Sunday, December 15, 2024

REST IN POWER

Amiya K Bagchi: ‘A Political Economist, Economic Historian Who Stands Tall in South Asia’

Rich tributes flow in for the ‘towering’ Marxist ideologue who passed away in Kolkata on November 28 at the age of 88.

Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi.

Kolkata: Towering Marxist economist and ideologue Amiya Kumar Bagchi breathed his last on Thursday, November 28, evening at a private hospital in Kolkata. He was 88. He is survived by two daughters, both of whom are also professors. A few years ago, he lost his wife, Jasodhara Bagchi, also a professor and champion of women’s right.

Paying tributed to the departed professor, several academics and Left Front chairman Biman Basu, CPI(M) state secretary Mohd Salim and CITU national secretary Tapan Sen expressed deep grief.

Bagchi was born in 1936 at Jadupur village of Murshidabad district and obtained his college education in Presidency University, Kolkata. Thereafter he joined Trinity College, Cambridge University. In 1963, he obtained his doctorate from the same university, with his dissertation on private investment in India.

He began his professional life by teaching economics in Cambridge University but left it and came back to India and joined as a professor in Presidency College. In 1974, he founded and joined the Centre for Studies in Social Science in Kolkata and became its director in his later years

Bagchi also played an important role in the conservation of banking and finance records as an economic historian and worked from 1976 to 1978 as an official historian of the State Bank of India. After leaving the Centre for Social Sciences, he joined the Institute of Developmental Studies as founder director.

Doubtlessly, Bagchi was one of the most outstanding economists, scholars, humanists in contemporary India, who did not believe in engaging with the science of economics, particularly political economy, from a purely academic point of view. His was a life of constant engagement and dialectical interactions with the living essence of Marxism, Praxis (the alloy of Theory and Practice) while nurturing a deep sense of respect for those put the theory into practice.

He authored various books, as a solitary writer or jointly. His book, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, was a compulsory read for students of economics, political science, and sociology. Some of his other books are Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascending of Capital, Capital and Labour Redefined: India and the Third World, Colonialism and Indian Economy, Money and Credit in Indian History as well as the Evolution of the State Bank of India.

Inspired by his PhD, his first classic work came out in 1972 titled, Private Investment in India: 1900-1939. The standard argument from the "dyed-in-the-wool free traders" was that India's industrial backwardness was owing to "distorted foreign trade regimes".

Economist P Ramkumar recalled that Bagchi showed in his book that India's slow industrial growth under colonialism was because much of the investible surplus was either exported, or used up in rentier consumption, or aborted because of the low propensity to invest in a poor and low-productive economy with sluggish demand for industrial goods.

In 1982, another seminal work, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, was a sharp attack on the neoliberal, free market explanations of continued under-development in the former colonies. In a long review of that book, eminent scholar Terence Byres noted that the book was “a clarion call to revolution”; it filled a void in the development literature; and stood tall alongside three other Marxist works: Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth, Maurice Dobb’s Economic Growth and Underdeveloped Countries and Geoffrey Kay’s Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis. Byres was amused that Cambridge University Press published such an explicitly Marxist book -- given that most of their books were in the laissez faire tradition -- and called it “a kind of dialectic justice”.

In the 1980s, Bagchi immersed himself in another magisterial work, which was the writing of the history of the State Bank of India. Four volumes of this history were published in 1987, 1989 and 1997. In this work, he used rich archival materials to analyse credit institutions and the operation of colonialism in India.

The book was the story of India's transition into a colonial economy but with financial institutions that actively favoured the imperial regime. Author B. R. Tomlinson was to remark in a review that just as the Presidency Bank enjoyed high rate of return on money, Bagchi's volumes had ensured that "their rate of return on intellectual capital is also high"!

Bagchi’s work in the 1990s and after focused on the catastrophic outcomes in Africa, Latin America, and partly Asia, of the stabilisation and structural adjustment policies recommended and enforced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“This is the period where I have heard him directly and personally. He would get passionate and genuinely angry about the policy drift in the developing world towards more free market systems -- and also about what he would call "statistical massaging". This was where he would consistently speak about the East Asian developmental experience, and the role of the (developmental) state and society in directing and regulating the market forces there. He would powerfully argue that the reasons for the contrast between the East Asian success and the Indian failure lay in the role of nationalism, land reforms and education in promoting the efficacy of state action in enhancing economic growth in East Asia” said Ramkumar.

In a later autobiographical description, Bagchi was to write: “My basic concern is still understanding the processes of reproduction of structures of inequality, and explaining how the same underlying processes lead to class formation and stratification along lines of gender, ethnicity, and locales of residence. I believe that theories of asymmetric and incomplete information, social externalities and sorting can provide some of the foundations of the Marxian theories of class and the Weberian theories of stratification. As a citizen of one of the poorest countries of the world, I am frequently sucked into various projects with political overtones. But I have not yet found much common ground with the dominant politicians bent on executing neoliberal policies while preserving an extremely unjust social order. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism to power in India has further exacerbated my conflict with the ruling elite...The themes of social and political conflicts and struggles of ordinary people to achieve a decent standard of living in dignity and freedom still form the core of my professional work. So long as the human world retains its unlovely constitution, my penchant for dissent is unlikely to disappear.”

Remebering Bagchi, Calcutta University professor of economics, Ishita Mukherjee, told NewsClick: “Prof Amiya Bagchi was a political economist, economic historian, who actually stands out tall in South Asia. It will be difficult to find another of his kind again. He was a mentor, teacher to hundreds in Bengal and elsewhere in the country and abroad. From Private investment in India to Perilous Passage, all his books are journeys through time in terms of economy, history, politics, society.”

Mukherjee said Bagchi led an interdisciplinary method of studying economics in Bengal. “He was global in thought but rooted deeply in Kolkata, Bengal and more so in Murshidabad, from where he hails. He felt pain in deprivation due to caste, class and gender. He was deeply committed to his Marxist ideology and his penetrating intuitions in contemporary happenings were worthy till he breathed his last. My tribute and respect to my teacher and mentor, the loss is irreplaceable for us” she added.

Economist Indranil Dasgupta, professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, said Bagchi was arguably the best economic historian India has produced. “He has fundamental contribution in many different areas of economic history and colonialism. His book on the unequal development and colonialism in generating under-development is a classic, as is his initial work on private investment in India. His demise is an irreparable loss to Indian economics and economic history. His SBI history is a classic work of how to record financial history.” He told NewsClick.

Amiya Bagchi was also the president of Friends of Latin America (FOLA) and played an important role in cementing Indian peoples’ connect with the Latin American people. Social activist and FOLA member Bimal Charma said,” Prof Amiya Bagchi was constantly observing and updated on the state of affairs in Latin American countries and interference by imperialist counties in the loot of local resources by the US and others. A great human being, he was a pro- people scholar of the masses, who always advocated economics as a tool of social development.”

Reminiscing Bagchi, the vice-president of FOLA, legal doyen and member of Parliament, Bikashranjan Bhattacharya, said that not only was Bagchi a “towering economist, he was also an activist, especially in the praxis of new socialist developments in the Latin American context. He was president of FOLA and was extremely pivotal in guiding the organisation.”

01 Dec 2024

COP29: Betrayal at Baku

D.Raghunandan |

The heavy hand of developed countries, ably assisted by global fossil-fuel interests, was clearly visible in this.

The climate summit COP29 at Baku, Azerbaijan, once again demonstrated the dominance of global North led by the US over the international negotiations process under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG), especially carbon dioxide, emissions and bring under control resultant climate changes. These are already posing large-scale threats to people and ecosystems and are now on the brink of possibly irreversible changes and even greater dangers ahead. Climate impacts, where the world stands with regard to the levels of accumulated and current emissions, and where they are required to be in order to keep global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees C or preferably 1.5 deg C, have been discussed in detail earlier and need no reiteration here.

COP28 a year ago in Dubai had endorsed the findings of the three-year Global Stocktake (GST) or exhaustive review of the current status of emissions, climate changes and impacts, and the transfer of finances, technologies and capabilities from developed to developing countries required to enable the latter to transition towards low-carbon and ultimately carbon-neutral or zero emissions development. COP29 at Baku, and the next COP30 in Belem, Brazil, were to concentrate respectively on climate finances and updated, increased emissions reduction targets by all countries. Both finance transfers, and national emissions reduction targets particularly of developed countries, have been found severely wanting and far behind requirements.

Since focus of COP29 was to arrive at a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for climate finance, the Baku COP came to be called the “finance COP.” Judged against that and other goals, COP29 was a total disaster. And the heavy hand of developed countries, ably assisted by international fossil-fuel interests, is clearly visible.

Climate finance

The term climate finance has avoided definition from the very outset. In broadest terms, the terms embraces funds for transition to low or zero-carbon development(mitigation), for coping with climate impacts (adaptation) and for compensating loss and damage already caused by climate change. Debates have arisen over two major questions, namely: the quantum of finance required, and the source of these funds. Over the years, various efforts have been made by developed countries to, of course, minimize the quantum of fund transfers, to avoid any interpretation that could be construed as acceptance of liability, and to move away from flows of grant-based public finance to a mix of development grants, mainly loans from multi-lateral agencies, philanthropic assistance and private investments in developing countries that bring in necessary technologies. All these were at play at COP29, with developed countries forcing agreement on terms of climate financing which heavily favoured themselves, and which left developing nations, especially the most vulnerable least developed countries and small island states, dependent on small handouts and trapped in massive and unaffordable cycle of indebtedness.

In discussions starting at COP10 in Cancun in 2009, an amount of $100 billion had been agreed upon for climate financing from different sources. This amount was cemented in the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, as the amount to be mobilized by 2020. Developed countries and various sources have claimed that this target was reached in 2022. However, various independent analyses including by the OECD have found that this amount includes funds from all kinds of courses and that most of this was in the form of loans carrying a huge debt burden with it. In the Global Stocktake, and in studies by UN-appointed as well as independent expert groups, it had been recommended that an climate financing required to be increased substantially to around $1,300 billion annually, or even more if all requirements were taken into account, would be needed by developing to deal with climate change.

However, in an "agreement" insisted upon by developed countries and pushed through a full two days after the COP 29 negotiations were to end, overriding strenuous objections by several developing countries including India, a paltry sum of $300 billion annually by 2035 was decided on in Baku. Accounting for inflation, this amount would probably even be less than the $100 billion agreed in the Paris Agreement!

This figure was sought to be papered over by vague promises to “make efforts” to increase this to over $1.3 trillion by 2035 from all sources. But even this sugar-coated pill came with bitter ingredients seeking to include in this amount developing countries’ own domestic resources, as well as “voluntary” contributions by some developing countries to others through “South-South” arrangements! Things could not have been worse!

Carbon markets

To the surprise of many, the hosts announced on the very first day that an agreement had been reached on defining standards for carbon trading as per Articles 6 of the Paris Agreement, which had evaded agreement so far, and for good reason. Whereas the hosts claimed that this could open up the possibility of $250 billion of investments flowing to developing countries in exchange for carbon credits at market-determined prices that could be exchanged for emissions reduction in developed countries, experts warned that, given the loose language and procedures outlined in the agreement, such carbon trading could actually lead to more, not less, emissions. Earlier experience with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) also resulted in a lot of money changing hands but with highly uncertain outcomes as regards emissions reduced or avoided.

The procedures decided upon in Baku, which would still have to be defined operationally as the scheme unfolds, have many loopholes. For example, countries have been required to quite rigorously define Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMO) or carbon credits, but old problems with exaggeration or other uncertainties about mitigation outcomes remain. Even more seriously, while ITMOs are recorded to UNFCCC and awarded at the time of the transaction, much time is allowed for verification and correction, with lack of clarity as to how rectification is to be done post facto.

There are fundamental issues involved regarding the carbon market itself. A more realistic price discovery for carbon credits could occur only if there is an internationally recognized upper ceiling for atmospheric carbon, which compels all actors to keep carbon emissions below this upper limit and trade accordingly. But that has precisely been the bane of the Paris Agreement, namely that there is no prescribed ceiling for atmospheric carbon, national emissions reductions are voluntary and carbon pricing therefore remains loosely determined, with carbon credits not realistically equivalent to the real value of carbon emissions reduced or avoided.

Further, it will be difficult to separate investments claiming carbon credits from those already taking place as part of routine business activity, for example in solar energy or green hydrogen. Additionality, that is outcomes which are over and above those obtained through business-as-usual activities or investments, has long been considered an important principle in climate policy. In carbon trading, this has been notoriously abused, leaving open the possibility of “greenwashing” such investments. Also, the nature of investments from developed countries that offer scale and ability to absorb the technologies so as to generate the returns that investors want, would tend to flow to markets in relatively larger, more advanced or emerging economies, possibly reducing the access of LDCs, small island states and smaller countries to these finances. This pattern was clearly in evidence in CDMs.

Carbon markets and trading are therefore likely to yield illusory reduction in carbon emissions over and above business as usual while generating revenues for investor and recipient companies and “greenwashing” such investments as climate financing. One expert described the Baku carbon trading agreement as “facilitating cowboy carbon markets at a time when the world needs a sheriff.”

Questioning COPs

With all this sleight of hand by developed countries, and backroom maneuverings by powerful parties, while climate impacts intensify inexorably and emission targets slip further away into a dangerous future, it is small wonder that even influential players not to mention desperate vulnerable nations are questioning the UNFCCC process and the COPs themselves.

About halfway through the fractious Baku COP, 20 highly influential global figures such as former UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon and former UNFCCC head Christiana Figueres issued a highly damaging statement declaring the COPs “not fit for purpose” and calling for its overhaul. Clearly under pressure, they later retracted the statement claiming it had been misunderstood.

Meanwhile, Vanuatu in the south Pacific, one of the most vulnerable small island states, has filed a case in the International Court of Justice seeking an “advisory opinion” on the legal obligations of developed countries to meet the demands of climate justice. The legal petition is based on an earlier resolution moved on behalf of 130 national government and non-governmental parties and adopted by the UN General Assembly in March 2023. The hearings on this matter commenced just a few days back on 2nd December. A representative of Vanuatu in Baku expressed his nation’s total frustration and sense of helplessness in the COP. He bemoaned his country’s fate at being compelled to participate in the COP and being present at the table or face the prospect of being eaten for lunch!

Last chance: COP30!

The writer is with the Delhi Science Forum and All India People’s Science Network. The views are personal.

07 Dec 2024

Capitalist Poverty Vis-à-Vis Pre-Capitalist Poverty

Prabhat Patnaik |

Poverty under capitalism takes a specific form associated with insecurity and indignity that makes it particularly unbearable.

Poverty is taken to be a homogeneous phenomenon irrespective of the mode of production that is under consideration. Even reputed economists believe in this homogeneous conception of poverty.

In fact, however, poverty under capitalism is entirely different from poverty in pre-capitalist times. Even if for statistical purposes poverty is defined as lack of access to a set of use-values that are essential for living irrespective of the mode of production, the fact remains that this lack is enmeshed under capitalism within a set of social relationships that are sui generis and different from earlier. Poverty under capitalism thus takes a specific form associated with insecurity and indignity that makes it particularly unbearable.

There are roughly four proximate features of capitalist poverty. The first arises from the inviolability of contracts, which means that irrespective of their conditions, the poor have to pay whatever they are contracted to pay; this leads to a loss of assets or destitution.

In pre-capitalist times, for instance in Mughal India, revenue demand was a proportion of the produce; this meant that in years of poor harvest, the revenue claims on the peasants got automatically scaled down. Put differently, the burden of the poor harvest got shared among the producers and the overlord.

But, in colonial India, reflecting its capitalist ethos, the tax got levied on land; the contract between the producer and the overlord changed: the producer would be allowed to cultivate a plot of land provided he paid a certain amount of revenue to the State. This meant that in a poor harvest year, the burden of the poor harvest was not shared and fell exclusively on the producer. The contract, in other words, was for a fixed amount of money payment, not for a variable amount of payment, as a share of the produce or its equivalent in money form. The destitution of the peasantry, that is, the transfer of peasants’ assets to money lenders followed from this. Poverty, in short, was associated with destitution which, therefore, tended to have a cumulative impact on the producers.

Put differently, the “flow” lack of access to use-values on the part of the producers was accompanied by a process of their “stock” deprivation of assets, which meant an increase in their vulnerability over time. There was thus a dynamic introduced into poverty.

The second feature of capitalist poverty is that it is experienced by individuals, whether individual persons or households. In a pre-capitalist society where people lived in communities, other members of the community, whether belonging to the same caste-group or simply to the same village, came to the help of the poor in particular years of bad harvests or natural calamities. Privations, in other, words were not suffered in isolation.

Under capitalism, however, when the communities are broken up because of the inexorable logic of the system, and the individual emerges as the primary economic category, this individual also suffers privations in isolation.

Non-Marxist traditions in economic theory fail to see this basic change because they are bereft of any sense of history. Marx had accused classical economics of this blindness toward history: the individual that emerged only at a certain point in history, was taken by it as having existed all along.

Neo-classical economics, starting with Carl Menger and Stanley Jevons, which began around 1870, of course apotheosised the individual, taking the individual as an eternal category and its point of departure for economic analysis. Both strands, therefore, missed the contrast between capitalist poverty and pre-capitalist poverty, the former experienced by isolated and alienated individuals and the latter referring only to the deprivation suffered within a community and hence to a sharing of deprivation.

The fact that capitalism is characterised by alienated individuals (until they form “combinations” or trade unions which bring them together in common struggles against the system) and that it is these individuals who experience poverty, gives poverty an additional dimension; it is not just the lack of access to a set of use-values that constitutes capitalist poverty, but also a psychological trauma that goes with this lack of access.

This becomes clearer when we look at the third feature of capitalist poverty. It arises for two reasons: one is the low wages of those employed, and the other is the absence of employment. It is the reserve army of labour that is particularly afflicted by poverty.

In fact, in economies like ours, where the “employed” and the “unemployed” are not two distinct categories, but most workers barring a tiny minority are unemployed for several days in a week or several hours in a day, the psychological trauma associated with poverty arising from the inability to find employment, is all the more pervasive. The lack of employment appears as a personal failure on the part of the individual, as something that saps the individual’s self-worth, apart from causing lack of access to a given set of use-values.

The fourth feature of capitalist poverty is the opacity to those afflicted by it of the factors causing it. Poverty in the sense of a lack of access to a given set of use-values in a pre-capitalist society is palpably rooted in the size of what is produced, and in the share taken from it by the overlord. Indeed, this is visible to everyone: a bad harvest may reduce the size of the produce and hence accentuate poverty (even when the reduction in output is shared); likewise, a rapacious overlord may snatch so much from the producers that many of them are reduced to poverty even in normal harvest years. But why a person remains unemployed and hence poor under capitalist conditions, remains a mystery to the person himself. Likewise, why prices suddenly rise, pushing more people into poverty, remains a mystery to those afflicted.

Satyajit Ray’s film about the 1943 Bengal famine (Distant Thunder) shows, in the run-up to the famine, prices rising in Bengal even as the Japanese troops occupy Singapore. The war in Ukraine today certainly contributes to the world-wide rise in food prices that accentuates poverty even in a remote African or Indian village. The apparent opacity of the roots of capitalist poverty is linked to the phenomenon of global inter-connectedness under capitalism; that is, to the fact that global developments, developments in distant lands, have an impact on every village, no matter how remote.

These specific features of capitalist poverty have important implications, of which I shall draw attention to only one. Many well-intentioned persons, who would like to reduce or eliminate poverty, suggest that transfers from the government budget should be made, so that everybody in society has a basic minimum income. This, of course, has not happened on the requisite scale anywhere, so that poverty continues as a social phenomenon and is even getting accentuated because of the world-wide food price inflation alongside the recession caused by neo-liberal capitalism. Even suggestions for transfers are invariably for somewhat paltry transfers. But all this refers to poverty in the sense of inadequate access to a set of use-values, that is, poverty that does not refer specifically to capitalist poverty.

Even if sufficient transfers could be made and poverty in the sense of lack of access to use-values could be overcome, that still would not overcome capitalist poverty which also entails a psychological trauma, a robbing of self-worth through unemployment.

Overcoming capitalist poverty in this true sense requires inter alia the provision of universal employment. Keynes had thought that this could be done under capitalism, but he has been proved wrong. This is not to suggest that transfers should not be made; but they are simply insufficient, palliatives that do not go to the root of the problem.

In India, likewise, 5 kilogrammes of free foodgrains per head per month are currently being provided to about 80 crore beneficiaries. How much of this reaches them, how long this scheme will continue (it was started because of the pandemic) are moot points. But anyone who believes that schemes like this constitute the panacea for poverty in contemporary India is sadly mistaken.

What is required is the universal provision of employment, education, healthcare, old-age security, and food, that would restore to people the dignity of being citizens of a democratic society; but this would involve going beyond neo-liberal capitalism.

29 Jun 2024

Neoliberalism & Before: What GDP Data Omits

Prabhat Patnaik | 09 Dec 2024

The neoliberal period has been characterised by increased nutritional deprivation, and hence an absence of improvement in the living conditions.

Representational Image. Image Courtesy: PTI

Karl Marx had once said that all criticism must begin with the criticism of religion. Paraphrasing Marx, one can say in the current economic context that all criticism must begin with the criticism of the GDP (gross domestic product). This conceptually and statistically dubious measure cannot cognise the phenomenon of exploitation. For instance, it looks at the income of the Mughal emperor and his aristocracy as a return for services rendered by them and adds it to the total production of the country in a blatant act of double counting. And yet it is used by defenders of neoliberalism to paint a rosy picture of this phase. Their claim is that the growth-rate of GDP under neoliberalism has been much higher than earlier under the dirigiste regime; that compared to the previous four decades or so prior to neoliberalism, when Independent India’s economic performance was lacklustre, it really took off under neoliberalism.

I was once at a conference where the then managing director of the International Monetary Fund or IMF, criticising the paper written jointly by me and a colleague, made the same claim, but without invoking GDP. His argument was that in the 1960s and 1970s, one was exposed only to the dreary and monotonous sight of Ambassador and Fiat cars on Indian roads, while after neoliberalism, the roads were full of snazzy cars! Despite being a well-known economist, he obviously did not understand what constitutes social welfare.

But the GDP-advocates have to be taken more seriously. The point here is not just that GDP does not indicate social welfare without taking the distribution of income into account, and that we know for sure that distribution has worsened greatly under neoliberalism; the point is whether the bulk of the people are in some sense absolutely worse off under neoliberalism. My argument is that they are.

Even the acceleration in GDP growth in the neoliberal era is greatly exaggerated. Several researchers have argued that there is an overestimation of GDP in recent years, which ipso facto over-estimates the growth rate.

Arvind Subramanian, the former Chief Economic Adviser to the government of India, has argued that between 2011-12 and 2016-17, India’s growth rate was over-estimated by as much as 2.5% per annum. Since this was because the method of estimation used for the new series of GDP introduced in 2011-12 was flawed, it would imply persistent over-estimation right until now, in which case the increase in GDP growth-rate in the neoliberal era compared with earlier, would not be more than 1 to 1.5%.

Taken in conjunction with the indubitable increase in income inequality in the neoliberal period, this would mean very little increase in the incomes of the common people. Even by the GDP measure, therefore, the neoliberal period has been no great success as far as common people are concerned, while the rise in income inequality has also undermined the democratic institutions and egalitarian ethos of the country.

In addition, however, we have direct evidence of absolute worsening of people’s lives. At the beginning of the 20th century, the per capita foodgrain availability in British India was around 200 kg per year. This fell to around 137 kg by the time of Independence, a 31% drop over the last half-century of colonial rule. After Independence, with the determined effort by the government during the much-derided dirigiste period, this was raised to 186.2 kg by 1991, a substantial increase but still not up to the level at the beginning of the century.

After neoliberalism was introduced, there was initially a prolonged drop in per capita foodgrain availability up to 2008 and then an increase to 183.14 kg in 2019-20; it exceeded the level reached back in 1991 only three decades on, in 2020-21 when it reached 186.77 kg and further increased by a small amount in 2021-22 to 187.83 kg.

The neoliberal period as a whole, therefore, can be said to have been characterised by absolute stagnation in an important index of welfare. True, in 2022-23 there has been some improvement in per capita availability, but an important reason for this has been a running down of government stocks (perhaps to provide the 5 kg free foodgrains as Covid relief, though how much of it has actually reached the common people remains unclear); that, though a welcome relief, is not the same as an economic performance.

So far, we have looked at the average picture for the population as a whole, without being concerned with the question of distribution of foodgrains within the population. With income distribution worsening, the per capita direct and indirect consumption of foodgrains must be rising among the upper income groups, at the expense of the poorer segment of the population, within this overall picture of stagnation of per capita foodgrain availability for the population as a whole; this means an absolute nutritional deprivation of the latter.

There is evidence to corroborate this. In the 1970s, the erstwhile Planning Commission had set 2,200 calories per person per day for rural India and 2,100 calories per person per day for urban India as the benchmark for defining poverty.

Let us consider rural India: the percentage falling below 2,200 calories daily intake was 56.4 in 1973-74 and 58 in 1993-94. Since the turn to neoliberalism began in 1991, it basically means that the two pre-neoliberal decades saw constancy in poverty ratio. This is nothing to write home about, but it at least meant no worsening of poverty.

By contrast, between 1993-94 and 2017-18 (both National Sample Survey or NSS large sample survey years) the real spending per capita on food declined and those below 2,200 calories intake per day in rural India increased from 58 to more than 80 (using a reliable approximation for 2017-18 since the government has refused to release the available nutritional intake data).

So dismal was the finding of the 2017-18 survey that the government not only withdrew the data from the public sphere but also changed the method of data collection, which makes the subsequent NSS findings non-comparable with those from all previous NSS surveys. Thus, the neoliberal period has seen an increase in the magnitude of absolute rural poverty by the definition of the old Planning Commission, in contrast to the claim of the GDP-advocates.

In the face of this argument, the neoliberal defenders usually draw attention to the fact that more rural residents are now sending their children to school, accessing modern hospital facilities, using cell phones, and so on, which show that their “tastes” are changing; they no longer care about foodgrains but want a “modern” life-style. Hence their reduced intake of energy as calories is a voluntary decision that should not detract from their improved living standards.

What this argument misses, is the following. In the consumption basket of the people, there are usually some commodities whose consumption cannot be reduced, while there are others whose consumption can be reduced without any immediate ill-effects (though in the long-run it is damaging). Food belongs to the latter category while a surgery or cancer treatment belongs to the former.

What is more, the items on which expenditure cannot be reduced or postponed, are not a given bundle, once and for all, but keep changing over time as new commodities replace the old, as scientific advances take place, and so on.

A person, therefore, does not choose between modern medicine and the old village witch-doctor. He knows at a certain point that he must go for modern medicine. But if his doing so entails a reduction in food intake, then he cannot be considered to be better off; and the chances of this are greater if the price he has to pay for modern medical treatment gets jacked up. His access to modern medicine in itself can be taken as improving his living condition. In this sense, even a poor person who has access to antibiotics today lives better than King Henry VIII of England who had died of sepsis from an ulcerated wound. But whether a person’s living condition improves overall depends on whether while continuing to enjoy access to a minimum necessary quantity of the changing bundle of irreducible goods, the person is forced to reduce the consumption of what he considers reducible goods, especially of foodgrains.

Foodgrains, therefore, constitute a “marker good”, whence it follows that any reduction in foodgrain intake (at the current levels of food consumption) in a country like India must entail an increase in nutritional deprivation, and hence a non-improvement in the living conditions of the common people.

The dirigiste period, in short, had witnessed some improvement in the living condition of the common people, when they had enjoyed both higher food intake (from the low levels at independence) and increasingly modern conditions of life. This improvement could and should no doubt have been greater; but the neoliberal period has been characterised by increased nutritional deprivation, and hence an absence of such improvement in living condition. Citing GDP data cannot do away with this elemental fact.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal.

Why Are Populists Loud and Aggressive?

Ajay Gudavarthy | 12 Dec 2024

Populists draw the nation into a vicious cycle of creating one crisis in the process of ostensibly solving another.

The current populist moment is marked by aspirational momentum. People and marginalised communities did have aspirations in the past too, but the difference being the present ideas of mobility are unwilling to accept co-responsibility.

Aspirations, mobility and solidarity co-existed in the past because there was a sense of mutuality, in spite of yawning inequalities. When the gap was more, mutuality was not a problem; but when the gaps are reducing socially and a ‘sense’ of economic opportunity is spreading, the sense of mutuality and co-responsibility is giving way to what German philosopher Nietzsche referred to as ressentiment -- I detest what I aspire for.

The stable markers of merit and achievement are being detested without necessarily knowing what it is to be replaced with. Mobility with co-responsibility has been replaced under populist mobilisation with mobility with disgust. Every stable marker of merit and solidarity has become markers or reminders of one’s vulnerability and humiliation.

We are passing through strange times of aspirational mobility without mutuality. What this does is to inaugurate a generic process of devaluation, disrespect and uncivility as a necessary social condition. We are now realising that equality was a romanticised ideal when at a distance, but as we inch toward it, it is going to get ugly.

Social mobility and making social groups equal is not going to be linear, additive and cumulative, but crooked and fairly nauseating. Those aspiring for equality may not necessarily value equality as a universal norm or ethic but as a contingent strategy.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s universal principle of categorical imperative of treating all humans with inherent value and as an end in themselves is today viewed more as an excuse and pretense of those already well positioned. Universal norms are seen as a way of dignifying unequal positionality. It is an attempt to pretend being civil in uncivil conditions. Civility is not seen an ideal to be achieved that dominant need to commit to, as a way of dignifying the existing unfair conditions.

Solidarity is linked to collective hope to push society in a normative direction of better and relatively more equal social and economic conditions. Today, ideals and utopia are not inspiring trust and collective faith. The directionality of a society is linked to the understanding of a collective history and memory, but if we refuse to think or lose hope in directionality, we begin to necessarily distort history. This is because it does not interest where we have come from and what has been our collective journey, as that knowledge is not going to guarantee us a better future.

Politics becomes a series of strategies of here and now. Pragmatists to post-structuralists found this way of negotiating reality more realistic and certainly more optimistic in bringing mobility to the marginalised. What works in real-time is what should guide collective action, against the Kantian emphasis on a priori principles.

Populists across the globe have seized this opportunity. It is strategy not struggle; it is pragmatic calculations and not ideal-type beliefs that work more effectively in countering power as we confront on everyday basis.

Populism represents mobility without trust and solidarity. ‘Speed and scale’ have come to replace trust and the need for mutuality. Speed attempts to displace the emptiness created by eroding trust and sense of mutuality.

Populists who vouch against technocratic liberalism and come with a promise to bring back ethics and community, also end up flirting with technology and technocratic governance. They are unable to provide a way out, but what they successfully do is to correctly locate the crisis. They locate the crisis created by technocracy, and therefore articulate a public critique against it but only to return to managing the collective affairs through the same technocratic means. It is, therefore, necessary for them to shut and rigorously control public debates, media and the public sphere. Dialogic spaces carry the potential danger of exposing their utter lack of imagination and that they have no solutions to the problems they correctly articulate. Old time elites and liberal-progressives not yet making sense of the problem only adds to the brazenness of the claims made by populists.

Populists are necessarily loud and aggressive because they know the problem but not a way out, so they have to fix the collective gaze on the problem and convince the collective that in naming the problem they could continue to pretend to know the way out.

Populists sometimes also consciously deepen the problem. It is the problem of, in this case, lack of trust and mutuality that is the source of their legitimacy. They draw the nation into a vicious cycle of creating one crisis in the process of ostensibly solving another. Crisis justifies greater control, surveillance and order. Order comes to replace trust. Since, it is already built on pragmatic calculations, people find it difficult to get out or introspect where this is leading. In fact, since directionality itself has been eschewed as a moral construct that obstructs mobility, they cannot possibly return to think of declining democratic space or deepening trust deficit.

This game of matrix began ‘originally’ with aspirations and mobility. Do people retain the ability to reflect on mobility based on their everyday experiences? Will they arrive at a point where they can tell themselves that these methods are not yielding greater mobility? Will they then return to recognise the need for solidarity as a pre-condition for mobility? The demise of authoritarian variant of populism will squarely depend on this one question, perhaps.

The writer is Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. The views are personal.