A comprehensive survey of capitalism's colonialist roots and
uncertain future
Those who control
the world's commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories
of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained
and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In this pathbreaking book-winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy
Memorial Award-radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat
Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required
the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist
modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of
mainstream economics.
Then, looking at the
history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a
millennium ago to today's neoliberal regimes, they discover that,
over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize
itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of
countless people. A few hundred years ago, write the Patnaiks,
colonialism began to ensure vast, virtually free, markets for new
products in burgeoning cities in the West. But even after slavery was
generally abolished, millions of people in the Global South still
fell prey to the continuing lethal exigencies of the marketplace.
Even
after the Second
World War, when decolonization led to the end of the so-called
"Golden Age of Capitalism," neoliberal economies stepped in
to reclaim the Global South, imposing drastic "austerity"
measures on working people. But, say the Patnaiks, this neoliberal
economy, which lives from bubble to bubble, is doomed to a protracted
crisis. In its demise, we are beginning to see-finally-the
transcendence of the capitalist system.