Prabhat Patnaik’s Blog

It is a common practice all over the world that when those incarcerated face a threat to life, the authorities send them home. Even Benito Mussolini had been forced by an international campaign to shift the Italian Communist Leader Antonio Gramsci, when the latter’s health had deteriorated greatly, first to a clinic in Formia, then to a clinic in Rome, and finally to release him after he had served eleven of his twenty years sentence; it was however already too late by then and Gramsci died within a week of his release. In India when Communists were arrested in large…

In a document like the New Education Policy, one must distinguish platitudes from new provisions, including within the latter even the dropping of old platitudes. Thus phrases like “education is a public good”, “6 per cent of GDP should be earmarked for education” are just platitudes, unless some concrete suggestions are advanced to realize to them. In short, repeating old platitudes is inconsequential; it is only not repeating them that has some significance. But such inconsequential repetition of old platitudes in the New Education Policy  has impressed many otherwise well-informed observers, and explains the strange phenomenon of their according some…

The pandemic and the lockdown are certainly causing an absolute shrinkage in the Gross Domestic Product of the Indian economy. But these tend to obscure something very serious that was happening even earlier, namely a real income decline for vast numbers of working people. There are several pointers to this fact. The rate of chronic unemployment in 2018-19 was the highest ever in the last 45 years at 6 per cent compared to the usual 2 to 3 per cent. The per capita real consumption expenditure in rural India according to the 2017-18 National Sample Survey was 9 per cent…

I have written about this in the past, but since bad economics comes thick and fast from the representatives of finance capital, especially the Bretton Woods institutions located in Washington DC, there is no harm in my repeating myself. The issue relates to a fiscal deficit and has acquired urgency at present because revenues of governments everywhere in the world, including India, have declined owing to the pandemic-induced lockdown, while the need for government spending on relief and healthcare has escalated steeply, necessitating larger fiscal deficits. Two grossly erroneous propositions are advanced in this context by the representatives of finance:…

There is much self-congratulatory back-slapping among governments, the World Bank officials and many economists about the “decline in poverty” that is supposed to have occurred between 1990 and the onset of the recent pandemic. This decline is claimed on the basis of an International Poverty Line (IPL) of $ 1.90 a day (at 2011 Purchasing Power Parity) worked out by the Bank, which basically defines poverty across the world as lack of access over one day to the bundle of goods that $1.90 would have bought in the U.S. in 2011. How ridiculously low this figure is can be gauged…

On May 25 in Minneapolis, an African-American arrestee George Floyd was choked to death by a white police officer pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck. The entire America erupted in protests, which targeted not just contemporary racism but even historical icons like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who had been either slave-owners or open racists. The statues of Confederate leaders during the civil war, Jefferson Davis and Robert Lee, were brought down. The protests even spread to Britain where the statues of some slave traders were brought down and those of Cecil Rhodes and…

What had been only a suggestion by several prescient members of the capitalist establishment till now, has become official policy, at least in Britain where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that his government will undertake public investment to stimulate the economy, as FD Roosevelt had done under the New Deal in the 1930s in the US. In fact, Johnson specifically referred to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and expressed his intention of increasing taxes on the rich if necessary. Amusingly, he prefaced his speech by the remark “I am not a Communist”. It does Johnson credit to have recognised that neoliberal…

DD Kosambi uses a telling example to illustrate the crisis of Indian feudalism: at the third Battle of Panipat in 1761, the troops on oneside had not had enough to eat, while the troops on the other side just managed to assuage hunger by looting villages in the neighbourhood; neither side in short had arranged provisions for its troops. Likewise the crisis of Indian capitalism is tellingly illustrated by a simple fact: in the midst of this dreadful pandemic, the medical staff in several hospitals in the nation’s capital has not even been paid its regular salary for sometime. But…

Between, say December 25, 2019, and June 23, 2020, world crude (brent) oil prices have fallen by nearly 37 per cent. They had fallen by over 60 per cent between end-December and mid-April, but there has been some price-recovery since then; even so, the decline in world prices till June 23 has been quite dramatic. In India however, over this very period, petrol and diesel prices have been going up sharply and are now higher than ever before; in fact diesel prices have increased even more sharply than petrol prices and the difference between the two has largely disappeared. This…

Something very odd is happening in the United States. The coronavirus toll keeps rising with no end in sight. The economy has virtually collapsed with more than 40 million people filing for unemployment. Thousands are out on the streets protesting against the rampant racism that marks that society. Relations with China have reached a nadir. Altogether, as philosopher Cornel West put it, the U.S. is showing every sign of being a “failed social experiment”. And yet there is a veritable boom in the U.S. stock market. The stock market index Nasdaq has increased by more than 40 per cent since…