estimated the second quarter GDP growth to have been -8.6 percent, has seen signs of recovery in October. Of course there had to be a recovery from the deep abyss to which the lockdown had pushed the economy, as some degree of normalcy returned; it is no reflection of any virtue of the government. Even the 8.6 percent drop in GDP in the second quarter (compared to the previous year’s second quarter), represents…

On the fourth anniversary of demonetization, Narendra Modi has claimed that it succeeded in curbing black money. He probably believes he can get away with making this claim because of the passage of time. But most people in the country know this to be a lie for a simple reason. For demonetization to curb black money, there must be some mechanism through which it can be shown to do so. Otherwise it would be no different from claiming that the Olympic Games of 2016 curbed black money in India. Besides, since the fact of black money being curbed is itself…

It is often believed that the ability to pass on property to one’s progeny is an essential element of capitalism, without which the capitalists’ incentives will dry up and the system will lose its dynamism. Nothing could be further from the truth; indeed the acquisition of property through inheritance is contrary to the bourgeois justification for capitalist property. This justification lies in the claim that the capitalists have some special quality that is rare, whose employment makes the nation prosperous and for which they must be rewarded; but there is no unanimity among bourgeois spokesmen on what exactly this special…

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has for some months been bringing out a report that monitors the impact of the pandemic on the world economy, especially the labour-hours lost because of the lockdown and their ramifications. The statistics it provides are not compilations of official data from different countries; they are based on the ILO’s own estimates made with whatever information is available from these countries. One cannot say how accurate the figures are, but they are the only figures we have, and given the meticulousness with which they are estimated, and their approximate compatibility with other data we have,…

Wealth distribution data are notoriously difficult to interpret. This is because variations in stock prices affect wealth distribution, so that a stock market boom suddenly makes the rich appear much richer, while a stock market collapse makes wealth distribution less unequal overnight. In other words, the fact that the rich hold a part of their wealth in the form of stocks makes it difficult to estimate their total wealth which now has one durable component and another that is potentially evanescent. There are certain occasions however when one can say something definitive about wealth distribution; and the period of the…

A theoretical analysis of the prevailing situation, from which the proletariat’s relationship with different segments of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry is derived, and with it the Communist Party’s tactics towards other political forces, is central to the Party’s praxis. A study of this praxis over the last one hundred years of the existence of communism in India, though highly instructive, is beyond my scope here. I shall be concerned only with some phases of this long history. While the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (1928) analysed the colonial question, advancing valuable propositions like “Colonial exploitation produces pauperization, not…

The three Agriculture bills rushed through parliament by the Modi government seek to bring peasant producers into direct contact with corporate buyers without any intervention by the state. The government suggests that intervention in the form of the Minimum Support Price-regime will continue. But this is disingenuous: if the MSP-regime was to continue, why was it not incorporated into the legislation? Besides, the MSP-regime requires supervision by government agents like those installed in mandis; if the mandis lose primacy, as the legislation visualizes, then the MSP-regime becomes infructuous. One consequence of this change has been much discussed, namely that it…