Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: 'There are Marxists in India?'

Per trovare un marxista intelligente, non imbalsamato nell'ortodossia, 
capace di usare il marxismo come base e stimolo per cercare soluzioni 
nuove adatte ai tempi.  Come avrebbe fatto Marx, mi piace pensare...
 
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'There are Marxists in India?'
Economist Prabhat Patnaik says moving back to an economic 'golden age' 
is impossible, so we must invent new solutions.
Last Modified: 28 Apr 2012 13:26
 
India's political spectrum is considerably wider than that of the US, 
and Patnaik offers an unusual perspective [AFP]
 
Austin, TX - After an engaging half-hour interview with India's 
pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York 
University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik.
 
"There are Marxists in India?" came the bemused response. "I thought 
India was the heart of the new capitalism."
 
Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is 
challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of 
capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as 
communist parties that have won state elections. Patnaik represents the 
best thinking and practice of those left traditions - both the academic 
Marxism that provides a framework for the critique of economics, and the 
political Marxism that proposes public policies - which is why I was so 
excited to talk with him about lessons to be learned from the current 
economic crisis.
 
In the interview, conducted during a break in the NYU Institute for 
Public Knowledge's "Futures of Finance" conference, I asked Patnaik two 
main questions: First, is there a "golden age" of capitalism to which we 
can return? Second, can we ever expect ethical practices from the 
financial sector of the global capitalist economy? Before explaining why 
his answer to both questions was "no", some background.
 
Prabhat Patnaik started his academic career in the UK, earning his 
doctoral degree at Oxford University and then teaching at the University 
of Cambridge. He returned to India in 1974 to teach at Jawaharlal Nehru 
University in New Delhi until his retirement in 2010. He's the author of 
several influential books, including The Value of Money, published in 
2008. Patnaik-the-politician served as Vice-Chairman of the Planning 
Board of the state of Kerala from 2006 to 2011 and is a member of the 
Communist Party of India (Marxist). He regularly writes on economic 
issues in the party's journal and addresses trade union meetings.
 
In the United States, where people believe Marxism was buried under the 
rubble of the Berlin Wall and communism can only mean Soviet-style 
totalitarianism, his political affiliations would guarantee a life on 
the margins. But India's political spectrum is considerably wider, and 
leftist ideas have a place in the national political discourse there. On 
the world stage, Patnaik brings an unusual perspective: An experienced 
economist with a history of political organising; an Indian who is 
engaged in the political debates of the West; a leftist who is not 
afraid to critique the weaknesses of the left tradition.
 
The quixotic quest for a 'golden age'
 
Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008, there has been more and more 
nostalgia in the United States - especially among liberals - for the 
immediate post-WWII period, the so-called "golden age" of capitalism 
during which profits and wages rose, and unemployment was low. This was 
the achievement of Keynesianism, the philosophy that unwanted market 
outcomes can be corrected through monetary and fiscal policy designed to 
stabilise an otherwise unstable business cycle. Primarily through 
"military Keynesianism" - massive spending on wars and a permanent 
warfare state - the US government helped stimulate the economy when it 
went into inevitable periods of stagnation. That worked until the 
mid-1970s, when growth started to slow.
 
Whether or not that system was good for everyone (lots of people in the 
"third world", for example, were not particularly happy with it), the 
question remains: Can we go back to that strategy? Patnaik says that 
golden age was necessarily short-lived, as the pressure for global 
investment pushed nations to give up the ability to impose controls on 
capital. This globalisation of finance made national Keynesian policies 
less relevant. At about the same time, steep increases in the price of 
petroleum generated even more capital in the oil states, which went 
looking for investment opportunities around the world.
 
Globalisation - meaning in this case, the concentration of capital 
moving freely around the world - meant that no single nation-state could 
go up against international finance. And with the global flow of goods, 
the large "reserve army of labour" (the unemployed and under-employed) 
in places such as China and India meant that workers in the advanced 
industrial countries had less leverage. So, productivity continued to 
rise, but wages stagnated. Patnaik said it is important to see the 
contemporary crisis in that historical context.
 
"The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is certainly 
part of the problem, but not the root cause of the problem today," he 
said. "The immediate crisis it touched off helps make the underlying 
problem visible."
 
If this financialisation of the global economy, which has put so much 
power in so few hands, is at the heart of the problem, the question is 
clear: In the absence of a global state, who is going to control 
international finance capital?
 
If capital is going to be concentrated, can we at least make it behave?
 
If the power of finance capital can't be diminished, is there a way to 
at least make it follow some sane rules to prevent the worst from 
happening again? Short answer: No.
 
"It's important to understand that capitalism is a spontaneous system, 
not something that is always necessarily planned or controlled," Patnaik 
said. Because the reward for ignoring, evading, or getting around rules 
is so powerful, the attempts to make capitalism follow ethical norms are 
bound to fail.
 
"Keynesianism worked in a specific time and place, but capitalism 
escaped Keynesianism," he said. New rules will suffer a similar fate, 
absent a force as strong as international finance capital to enforce the 
rules.
 
Although Patnaik often talks in detail about the complex workings of the 
global economy, he also articulates simple truths when that kind of 
straightforward analysis is needed. In doing so, he often draws on 
aspects of Marx's analysis that the world tends to forget.
 
To make the point about the futility of talking about ethical norms in 
capitalism, Patnaik pointed to Marx's insight that a capitalist is 
"capital personified". Here's the relevant passage from the first volume 
of Marx's Capital:
 
     "[T]he possessor of money becomes a capitalist ... [A]nd it is only 
in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the 
abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as 
a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with 
consciousness and a will."
 
What Marx described as "the restless never-ending process of 
profit-making" and "boundless greed after riches" reminds us that, as 
actors on the economic stage, we are less moral agents and more "capital 
personified" - relentless in our restlessness and bound to believe in an 
illusory boundlessness. Society might be able make some moral claims on 
people with wealth if they were merely working in capitalism, but it's 
more difficult to find common moral ground with "capital personified".
 
What should people fight for?
 
If we can't go back to business as usual, and there's no reason to 
expect that new rules will solve our problems, what kinds of solutions 
are possible? Patnaik said that neither of the two most obvious 
responses to the financial crisis - creating a surrogate global state to 
impose controls on finance, or "delinking" a nation's economy from the 
global finance system - are now on the cards. Even though capitalism is 
in deep crisis, resistance to capitalism is not nearly strong enough to 
produce movements that could make that possible.
 
Given his intellectual roots and political affiliation, it may seem 
surprising that Patnaik argues for organising to bring back the liberal 
welfare-state policies that developed in the advanced industrial 
countries during the postwar period when Keynesian economics ruled.
 
"That is not about going back, which is impossible," Patnaik said. "We 
have to go forward with new ideas." The call for a more robust social 
safety net (protecting workers' rights, unemployment insurance, social 
security, health insurance, etc.) isn't new, but such policies can be a 
step towards new ideas, a transitional measure, he explained. Rather 
than making those policies the final goal, as part of a more-or-less 
permanent accommodation with capitalism, they should be seen as a 
stepping stone toward radical change.
 
"We can work towards a reassertion of welfare state policies, not as an 
end but as a vehicle toward greater justice, as a way of making visible 
the inherent limitations of capitalism," he said.
 
In additions to the limitations of capitalism, there also are ecological 
limitations we can't ignore, he said, which means the goal can't be 
raising India and China to the material standards of the United States. 
Patnaik recognises the need to adjust older socialist goals to new 
realities.
 
"The world simply has to be refashioned," both in the "third world" and 
in advanced capitalist countries, and specifically in the United States, 
Patnaik said, which means experiments in alternative ways of living that 
are not based on material measures.
 
"This really is a spiritual/cultural question, about what it means to 
live a good life," he said, which should not be seen as foreign to 
socialism. "Marxism shouldn't be reduced to productionism. The goal of 
socialism has always been human freedom, which is about much more than 
material wealth."
 
"Gandhi talked about the ethical demands of nature, but I don't like 
that phrase, being a socialist and anthropocentric," Patnaik said with 
the hint of a grin. "But we do have to live within the limits of nature."
 
The role of Marxism
 
It is easy to misjudge Patnaik from first impressions. Unlike many 
intellectuals, Patnaik does not immediately thrust himself into a 
discussion, and he's soft-spoken both in conversation and from the 
podium. But when he does speak, his passion for justice comes through 
loud and clear. And, while Patnaik identifies very much as a communist, 
he also is quick to poke at some of the tradition's platitudes.
 
"I just came from the (Communist) Party Congress, and I keep reminding 
everyone that they have to give up notions of a one-party State, of 
democratic centralism (the Leninist notion that party members were free 
to debate policy but must support the final decision of the party)," 
Patnaik said. "Democratic centralism always leads to centralism."
 
If leftists reject the current dominance of finance in the world, 
Patnaik said that it's important to reject any suggestion that a single 
perspective or party should dominate.
 
"The hegemony of finance throttles democracy. The hegemony of finance 
beats you into shape," he said. If the goal is to resist that kind of 
hegemony, then the approach of the old communist movement simply isn't 
relevant, Patnaik said - but socialist principles are more relevant than 
ever.
 
"Any resistance has to be about opening up alternatives, opening up 
critical thinking to imagine those alternatives," he said. "The only way 
to challenge that global regime is mass mobilisation."
 
Patnaik has no off-the-shelf solutions to offer, and it's difficult to 
reduce his thinking to slogans. At the age of 66, when many people hold 
on tightly to what they believe will work, Patnaik doesn't hesitate to 
say: "It's time to invent."
 
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at 
Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in 
Austin, one of the partners in the community centre "5604 Manor". His 
latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the 
Prophetic Voice.
 
Follow him on Twitter: @jensenrobertw
 
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/2012423164839425416.html
 
-- 
Sostieni Rete ECO
 
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html
 

 nuove adatte ai tempi.
 
ma ci sono anche le elaborazioni autionome pubblicate su IPI!
 

 India was the heart of the new capitalism."
 
Non si usa più l'inversione nelle forme interrogative?
 

 Per trovare un marxista intelligente
 
nel 2012, un ossimoro.

 Non si usa più l'inversione nelle forme interrogative?
 
Anche questo uso va, specialmente quando si vuole esprimere l'incredulità.
 
 

Il giorno domenica 29 aprile 2012 15:46:33 UTC+5:30, Trew ha scritto:

Anche questo uso va, specialmente se si vuole esprimere l'incredulità.


Grazie per la spiegazione della sfumatura.

 Am.
