Why the Boston Review wants to nuke America.

Prabhat Patnaik writes in the Boston Review-

It has been four decades since neoliberal globalization began to reshape the world order. 

What happened in 1980 which caused this? Patnaik won't tell us. The fact is that India- to which he returned in 1974- had been hit hard by the first oil shock and thus had to figure out ways to boost foreign exchange earnings. Thus, India's economic policy- from paying lip service to Socialist ideals- became focused on the Balance of Payments. The License-Permit Raj was seen merely as a way of extracting rents. It no longer had any ideological purpose. Patnaik and his wife, teaching at JNU, may have been oblivious of this fact. They may not have noticed that Sanjay Gandhi- like other sons of senior politicians- had zero belief in Marxism. The scions watched the Godfather and read books about the Mafia so as to understand Indian politics. 

During this time, its agenda has decimated labor rights, 

because labor rights decimated jobs. You can't belong to a Union if you don't have a job.

imposed rigid limits on fiscal deficits, 

There were limits on the expansion of Government spending because tax payers and borrowers rebelled. There was no Keynesian 'money illusion' which monetary policy could exploit. 'Ricardian Equivalence' meant that Government spending had to be more productive than private sector spending or else it would not be sustainable. However, because of 'labor rights', Government spending could not be more productive. 

Patnatik is wrong about 'rigid limits on fiscal deficits'. He probably has some hazy memory of his colleagues back in Blighty talking about the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement and how this linked to monetary expansion and thus inflation. But once underlying cost-push factors abated, deficits ceased to matter- provided debt was held internally. 

given massive tax breaks and bailouts to big capital,

Rather than killing the golden goose- which, truth be told, had wings and could fly away easily enough.

However, in the Seventies- under 'stagflation'- there was plenty of 'Corporate Welfare'. 

sacrificed local production for multinational supply chains, 

Very true! Oxford should grow its own pineapples and bananas! It should refuse to educate the Prabhat Patnaiks of this world. Let them get educated in their own country. 

and privatized public sector assets at throwaway prices.

But those privatized companies then paid much more in tax instead of incurring bigger and bigger losses for the tax-payer. Look at Air India. Why should the Indian tax-payer finance that money-pit? Had the Tatas retained control of it, India would have been gaining tax revenue from it. Instead, the Exchequer kept losing money that could have gone towards schools and hospitals. 

As trickle-down economics lost its credibility, a new prop was needed to sustain the neoliberal regime politically. It came in the form of neofascism.

Franco was an actual Fascist. His regime thrived in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies. He re-established the monarchy and died peacefully. Patnaik does not seem to understand that Fascism did not go away. Fascist parties- like the Indian National Congress (whose leader was described as the Il Duce and Fuhrer of India by Govind Vallabh Pant)- remained in every country which had not been militarily defeated. The KMT ruled Taiwan. South Korea became a military dictatorship in the early Sixties- greatly to its own advantage, it must be said. Phalangist and Ba'athist parties were doing well in the Middle East. There was a Shah in Iran and Suharto in Indonesia. 

What could have been more 'neo-Fascist' than Indira's Emergency- which Patnaik had returned just in time to personally experience? What is this fool babbling about? Does he really think Thatcher and Reagan and Mitterrrand were secretly Nazis?

The result today is a perverse regime defined by the free movement of capital, which moves relatively effortlessly across international borders,

If this is so, why is Iran complaining? Capital mobility is constrained by information asymmetry and judicial and regulatory problems. The reason Capital isn't flowing into India, as it did into China, is because 

a) it is difficult to know which local to trust

b) uncertainty re. contract enforceability and the justiciability of arbitrary state action- e.g. retroactive taxation. 

 even as free movement of the people is ruthlessly controlled by a sharp increase in income inequality

What is Patnaik getting at? A guy named Cecil Rhodes provided the money which took him to Oxford.

Perhaps Patnaik thinks Rhodes reduced income inequality. 

 and a steady winnowing of democracy.

Indira winnowed the fuck out of democracy just when Patnaik had returned to teach at JNU. Did this guy protest against her horrible policies- e.g. forcible sterilization? Nope. He was a 'useful idiot' for the Dynasty. 

 No matter who comes to power, no matter what promises are made before elections, the same economic policies are followed. 

This was certainly true of the various Communist and Socialist parties in India. Narendra Modi tells a joke about a Gujarati who prefers to walk from the train station rather than hire a rickshaw. Still one rickshaw-wallah follows him and says 'Look, I understand you are 'Samajvadi' (Socialist) so you don't want to be seen riding in a rickshaw. But the street is deserted now. Nobody is watching. Hop on'. 

The Gujrati replies 'I am Ahmedabadi- not Samajvadi'- i.e. miserly not Marxist.

Since capital, especially finance, can leave a country en masse at extremely short notice—precipitating an acute financial crisis if its “confidence” in a country is undermined—governments are loath to upset the status quo; they pursue policies favorable to finance capital and indeed demanded by it. The sovereignty of the people, in short, is replaced by the sovereignty of global finance and the domestic corporations integrated with it.

Patnaik is saying that if money and smart people can run away, then popular sovereignty is undermined. We must build a wall and shoot those who try to escape our Socialist Utopia. The problem here is that Patnaiks too get shot or sent to Gulags because they may be classed as 'Left Adventurists' or 'Right deviationists' or simply as crypto-Zionists in the pay of MI5 or the CIA. 

This abridgment of democracy is usually justified by political and economic elites on the grounds that neoliberal economic policies usher in higher GDP growth—considered the summum bonum after which all policy should aim.

That's not what Indira Gandhi said when she declared Emergency nor was it what Bandarnaike or Mujib or Bhutto on anyone else in that part of the world said when they 'abridged democracy'. The talk was always of 'reactionary forces' and a 'foreign hand'- i.e. the CIA. Indeed, when Indira returned to power, Buta Singh persecuted elderly Gandhian nutters and fucked over their various 'Peace Foundations' on the grounds that they were all a CIA front. I should explain, those senile shitheads had backed JP who, along with senile shithead Kripalani, put in senile shithead Morarji Desai as P.M with the predictable result that the Janata coalition fell apart and India saw there was no alternative to the Dynasty. 

 And indeed, in many countries, especially in Asia, the neoliberal era has ushered in noticeably more rapid growth than under the earlier period of dirigisme.

India ran out of foreign exchange and so Manmohan Singh- a better economist than this shithead- scrapped a lot of stupid import controls.

 Such growth scarcely benefits the bulk of the people, of course:

No. It benefits them hugely. However, if those it doesn't benefit have babies like crazy then handouts are needed to keep them alive. States which have experienced demographic transition have increased the gap with those where stupid Patnaik type 'Socialist' policies caused stagnation. 

 in fact, neoliberal policies are even more highly associated with the growth of income inequality 

just as more education is associated with higher educational inequality and better health services is associated with higher health inequality and so forth. This is because mathematical pedagogy has not advanced far enough to be able to turn me into Terence Tao, nor has medical science advanced far enough to make me as healthy as a guy my age who is not as fat as fuck. If there were no education and no health services, there would be much more equality though, obviously, the indigenous population might decline and be subject to demographic replacement. 

than with the growth of GDP. (Even International Monetary Fund economists Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri concede this point in their 2016 article “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”) 

Those guys are bleeding heart leftists. Patnaik lives in a fantasy world where the IMF is a sort of Gestapo under orders from top hatted Capitalists in Wall Street. 

neoliberals have sold a powerful response to this objection: a rise in income inequality should be considered an acceptable price to pay for more rapid growth, for it still might mean an absolute improvement in the conditions of the worst off. The fundamental ideological conceit of neoliberalism has been that growth will lift all boats, even if some boats rise much more than others.

No. The only conceit on display here is Patnaik's own intellectual arrogance. The fact is, some people can become more productive under globalization. As Marx said, they should be rewarded according to their contribution. Social Democracy however stipulates for collective insurance such that a social minimum is available to those who can't be productive. 

There is perhaps no better counterexample to this claim than India, where neoliberal policies were introduced in 1991—spurring both a dramatic rise in inequality and, at the same time, an increase in certain measures of absolute poverty and a decimation of peasant agriculture. 

The alternative was starvation and other types of avoidable mortality whose effect is to decrease 'certain measures of absolute poverty' if anybody remains around to do the measuring.

In 1982, after more than six decades of strong income taxation, the top 1 percent of earners accounted for just 6 percent of national income, according to Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty. 

But they had all sorts of perks and privileges. It was a great time to be a Corporate Exec. You could fuck your secretaries after your three martini lunch and then head off to the Golf Course for a 'business meeting'. Then everybody piles into the Company jet and heads off to Vegas, baby. Meanwhile the guys paying into pension funds were getting royally screwed. That's why institutional investors backed corporate raiders so as to get a better return for their clients.

By 2014 that figure had ballooned to 22 percent, the highest it had ever been in a century. 

Coz Obama was shit- right?

Meanwhile, as economist Utsa Patnaik has shown in a recent report to the Indian Council of Social Science Research, poverty also went up. In rural India, where the norm for defining poverty has been lack of access to 2200 calories per person per day, the proportion of the poor in total population increased from 58 percent in 1993–94 to 68 percent in 2011–12 (the latest year for which large sample survey data are available). The same pattern held true in urban regions, where the norm has been 2100 calories per person per day: the proportion of the poor increased from 57 percent to 65 percent over the same time period.

Because people below the poverty line had babies who had babies. Thus the proportion of the population which had always been malnourished increased. Interestingly, spending less on food and more on a smart phone causes you to have less babies. BTW the methodology for those studies is utter shit. On the other hand, it is true that I am severely malnourished. I only consume 100 calories per day. Why am I so fucking fat? Obviously, neoliberalism is extracting unhealthy belly fat from billionaires and secretly injecting it into me. It is not true that I'm a great big greedy guts. 

Despite these and other cracks in the rising-tide argument that had become all too apparent by the turn of the century,

to whom? Cretins like Patnaik whose students had stopped believing them in the Seventies itself. Still, to get a credential they kept mum and wrote whatever shite was expected of them.  The smart ones emigrated and got jobs with hedge funds.

 the narrative that neoliberalism would benefit everyone retained a certain currency until the early 2000s, for at least two reasons. First, neoliberal globalization was said to have contributed to the astonishing reduction of poverty in China—the economist Pranab Bardhan has forcefully questioned this conventional story in these pages—

Who listens to that shithead? The fact is China has done well. There is no denying the evidence of your own eyes. Bardhan has not done well. Still he had the sense to emigrate to California forty years ago. Gassing on about poverty is best done far far away from the shithole country you originate from.

and a significant segment of the global middle class did do well: its opportunities expanded thanks to the outsourcing of a range of activities from advanced countries and to a rise in the share of economic surplus, caused by languishing wages but increased productivity of the working class. Second, even those hurt by the neoliberal regime often nurtured the hope that persistent high growth would sooner or later “trickle down” to them—a hope fed incessantly by a media establishment dominated by the middle and upper classes.

Very true. Homeless dudes in LA and London talk about this all the time.

This hope more decisively receded, however, as the high-growth phase of neoliberal capitalism ended in 2008 with the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, giving way to protracted crisis and stagnation in the world economy. As the old prop of trickle-down economics lost its credibility, a new prop was needed to sustain the neoliberal regime politically. The solution came in the form of an alliance between globally integrated corporate capital and local neofascist elements.

Obama, presumably, was the local neofascist Wall Street installed as its savior. 

This dynamic has played out in countries around the world, from the rise of Narendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Donald Trump in the United States. 

But Modi only became PM in 2014 because Rahul refused to step up to the plate. Anyway, India wasn't affected by 'sub-prime'.  Trump couldn't have become President if he hadn't faced Hilary. The truth is, there's something unlikable about her. Had Lula not been imprisoned, Bolsonaro wouldn't have had a snowflake's chance in Hell of getting elected. 

To some observers,

observers? No. Lunatics.

 aspects of the Trump administration—his protectionist proposals, his support of Brexit—reflect a departure of neofascism from neoliberalism. But this analysis overstates the significance of Trump’s breaks from neoliberal orthodoxy at the same time that it neglects the distinctive link between neofascism and neoliberalism in the developing world. For evidence of the connection between neofascism and neoliberalism, we need look no further than the fact that no neofascist political formation has actually imposed controls over cross-border financial flows. 

Mahathir blamed the Jews for the 1998 crisis and imposed capital controls. That was smart. 

Ultimately, it is only by implementing such controls—along with strong domestic welfare policies—that we can escape this alliance.

Cool! Modi should impose capital controls so as to fuck over the guys who control the left-liberal Indian media. He should buy votes through 'welfare policies'. This will entrench is Party in power for the next 30 years.  This cretin does not get that the Left has been destroyed in India. Thus policy proposals which increase the power of the PM are bad news for people like Patnaik. 

To assess the prospects for such a shift, it is essential to appreciate the distinctive features of the new fascism. Neofascist groups exist in all modern societies, but typically only as fringe elements. 

The Left is now merely a fringe element in Indian politics. Yet, under UPA 1, they looked strong. They shat the bed by opposing the 123 nuclear agreement. Manmohan took a strong line with them and they suddenly collapsed. It turned out that voters didn't care about American Imperialism or Neo-Liberalism or other such senile shibboleths.

What isn't a fringe element in Indian politics now is the Hinduism of the vast majority. Is this because of Globalisation? No. It's because most Indians are Hindus.

They take center stage in periods of crisis only with the backing of corporate capital, which provides access to massive financial resources and control over the corporate-owned media and other means of opinion-making.

Such as writing shite.

A characteristic strategy of neofascism, like its classical predecessors, is to demonize the “other,” whether Muslims in India

Who were demonized at the time of Partition and ethnically cleansed from parts of India because...urm...well, the Hindus say, the Muslims started the violence. 

...India provides a vivid illustration of the relation between neofascism and neoliberalism. For one thing, the neofascist Hindu supremacists that came to power in 2014 never had anything to do with India’s anti-colonial struggle (indeed, one of them even assassinated Mahatma Gandhi). 

But Gandhi delayed Independence. Anyway, the issue was not whether the Brits would leave but who would get their nice offices and bungalows. 

Instead they are arch neoliberals, even more so than earlier neoliberal governments; their entire policy stance, even during the pandemic, is centred around keeping the fiscal deficit in check for fear of offending globalized finance, because of which India has been one of the countries offering the most niggardly government assistance to the people affected by the lockdown. 

India is as poor as shit. The Central Government will turn on the money tap when the General Elections are around the corner. 

India’s government today is also more eager than ever before to privatize public sector enterprises 

because they are shit

and to provide assistance to corporations, especially a few favored ones. 

because they are less shit

And it has been more keen than any previous government to ensure corporate encroachment on peasant agriculture and petty production.

i.e. the shit that keeps India very very poor.

Indeed, since the earliest days of neoliberalism in India there has been a tragic spike in peasant suicides—more than 300,000 in the two and half decades following 1991. 

During most of which time the BJP wasn't in power. Farmers don't have a higher suicide rate though, for political reasons, their families can profit financially if Daddy drinks pesticide. 

This is because of growing peasant indebtedness. 

Don't lend to peasants. They will top themselves rather than repay you. 

Debt has exploded in the face of 

loan availability. The reason I'm not in debt is because nobody in their right mind will lend me a penny.

higher costs for privatized essential services and a steep drop in profits for peasant agriculture following the withdrawal of government price support in cash crops and a reduction of such support in food grains. 

Why can't the non-farmers of India just pay the farmers lots and lots of money? Oh. It's because the non-farmers are as poor as shit. Sad.

The squeeze on peasant agriculture, a sector that employs almost half the total workforce, has been so drastic that the number of “cultivators” has shrunk by 15 million between two censuses, 1991 and 2011. Some became laborers and others migrated to cities in search of non-existent jobs, swelling an army of unemployed or underemployed workers that weakened the bargaining position of the relatively few unionized workers. The GDP growth rate has increased, but there has been a reduction—a halving in fact—in the rate of growth of employment, which has brought it even below the natural rate of growth of the workforce.

Coz it's better to pay higher wages in Bangladesh rather than 'make in India' due to crazy labor laws. 

The massive peasant agitation currently rocking the country is aimed to roll back three farm laws enacted last year by Modi’s government that only further extend this neoliberal regime. The U.S. administration and the International Monetary Fund, while critical of the Indian government’s handling of the agitation, support the thrust of the three laws. Modi’s neofascism is thus quite unambiguous in its defence and promotion of the neoliberal agenda.

There you have it. The US administration is neofascist as is the IMF. Everything is their fault.  How can we stop these Fascist bastards? Hiroshima. Nagasaki. That's what worked in the past. Not until America is nuked to a crisp can Socialism prevail. Death to America! Thank you, Boston Review, for publishing this shite.