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Capital and Imperialism

Theory, History and the Present

Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik

July 2022

6.25 x 9.5 inches

392 pages

ISBN : 978-81-956392-1-2

INR 900
INR 900.00
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Capital and Imperialism

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.

 

Prabhat Patnaik

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability under Capitalism, The Retreat to Unfreedom, The Value of Money and Re-Envisioning Socialism. He has co-authored A Theory of Imperialism and Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present with Utsa Patnaik.

 


Utsa Patnaik

Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation, The Long Transition and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays. She has co-authored A Theory of Imperialism and Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present with Prabhat Patnaik.