For
sale in India and South Asia only
Mainstream economics invariably sees capitalism as
an isolated and closed system. In this path-breaking
book, authors Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue
that this is both historically false and logically
untenable. An essentially money-using economy like
capitalism is inconceivable unless placed within a
pre-capitalist setting which it dominates and modifies
for its own purposes.
Colonialism created such a setting. Metropolitan capitalism
transferred massive resources from colonies gratis fuelling
industrial revolution, and later found external markets,
thus avoiding domestic stagnation, by displacing craft
producers in tropical colonies. The exhaustion of
colonial markets was an important factor behind the
Great Depression of the 1930s.
The authors argue that post-war state intervention
to boost demand now played the role of colonial markets;
but metropolitan inability to extract resources from
newly decolonized tropical colonies precipitated the
inflationary crisis bringing the post-war boom to
an end. Neoliberalism, replacing post-war dirigisme,
keeps inflation in check by imposing income compression
on third world populations; but it also prevents state
intervention for expanding demand, thus engulfing
world capitalism in a protracted crisis. Overcoming
this crisis requires transcending the hegemony of
globalized finance, which will be the first step towards
a transcendence of capitalism itself.
Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat
Patnaik are both Emeritus Professors
at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Utsa’s books include Peasant Class Differentiation, The
Long Transition and The Republic of Hunger
and Other Essays. Prabhat’s books include Accumulation
and Stability under Capitalism, The Value of
Money and Re-Envisioning Socialism. Their
last book was co-authored under the title A Theory
of Imperialism.
To order copies of the book, please write
to us or contact our distributors:
IPD
Alternatives, New Delhi.
E ipd.alternatives@gmail.com
/ ipda.office@gmail.com
Atlantic Publishers and Distributors,
NewDelhi.
E aipb@atlanticbooks.com
To order copies online:
www.tulikabooks.in, www.leftword.com
