Prabhat Patnaik’s Blog

One of the striking findings of the Bihar Caste Survey, which bears out what the Left has been asserting for a long time, is that absolute poverty in the country is far more pervasive than what successive governments in India have been claiming. It shows that 34.1 per cent of Bihar’s population has a monthly household income of Rs 6,000 or less. This benchmark figure of Rs 6000 per month corresponds to what the official “poverty line” itself should be on the government’s own criterion, though these days the government has stopped talking about the poverty line altogether; it has…

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had witnessed the emergence of two different paradigms of colonialism: the first, of which India was the classic example, involved the conquest of countries which had had a history of established central administrations that were sustained by established systems of surplus extraction, and the replacement of those old administrations by colonial regimes. The essence of this colonialism was, apart from finding a market for European goods at the expense of local craftsmen, the expropriation of this surplus and its shipment back to the metropolis in the form of commodities that the metropolis needed. There was…

In an economy like ours where the work-force is not neatly divided into “the employed” and “the unemployed”, and instead there is massive and growing casualisation of work, measuring unemployment is a tricky business. It necessarily means asking a person how much work that person got over a certain period in the past, because of which the unemployment measure varies depending on what period is taken into account and how much work over this period is taken to constitute employment. The National Sample Survey accordingly has three different concepts: usual status, weekly status and daily status; the NSS however, apart…

Significant segments of the non-Communist Western Left see the developing contradiction between the United States and China in terms of an inter-imperialist rivalry. Such a characterisation fulfils three distinct theoretical functions from their point of view: first, it provides an explanation for the growing contradiction between the US and China; second, it does so by using a Leninist concept and within a Leninist paradigm; and third, it critiques China as an emerging imperialist power, and hence by inference, a capitalist economy, which is in conformity with an ultra-Left critique of China. Such a characterisation ironically makes these segments of the…

All fascistic outfits have one common characteristic: they reject outright all evidence that goes against the narrative they spin; and the Hindutva elements in power in India are no exception. Their narrative presents India as the fastest growing economy in the world where the people never had it so good; but if evidence collected by international agencies or even by the government’s own agencies shows otherwise, then that evidence must be wrong. The credo of India’s fascistic Hindutva outfit is simple: the reality is what Modi says, if evidence shows otherwise then it must be wrong, and, most likely, the…

In response to the attack by Hamas on October 7, Israeli forces have not only pounded the Gaza strip with massive bombing, killing nearly 2000 Palestinians and wounding at least 7000 (till Friday night), but have cut off all supplies of food, electricity, gas and water to Gaza. In addition, on Friday they gave a warning to 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza, that is, to half of the population of the whole of Gaza (which numbers 2.2 million crowded into an area measuring merely 365 square kilometres) to leave their homes and evacuate the region within 24 hours in…

The outlook behind the Bretton Woods system, along with which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were born, was to facilitate State intervention in the economy to overcome the limitations of unrestricted capitalism. Both the chief architects of the system, John Maynard Keynes of Britain and Harry Dexter White of the United States, believed in the necessity of State intervention. Keynes had written a classic book advocating it, and White represented an administration, that of F.D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal had been path-breaking. The Bretton Woods system, therefore, permitted countries to impose strict capital controls so that…

One of the most intriguing questions at present is why Europe’s political leadership has become complicit in what appear to be US efforts at undermining European economies. The well-known American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, having already provided evidence that the United States was responsible for the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, has now revealed that this blowing up was not even linked to the war in Ukraine; it was a deliberate move on the part of the Biden administration to ensure that Europe remained dependent on US gas despite its being far more expensive, rather than become…

The Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover for starting projects that rake in profits. It is amending the Forest Conservation Act to remove those forest patches that are not deemed as such by the government from protection under the Act. It may be recalled that in 1996, the Supreme Court had given an order according to which every patch of forest, no matter who owned it, had to be protected, irrespective of whether the government’s records recognised…

The current upsurge in prices in India is led by food prices. In July 2023 while retail inflation was 7.44 per cent (over July of the previous year), food price inflation, which covers all food items including foodgrains, vegetables, milk products and such like, was 11.5 per cent. Food price inflation came down a little in August to around 10 per cent, largely because of some supply management measures adopted by the government relating to vegetables like tomatoes, and this was responsible for bringing down the overall retail inflation rate to 6.83 per cent; but obviously food price inflation, and…