The Veins of the South Are Still Open Quotes

“Imperialism as an arrangement, however, has remained largely invisible to the discipline of economics, even to its best practitioners and even in the colonial period. No less a person than John Maynard Keynes, in his classic work The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), where he talks of the ‘economic Eldorado’ that prewar Europe represented, fails to mention that this Eldorado rested upon an elaborate framework of imperialism. Europe’s accessing of food from the ‘new world’, an important aspect of this Eldorado, would not have been possible if this food had not been paid for, through an intricate arrangement, by Britain’s appropriation gratis of a part of the surplus of its colonies and semi-colonies (‘drain of wealth’), and by its export of manufactured goods to its colonies and semi-colonies at the expense of their local producers (‘de-industrialization’).”
― Prabhat Patnaik, The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time

“In contemporary capitalism, in contrast to the colonial period, the enforcement of neoliberal policies is the chief means of imposing income deflation on the working people of the periphery.”
― Prabhat Patnaik, The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time

“The old imperialism had the ‘advantage’ that the leading metropolitan power of the time, Britain, could keep its economy open to the goods of the then newly-industrializing countries, without getting indebted (on the contrary it became the largest capital exporter in the years before the First World War). For at least four decades up to 1928, India had the second largest export surplus in the world (second only to the USA); and this despite the imports of goods that caused domestic de-industrialization. But this export surplus was entirely appropriated by Britain not only to pay for its current account deficit with continental Europe, North America and regions of recent European settlement, but also to allow it to export capital to these regions.”
― Prabhat Patnaik, The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time

“Such an increase in supply price [i.e. raw materials from the Global South], however, creates serious problems for capitalism. These arise not because of a diminishing rate of profit or a slide towards a stationary state as Ricardo had feared. Such fears relate in any case to long-run prospects. Increasing supply price, in so far as it gets translated to an increase in price, undermines the value of money, and that is a very serious and immediate issue for capitalism. If wealth-holders believe that the value of money in terms of commodities is going to fall over time, then nobody will hold wealth in its money-form.”
― Prabhat Patnaik, The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time

“Economists have always been haunted by the spectre of ‘diminishing returns’. Ricardo had famously seen ‘diminishing returns’ in agriculture leading to a progressive fall in the rate of profit, a progressive shift of the terms of trade between manufacturing and agriculture in favour of the latter and the eventual denouement of a stationary state where further growth became impossible. Even Keynes in the aforementioned work saw ‘diminishing returns’ in food production as undermining the Eldorado even if the war had not done so. And yet none of these fears have come true. The terms of trade between manufacturing and agriculture have shown a secular tendency to shift against, rather than in favour of, the latter; and while the growth rate under capitalism has come down of late, this has nothing to do with any fall in the profit rate caused by ‘diminishing returns’. Likewise, the advanced capitalist world has no difficulty to this day in meeting its food requirements, belying the fears of Keynes. How then do we explain this contrast between fears and reality?”
― Prabhat Patnaik, The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time