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About Prabhat Patnaik

Prabhat Patnaik is an Indian political economist and political commentator. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011).
  • Photo by Masrat Zahra/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

    Treating infrastructure as a Holy Cow

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on March 5, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    THERE is an impression shared by even progressive intellectuals that the entity that goes by the name of “physical infrastructure” is an absolute necessity in each country, and that the actual amount of infrastructure that exists is always less than what is needed.

  • Modi-Adani

    “Crony capitalism” as an economic strategy

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on February 12, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    Gautam Adani’s calling Hindenburg’s allegations of fraud against him an attack on the Indian nation is a matter of particular significance.

  • The S&P 500 has fallen by a fifth since the start of the year / Image: Public Domain

    The ‘rent good’ and imperialism

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on January 29, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    A “rent good” is one whose supply cannot be augmented at will, simply through investing more on its production; its supply is subject to constraints imposed by nature, because of which there is a certain maximum rate of long-run growth which is exogenously given and cannot be altered at will.

  • Packed like sardines

    The abuse of the concept of “populism”

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on January 22, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    ALL regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own discourse and vocabulary and a key concept in this vocabulary is “populism”.

  • IMF not happy with NRB’s role to effectively track Nepal’s banking sector

    The impending world recession

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on January 15, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    The IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva has now openly admitted that the year 2023 will witness the slowing down of the world economy to a point where as much as one-third of it will see an actual contraction in gross domestic product.

  • Queen Victoria and her Indian servant Abdul Karim, 1893.

    Imperialism and the agrarian crisis

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on January 1, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    THE hegemony of imperialism is invariably associated with an agrarian crisis in countries of the global south; in fact agrarian crisis is just the other side of the ascendancy of imperialism. This is evident from the case of Indian agriculture.

  • It takes money to make money? — Strong Towns

    On income and wealth inequality

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on December 18, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    THE fact that income and wealth inequalities have increased quite dramatically under the neo-liberal regime is beyond dispute. The empirical work by Piketty’s team bears out the increase in income inequality. They use income tax data to infer about the share of the top 1 per cent of the population of a country in its national income.

  • Neo-Liberalism and the Diffusion of Development

    The working class under neo-liberalism

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on December 11, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    A NEO-LIBERAL regime entails a spontaneous change in the balance of class power against the working class everywhere. This happens for a number of reasons.

  • European Union flag

    The fiscal requirement of a welfare state

    Originally published: Peoples Dispatch on December 4, 2022 (more by Peoples Dispatch)  |

    THE post-second world war period had seen a spate of welfare state measures in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in Europe, in emulation of what the Soviet Union was effecting.

  • Data: Household financial liabilities decline sharply in 2019-20 factly.in

    The outflow of finance from the periphery

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on November 20, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    In the current calendar year an estimated $200 billion has already flown out of India which amounts to a third of India’s exchange reserves.

  • Food Corporation of India

    Economics and dishonesty

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on November 13, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    In 1973-74 the Planning Commission in India had defined poverty as the inability to access 2400 calories per person per day in rural India (in practice however it applied a lower 2200 calories norm), and 2100 calories per person per day in urban India.

  • Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives in Downing Street.

    The triumph of the City

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on November 6, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    THE triumph of the City of London, the one square kilometre next to Liverpool Street station that houses the citadel of British finance, is complete.

  • Liz Truss

    Whatever happened to Liz Truss?

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on October 30, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    The most intriguing question with regard to Liz Truss’ resignation as the prime minister of Britain after a mere 44 days in office is this: what is it about her economic programme that the “market” (read “finance capital”) found unpalatable?

  • Oil Barrels (Photo: Jouni Lehti / Flickr)

    The OPEC’s decision to cut oil output

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on October 16, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    WHAT is called OPEC+, that is the 13 members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) together with 11 other petroleum exporting countries led by Russia, decided on October 5 to cut their oil production by 2 million barrels per day, starting from November. The U.S. had been pressing OPEC not to take this decision.

  • Banco de Inglaterra, Londres, Inglaterra, 2014-08-11 (Photo: Diego Delso / Wikimedia)

    Acceleration in Eurozone inflation rate

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on October 9, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    FOR the first time ever, the annual rate of inflation in the Eurozone, measured by the Consumer Price Index, has reached double digits: it exceeded 10 per cent in September 2022, up from 9.1 per cent in August.

  • It takes money to make money? — Strong Towns

    The new threat on the Foreign Exchange front

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on October 2, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    ON September 23, the value of the rupee vis-a-vis the dollar fell to a new low: it crossed 81 to a dollar after some weeks of relative stability when it hovered between 79 and 80.

  • dollars and euros background

    Europe’s economic Hara-Kiri

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on September 25, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    It is not just the immediate effect on Europe that threatens to be severely adverse; capital has already started relocating away from Europe to the United States, a trend that will inevitably gather momentum, so that long-term growth and hence employment prospects on that continent will also be affected.

  • Economy

    Controlling inflation at the expense of working class

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on September 4, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    ECONOMISTS distinguish between two kinds of inflation: “demand-pull” and “cost-push”.

  • Dollar Bomb

    Sanctions and the decline of the dollar

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on August 21, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    The hegemony of the U.S. dollar was based on the fact that the world’s wealth-holders considered it to be “as good as gold”, even when it was no longer officially convertible to gold at a fixed rate, as it had been under the Bretton Woods system, after the collapse of that system.

  • INDIAN FARMERS – BACKBONE OF ECONOMY

    The Indian economy since Independence

    Originally published: Peoples Democracy on August 14, 2022 (more by Peoples Democracy)  |

    The post-colonial state in India had two primary tasks before it: one was to overcome the hegemony of metropolitan capital, so that a development strategy in relative autonomy from imperialism could be pursued; the second was to attack landlordism both to free the agrarian population from its clutches, and to increase agricultural output for rapid industrialisation based on a growing home market.

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Also By Prabhat Patnaik in Monthly Review Magazine

  • The Drain of Wealth February 01, 2021
  • Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End July 01, 2019
  • The October Revolution and the Survival of Capitalism July 01, 2017
  • <em>Monopoly Capital</em> Then and Now July 01, 2016
  • Capitalism and Its Current Crisis January 01, 2016
  • Imperialism in the Era of Globalization July 01, 2015
  • Capitalism in Asia at the End of the Millennium July 01, 1999

Books By Prabhat Patnaik

  • Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present March 10, 2021

Monthly Review Essays

  • US Imperialism in Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges to a Global Community with a Shared Future
    Sam-Kee Cheng A late 1940s Soviet poster showing a US military service member lounging on top of a German factory, smoking a cigar. The text beneath reads DER DOLLARIMPERIALISMUS [dollar imperialism].

    1. Introduction The predominance of US economic, political and military power in the world was established at the end of the Second World War.1 With just 6.3 percent of global population, the United States held about 50 percent of the world wealth in 1948. As the only power which had used nuclear weapons on civilian […]

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