The world today is witnessing a rather novel phenomenon, namely a pervasive tendency towards political uprisings by the urban middle class.  Not just the leaders, but even the bulk of the participants in such uprisings are educated, are reasonably well-off, and make extensive use of social media channels for keeping in touch with one another. […]

5th Dr. BR Ambedkar Memorial Lecture, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi, September 27, 2014 I I would like to use this occasion to dwell upon a point to which Dr Ambedkar had drawn attention in his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949.  In that speech he had underscored a […]

I. The Piketty Argument Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century embodies an immense amount of empirical research into the distribution of wealth and income across the population for a number of advanced capitalist countries going back for over two centuries.  In particular Piketty has made extensive use of tax data for the first […]

Prabhat Patnaik: To me, imperialism is immanent in the money form, and I want to argue that in the era of finance capital, far from its becoming less relevant, it becomes more relevant. . . .  I would even define imperialism as an arrangement in which not only you get use values but you get […]

It is obviously silly to push for austerity in the midst of a recession, not just silly but cruel, since it prolongs the pain of unemployment.  The recession is caused by a deficiency of aggregate demand.  To overcome it what is necessary is an increase in demand which requires larger expenditure.  Since private expenditure on […]

“Combating corruption”, like “promoting peace”, can mean anything to anyone; and precisely because of this “fuzziness” it appeals to everyone.  Some join the anti-corruption movement because they are against “corporate loot”; others join because they are against the Nehru-Gandhi “dynasty”; and still others join because they oppose the “corrupt practice of job reservation”.  The movement […]

India’s economic experience since the beginning of economic liberalisation constitutes a resounding refutation of “mainstream” (bourgeois) development theory.  On the basis of official data during this period there has been a remarkable acceleration of the growth rate of GDP, together with a striking increase in the incidence of absolutepoverty, a combination which no strand of […]

The Central government’s flip-flops on Anna Hazare are obvious: it went from abusing him (through the Congress spokesperson) for sheltering corruption, to extolling him for his idealism; from arresting him, without any justification, and getting him remanded to judicial custody for a week, to releasing him within a few hours.  But the Anna group’s flip-flops […]

The United States has an archaic piece of legislation, passed in 1917, which puts a ceiling on the magnitude of the debt of its federal government in absolute dollar terms.  (Since the various state governments in the US are not allowed to run fiscal deficits and hence incur debt, the federal debt is synonymous with […]

The deputy chairman of the Planning Commission made an extraordinary statement the other day, namely that the oil-price increase, which everybody opposes for adding to inflation, was really an anti-inflationary measure; it would reduce inflation.  The deputy chairman’s is an exalted position; and the current incumbent is an economist of repute.  There is a danger […]

There have been periodic demands, the latest being from Baba Ramdev, that “black money” from India which is stashed in Swiss banks should be “brought back” and used for development purposes.  This money of course does not have to be physically brought back; all that is required is a nationalisation of those deposits, ie, a […]

There is a pervasive view that growth under capitalism, though it may worsen poverty, even absolute poverty, to start with, eventually leads to a lowering of poverty.  The experience of the English Industrial Revolution is invoked in this context.  There has been a huge debate among economic historians about the impact of the Industrial Revolution […]

The anti-colonial struggle in the third world countries had brought together workers, peasants, agricultural labourers, artisans, middle class intellectuals, and even the national bourgeoisie into one camp, demanding decolonisation.  This was a reflection of the fact that colonialism, or imperialism (if one uses the term in an inclusive sense to refer to all stages of […]

Capitalism is supposed to bring in modernity, which includes a secular polity where “babas” and “swamys”, qua “babas” and “swamys”, have no role.  Many have even defended neo-liberal reforms on the grounds that they hasten capitalist development and hence our march to modernity.  The Left has always rejected this position.  It has argued that in […]

The term financial liberalisation is used to cover a whole set of measures, such as the autonomy of the Central Bank from the government; the complete freedom of finance to move into and out of the economy, which implies the full convertibility of the currency; the abandonment of all “priority sector” lending targets; an end […]

On a television channel on counting day, the panellists discussing the assembly election results were asked to offer advice to the Left, which had lost both the large states it ruled, one of them quite massively, on how it should reform itself for a future resurrection.  The overwhelming opinion among them was that it should […]

One of the most persistent demands of the advocates of neo-liberalism in India has been for the introduction of “labour market flexibility”, by which they mean the absolute right of employers to hire and fire workers as and when they please, without any let or hindrance.  The absence of such flexibility, they claim, has been […]

At first sight no two persons could have been more dissimilar.  One was a Cambridge don, with more than one foot in the British government; a supporter of the Liberal Party, staunchly opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution; an aesthete and a member of the Bloomsbury Group; a life peer in imperial Britain, and a solid, […]

While the advanced capitalist countries are hit by an acute crisis of recession and unemployment, the developing world is facing, apart from the fallout of this crisis, an acute food crisis.  Hunger afflicts the developing world today with a virulence not seen in decades.  World food prices, not just in nominal but in real terms […]

While there will be general agreement that the judgement in Binayak Sen‘s case represents a gross miscarriage of justice, most people will attribute it to the overzealousness of a lower judicial functionary, or, at the most, to the prevailing atmosphere in the state of Chhattisgarh.  If the trial had been held elsewhere, they would argue, […]