Prof. Prabhat Patnaik on what is new about the current state of capitalism
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- Опубліковано 12 чер 2024
- Prof. Patnaik is an Indian economist and political commentator. He taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was the vice-chairman of Kerala State Planning Board from June 2006 to May 2011. He was also part of a four-member high-power task force of the United Nations (U.N.) to recommend reform measures for the global financial system. Chaired by Joseph Stiglitz.
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#austerity #neoliberalism #soviet #cpm #kerala #keynesianism
Make sure to hit like, or drop your comment if you enjoy our show. if you have a space for any contribution, you can drop a super chat. That does help us grow. But obviously no pressure. Stay in touch!
Long time back, in Calcutta, my dad and his friends were drinking and reminscing their old Marxist days (the era where Indira Gandhi killed thousands of students and communists in Calcutta). After a lot of blahblahbla .. One of them finished his drink and said "You know.. Marxism did not fail, but we Marxists did.." What he meant was - That there is a fundamental problem how the State views people and resources. Does not matter then if it's Marxist or Capitalist. These folks still don;t get it perhaps..
A great conversation. Professor Prahbat Patnaik is always so easy to listen to and understand. I am a 57 year old white man in the USA and I have no trouble following his explanations of Neo Liberalism and Marxism. Thank you for posting and please keep these conversations coming. It is particularly helpful to further discuss how to educate and implement socialist concepts wherever possible.
This is my first talk from this channel and I’m going to be trawling through your backlog while watching for what you do next. A simple thanks isn’t enough for the fantastic alternative you’re providing to Western-oriented left talkshows.
Thanks Robert. Really very happy to get connected. Stay in touch!
I have been listening to Chomsky (on youtube) for years now. This is the first good critique I heard of Chomsky's perception of Soviet Union by Prof Patnaik. Really liked it, very instructive and insightful. Thanks for putting together this great conversation! I am a subscriber now.
Really enjoying this presentation from the great professor.
Glad to know that you enjoyed the show. You can use the live chat for a more lively discussion.
Thanks Ayo. Stay in touch. Solidarity!
1st: A suggestion: Interviews and pods are alright but if possible do educational videos too like explaining the basics (philosophy, economics, ethics, and their applications to current issues) of socialism, marxism, communism, and the several flaws of capitalism.
My point is that these interviews are good for audiences who have a good idea of what socialism is, but for people who do not know about the idea and importance of revolutionary socialism, these videos would not be useful and these interviews would be restricted to intellectuals and the academia only. But for an idea to be revolutionary, it must be understood by the masses.
2nd: What are your views on the Maoists of India?
Woah. Very excited for this
Took some time due to all the rescheduling, but hope it is worth it.
Interesting guest, I especially enjoyed listening to his assessment of the hopes of the current crisis - I hadn't yet thought about anything but slow apocalypse approaching
Thanks GSoM. Good to see you.
I enjoyed the program immensely….good system the host n narrator worked out for staying focus😎🙏🏽
Glad to hear that :) Thank you.
Excellent interview - this channel has very quickly become a favorite.
The section around 30-40 minutes in, discussing the coming neoliberal dead-end and the possibility of returning to "military keynesianism", reminded me immediately of the Stalin quote that "Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism". This relates also to Prof. Patnaik's idea of the three phases of (conceptualizations of) capitalism discussed earlier - the second phase coincides with European fascism, and in fact as the Prof. pointed out Germany came out of the crisis even earlier than the USA, in 1933, with the Nazis taking power and their own particular application of "military keynesianism". In my view, this renewal of "military keynesianism" (i.e. fascism) is the likely political form that will bring the advanced capitalist countries into a transition phase akin to the interwar phase (phase 4?), also called "multipolarity" or "imperialist competition" sometimes in recent discussions. This will include an intensification of imperial exploitation and a capitalist need to expand it, which will necessarily involve a war on the PRC, for which consent is already being manufactured today.
Further on, around 53 minutes in, Prof. Patnaik (correctly) credits the Soviet Union as a major enabling force for decolonization and even socialism in the global south. The parallel today, in content if not in form, with regards to IMF-style neo-colonialism, is the BRI projects around the world which serve to undermine the basis of this neoliberal form of imperial exploitation, much in the same way that the existence of the USSR (specifically of the Red Army) undermined the basis of direct, military colonialism - which was pure force and violence, something we have seen a significant return to as soon as the USSR was dissolved. It seems quite plausible to me that this contemporary BRI-centered process of economic development represents a similar threat to imperialism as did the industrialization of the USSR, and as we know, the only capitalist answer to ascending socialism is fascism.
So I think those are crucial developments of the situation today and Prof. Patnaik's framework presented in the interviews really helps to illustrate that point.
Just a few thoughts :) Thanks for the great work!
Dear ywolfinger, thanks for liking our show. It really means a lot. And thanks for the lovely thoughtful comment. Hope we stay in touch.
Really interesting conversation. You have a new subscriber from italy
Dear Tobia, Thanks and welcome. Really glad to have you. You may like to watch our show with Clara Mattei in particular. It has a little bit on Italy, if not enough.
Great show. Thanks.
@1:00:00 Stalin had a solution for that. A forced march to industrialise with the five year plans. He got the best and the brightest from wherever, paid them very good money but expected them to leave the country with substantive industrial know how. Russia built its oil industry thanks to Koch. Who then proceeded to take his wealth back to the US and build the richest family business still extant. Koch couldn’t forgive Stalin for not allowing him to build a fief in Russia.
great show, thanks a lot for inviting professor Prabhat Patnaik.
good to watch, keep going on
I have discovered this channel only recently. Very useful and inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing.
Thank you so much, Wenke. Stay in touch!
Not relevant to today's topic I presume, but are you planning on doing any sort of program of the state of the left movement in India itself, or of the current parliamentary situation in India? My only knowledge is of the usual western article mills, and the few folks from there I've met in my area, but I'm definitely not trying to ask their opinions on national politics while they or I are on the clock.
Thanks trent for your comment. Really appreciate it. Yes, we will have the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) soon. We will take some of the things you mentioned. We will also have P. Sainath, one of India's leading Left journalist we know of.
@@IndiaGlobalLeft Can't wait to hear them, thank you! I'm always struck hard by how large the movement is in places I don't get to read about. Gives me hope, stuck here in the center of empire, that the fire of humanity still burns hot outside our official borders. I know nowhere and nothing is perfect, but at least there's people still trying, blessedly.
Thanks for a new (for me) perceptive.
This video should get more views. Terrific
Thanks mate, please like our videos and share with your friends and family to help us reach to larger audience. Solidarity
@@IndiaGlobalLeft absolutely
Excellent discussion!
Thank You. This was a good video very educational. I will recommend it.
Glad you enjoyed it! Stay in touch. Thanks.
Superb. Good host!
A Marxist critique of Prabhat Patnaik:
… One of the most prominent intellectuals of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Prabhat Patnaik, gives a "left" slant to the Keynesian program of increased government spending. In a "Perspective on the Crisis" published on October 13 he writes that the need of the hour is not just the injection of liquidity into the world economy, but the injection of demand through increased spending.
Moreover, he continues, "the general objective of such spending must be the reversal of the squeeze on the living standards of the ordinary people everywhere in the world that has been a feature of the world economy in the last several years". The "new growth stimulus" must come not from some new speculative bubble but from "enlarged government expenditure that directly improves the livelihoods of the people, both in the advanced and in the developing countries".
To advance the notion that governments can somehow be pressured into lifting living standards and that this would alleviate the crisis of the capitalist economy is to blind the working class and the oppressed masses as to the real situation they confront.
At the heart of the crisis is the over-accumulation of fictitious capital in relation to the surplus value extracted from the world working class. This means that any improvement in living standards will exacerbate the crisis of profitability. That is why governments around the world, while handing out billions to the banks and financial institutions, will seek to drive down further the living standards of the working class, as the negotiations in the United States over the proposed bailout for the major car producers clearly demonstrate.
The World Economic Crisis: A Marxist Analysis
Part 5
Nick Beams
24 December 2008
1) Modern Money/Monetary Theory (MMT)
2) Mariana Mazzucato
2) Paul Cockshott
Please what is he saying about Mariana? I'm still trying to ascertain if she and her Institute are a force for good
@@stepmaster9988 I think so.
@@satyajitsheth4705 Okay thanks. I’ll listen at a quieter time.
I was impressed with the series of talks by Damon Silvers for non-economists on neoliberal capitalism. They don’t go so far as to call for the socialist state to replace the capitalist state but at least he explained it well why neoliberalism is finished but doesn’t go into what should replace it ua-cam.com/play/PLCB5zYFnXOqzQz2UGR-FQc73V3W-6i64Y.html&si=NNiIr1y_UQtdR6v9
@@stepmaster9988Maybe throw in a bit of Yanis Varoufakis too.
@@satyajitsheth4705 Yes I like his work too, esp the new book on Techno Feudalism, but he seems very anti-China (thinks there’s a genocide going on in Xinjiang) or just lacks depth and seems to be anti-socialist as well despite his anti capitalist critiques
Wonderful conversation 😉
Glad you enjoyed it! Stay in touch. Solidarity!
What a discussion.. enriching, to the real subject. Thank you.
Thanks Partho. Stay in touch!
Can you recommend any books on imperialism, especially any focusing on recent events? The only book I have on that topic is from David Harvey. I’d certainly appreciate it, honestly any book recommendations I’d very much appreciate!
These are good talks, I’ve been listening through a few now. Very good!
You may want to interview Robert Pollin sometime. I've heard him talk about how the oil shocks of the 70s were very bad for progressive/left economics.
The way to stop bad guys with a state is to have a good guys with a state.
Excellent talk. Professor Patnaik's discussion of the rise, stagnation and decline of socialism in India is very instructive. Yet he correctly underlines the abiding relevance of socialism as a guiding vision for a more just society. He makes no criticism of Chomsky as suggested by the blurb. Chomsky's ideal of anarchist syndicalism or workplace democracy and collective ownership seem to be perfectly in synch with Professor Patnaik's views. Chomsky might however have reservations about the Soviet Union's historical contributions as its centralized authoritarian structure and ideology of the party leadership is inimical to the anarchist ideal. But there is much to be said for Patnaik's views regarding the Soviet Union's creation of a welfare state, the building of state institutions, its defeat of fascism and its contribution to the decolonization process. Like West Bengal and Kerala it seems the Soviet Union also ran out of ideas which is what happens when ideals and movements triumph and then get bureaucratized in which hierarchical forces prevail over egalitarian and democratic ideals. The abiding enemy of socialist and democratic ideals has been the US state corporate military-capitalist system which will keep the socialist ideal alive and relevant.
Thanks Ashraf for the well-thought comment. Stay in touch! Solidarity.
Very good, but you should've interruptted Dr Patnaik less
If Sovjet had not been targeting many times instead had been able to built its socialist State without interfeering can we imagine the result, I can
interesting, the soviet union itself wore some colonialism to its union states yet contributed to the decolonization.
Ight
48:50 State control is just a half-step away from bourgeois or elite control, and is only "socialist" when the State is nothing more than the proletariat organized as the ruling class in a literal democracy. Not a "democracy" like the standard republic, where the proletariat is allowed to vote for who will rule over them, not a "democracy" where the proletariat has easier access to government office, but a democracy that is based in community-level discussions that result in decisions being made by the proletariat that are then enforced by the proletariat itself. A republic is the closest system to it that the bourgeoisie have allowed to develop, but it has to undergo those bottom-up changes that Marx and Lenin supported or else just another top-down system claiming to be "better" simply because it serves the "interests" of the people that will eventually become more and more oppressive "to protect the people" and other nonsense. As well, under capitalism the State is a useful tool to fight the worst consequences of capitalism (so long as the proletariat can put enough cohesive/consistent pressure on the State), but it can never be forgotten that the bourgeoisie will have their allies incorporated into the State to undermine those efforts and "prove" that State control is inferior to private control through sabotaging the programs run by the State, and with all of their resources fight to reverse the protections of the State (immigration "crises" are a common one).
The State will retain its position above the proletariat even after ejecting the bourgeoisie unless the proletariat themselves become the State by turning it into a real democracy, so suggesting that there be mixes of State/private/etc aspects to a socialist economy is just silly. To protect the interests of the proletariat, only the proletariat, the ENTIRE proletariat via democracy (not the "feudalism with elections and without bloodlines" of republics), must be the primary decision-making body. (In societies where there is a peasantry, they must also be included into the process and socialized (culturally) so that they eventually become proletarians and share the same class interests.) That means the workplaces must be democratically organized and controlled by the workers *in cooperation with the democratically organized communities*, even if it means they're not super efficient (efficiency will come with greater practice in democracy and its application to more aspects of life, just as it came through the same means in autocratic systems, and should never be slapped with the "it was tried for a month/year half-heartedly and with intervention from parties interested in seeing it fail, and it wasn't as efficient as private or State control, so we should just admit that it doesn't work for everything" arguments that seem to be common even among leftists. We don't NEED super-efficiency so long as needs are met according to what the proletarians democratically decide their needs even are).
It also means that the economy must be democratically planned. With the technology available, it's not a stretch to say that the entire economy can be planned, but to believe that the plan must be CENTRALLY created by a CENTRAL entity planning FOR the proletariat is the wrongest "socialist" argument I've heard in this discussion. It must be the proletariat doing the planning, starting within their local communities. Each community can determine for itself what it needs and what it can provide, and then share that information with other communities to create a logistical network based on fulfilling needs according to what can be produced, and planning to change production based on what isn't. That is the essence of a SOCIALIST (i.e. "managed socially") "planned economy," and the opposite of what many leftists and even socialists seem to think when they imagine socialism.
50:45 Are you kidding? You're talking about something other than socialism in this case. Statism is state control of the economy (and therefore politics). Socialism is democratic control economy (and therefore politics). You don't need a strong State to have collectively owned/controlled means of production (like cooperatives) UNLESS your system is still a capitalistic or other hierarchical one, in which case yes, you do need to protect the rights of the people. If you don't have the bourgeois property rights as under capitalism, or the bourgeois democracy as in republics, but instead focus on community-level democracy as the decision-making and decision-enforcing body, then the "strong State is necessary" argument flies out the window as so much refuse. Some of the arguments made in this discussion suggest to me that the concept of socialism as democracy is seen as one of those "sounds good in theory, but I don't really believe it can work in practice" things that then reinforces the "so I'll assume it will fail and argue for something else" approach/mentality. If that's the case, then don't muddy the discussion with talk of socialism, but instead talk about left-statism, because that's really what it boils down to.
Defending the USSR under Stalin isn't defending anything about socialism, but defending Stalin's pseudo-fascist statism. It's fine to admit that. It made great positive strides and they sacrificed a lot to fight the Nazis, but Stalin also oversaw the betrayal and destruction of socialist/communist movements around the world in order to benefit the position of the USSR in relation to the more dominant bourgeoisie. That's not a socialist history. Defend what took place pre-Stalin as the movement towards socialism, because that's defensible. Defend the improvements that the USSR made, because that's defensible...but don't brush aside the fact that they were a statist country that did a lot of anti-socialist stuff while trying to control the socialist movement in its favor.
Oh, yes, it is a biiiig stretch to claim that the entire economy could be planned in the way you propose. You don't need a degree in social psychology to understand that's not how societies work and what you propose is ineffective chaos and not actually planning.
While I agree with many of your points, this one, which seems central to your critique, is just wishful thinking. Yes, we have technology now, yet involving millions of people in the decision making process poses major problems and even threats. So you'll need a coordinating unit. Whether you call it the state or something else doesn't really matter
@@sheezle3 A "biiiig stretch" based on...what? There are no examples on which to claim that it can't work simply because it isn't ALLOWED to be tried. Every time there looks like there will be any significant leftist progress that could undermine the very notion that "there is no other option" or "it's the best we have" concerning capitalism a lot of effort and resources are sunk into ensuring that 1) people see it as impossible/impractical/evil and 2) it fails by thorough sabotage (sanctions and blockades are only part of it) and outright interventionism, invasion etc. The same applies to claims made by social psychologists simply because they have few examples to draw from for study, though there are plenty of smaller-scale examples of common democracy being very well employed among and between communities across short and long distances. In fact, there are calls for such studies to be made by social psychologists, with at least one author arguing that, ahem, "behavioral experiments tend to be designed for top-down control rather than a democratic society."
There's also the whole "tragedy of the commons" garbage that follows your arguments, yet it was thoroughly debunked by Elenor Ostrom's research (done over decades, winning her the 2009 Nobel Prize); the TOC was a thought experiment based on the "Prisoner's Dilemma" behavioral study which focused on isolated individuals with no ability to socialize or otherwise communicate with others beyond a slip of paper at certain times, but the research debunking the TOC looked at case studies of private, State and social control over various resources, coallated the data, and looked at more appropriate behavioral studies (ones that made social interaction integral to the study) to help understand why the socially-controlled resources were generally (not always) better managed than both the private and State controlled resources. I suggest reading her paper or even watching some of her lectures posted on youtube.
The biggest stretch is claiming something can't work when the future of the existing systems and hegemonies depends on them never being seriously considered in the first place. So what's the smallest number of people participating in a functioning society that practices common democracy for its economic and social/political planning for you to believe it plausible (not guaranteed, just plausible)? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? And what standard do you hold for testing approaches? Must it work immediately without any preparation or practice? Must it be developed quickly with a little practice? Must it be developed over a longer period with lots of practice? And what of the standard for scale of participation? Must it be all of the people all at once? Must it be entire regions individually but all at once? Must it be some other grouping but all at once?
You're making the same arguments that every anti-democratic person on the right makes, despite any agreements you may have with the rest of it. That's by design. The common narrative since Aristotle has been exactly as you say, that involving too many people would pose major problems etc, which has also always been a major justification for an aristocracy ("Aristotle" as a name is "the best of all," and "aristocrat" is literally "the rule of the best"), including a capitalism's top-down organization where the boss/CEO reigns supreme. That doesn't mean that it's correct, though, and there are examples throughout history (particularly in the Americas pre-colonization) and even some right now that stand as evidence against it. Which is why I suggest you look deeper than the talking points into what is "obvious" to everyone yet apparently works anyway when people who have an interest in making it work...actually try to make it work. It's not going to produce fast decisions, but decisions don't need to be fast all the time, especially when it comes to the most socially important issues. An economy can be democratically planned without a central authority, even without advanced technologies to track everything (they are useful because they make things easier but are not necessary). If you think I'm suggesting that everyone everywhere should immediately transition to such a system, then you've misunderstood my arguments.
Imagining common democracy on a larger scale as chaos will only result in you working to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If it can work for >300,000 people over an area approximately the size of South Carolina, with no advanced technologies to track everything or even have immediately communication between all parties at all times, then it can be scaled to work in smaller areas (city-sized, even neighborhood-sized) where those technologies do exist within the larger state, regional and national scales. But if the attitude is "it can't work because we've been made to believe it couldn't without evidence, so let's insist that it can't work and never try it," then obviously it'll never work, it'll be pure chaos, and .
But again, take some time to actually research the topic. You don't need to be a social psychologist to know that social psychologists haven't done much/any research on the topic to back up any claims that it couldn't work if people made a good-faith effort to build a society (and economy) based in common democracy.
Your characterisation of Stalinism as “pseudo-fascist statism” doesn’t help us understand the contradictory character of the degenerated workers state that existed and can only create confusion as to what fascism is.
Patnaik is giving the standard apologies for Stalinism (welfare state, defeating Nazism, allowing decolonisation) WITHOUT mentioning “Stalinism” or its counter-revolutionary role.
Always with such apologies there is silence on the crucial role the Stalinists play from 1929-1933 in allowed the N@zis to rise, be appointed to power then destroy all the independent organisations of the working class without any organised opposition.
The passive capitulation of not only the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) but also all the sections of the Comintern to this catastrophe marked the transition of Stalinism into a counter-revolutionary force.
Only Trotsky and the International Left Opposition fought to warn German workers of the danger and called for an overturn of the Stalinists' "Third Period" line of calling the social-democrats "social fascists".
Read on the WSWS:
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners
David North 11 April 1997
@@johnwilsonwsws There's a lot that I don't know, and I admit that. I wasn't trying to help people understand all of the contradictions of the USSR and countries/systems like it, though. Just the specific one that statism is not socialism, and is in fact contradictory to the movement towards socialism if control of the state's political and economic governance are not given directly into the hands of the working people instead of a party or organization above them. Because only by constant progress towards full democratization can statism transition in that direction.
My argument is against lip service to socialism while in practice preventing it domestically and around the world out of self-preservation. There are various excuses for why they would deny full democratization, but it's all just excuses that attempt to justify top-down control by the "right" people who know how to do things the "right" way.
I've since given up trying to argue about the details of this or that country for the most part; my memory is horrible so I would have to re-read so many books, pamphlets etc, and re-watch so many videos or listen to so many speeches. My argument has evolved to focus almost entirely on full, non-exclusionary democratization as the only path to socialism, and how to approach doing it starting with the very first steps in a neoliberal capitalist society. If that's interesting to you my website and blog are linked to my profile. (It's just a wix project. I don't own a domain to make them publicly searchable because that costs. If you find any of it useful, I think somewhere on the site I give permission to plagiarize. Heck, copy the whole thing without any changes for all I care. As long as someone finds it useful to the movement, that's all that matters to me.)
@@samuelrosander1048 I will have a look at your page.
The transition to socialism does indeed require full democratisation, especially of the economy. (How else can workers control the product of their collective labour.)
The problem is they have to take power and defeat the counter revolution. Capitalism cannot be reformed and the capitalist class, like all preceding dying ruling classes, will do everything it can to cling on to its wealth, power and privileges.
The “lip service” to socialism of Patnaik isn’t an intellectual error but part of his illusions in the viability of capitalism and rejection of the development of the political consciousness of the working class.
QUOTE
… One of the most prominent intellectuals of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Prabhat Patnaik, gives a "left" slant to the Keynesian program of increased government spending. In a "Perspective on the Crisis" published on October 13 he writes that the need of the hour is not just the injection of liquidity into the world economy, but the injection of demand through increased spending.
Moreover, he continues, "the general objective of such spending must be the reversal of the squeeze on the living standards of the ordinary people everywhere in the world that has been a feature of the world economy in the last several years". The "new growth stimulus" must come not from some new speculative bubble but from "enlarged government expenditure that directly improves the livelihoods of the people, both in the advanced and in the developing countries".
To advance the notion that governments can somehow be pressured into lifting living standards and that this would alleviate the crisis of the capitalist economy is to blind the working class and the oppressed masses as to the real situation they confront.
At the heart of the crisis is the over-accumulation of fictitious capital in relation to the surplus value extracted from the world working class. This means that any improvement in living standards will exacerbate the crisis of profitability. That is why governments around the world, while handing out billions to the banks and financial institutions, will seek to drive down further the living standards of the working class, as the negotiations in the United States over the proposed bailout for the major car producers clearly demonstrate.
The World Economic Crisis: A Marxist Analysis
Part 5
Nick Beams
24 December 2008