Bøger af Prabhat Patnaik

Liberalism holds that individual freedom can be realized under capitalism. "Classical liberalism" tends to focus on excessive state interference as the primary threat to freedom. More recent theorists, however, recognize that capitalism, left to itself, would be characterized by mass social ills and argue that state intervention is necessary to guarantee individual freedom. This book is a Marxist critique of liberalism. Prabhat Patnaik demonstrates that liberalism and Marxism provide vastly differing accounts of individual freedom and the forces that restrict it. In the Marxist view, people, contrary to appearances, lack real agency under capitalism. Competition coerces individuals to act according to the impersonal logic of capitalism, making them mere instruments of the system. In this way, capitalism creates universal alienation, and true individual freedom is possible only through overcoming it. Patnaik argues that socialism can secure individual agency in both economic and political spheres, though actually existing socialism has failed in this respect. He also considers what a socialist society should look like: not a planned economy but a highly decentralized system in which citizens are directly involved in taking decisions affecting their lives and enjoy fundamental economic rights as well as political ones. Readable yet rigorous, Beyond Liberalism brings together political philosophy and political economy to offer a renewed vision of socialism.

The papers in this volume are informed by a perception that can be summarized as follows. A capitalist economy is a self-driven or 'spontaneous' system. State intervention in its functioning, driven by political compulsions, tends to make it dysfunctional. This necessitates either further interventions, leading to a transcendence of the system itself, or a progressive slide-back to the pre-intervention state. To say this is not to suggest that capitalism does not need the state. It does, not only for the maintenance of capitalist property relations and for providing it with the external, precapitalist surroundings that are necessary for its functioning; but also for accelerating, through its intervention, its immanent tendencies. But state intervention that is contrary to its immanent tendencies makes capitalism dysfunctional, setting up a dialectics either of subversion of or subservience to the logic of capital. It follows that all the shibboleths of capitalism, namely freedom, democracy and individual subjectivity, are actually unachievable under capitalism. They can be realized only if the spontaneity of the economic terrain is broken through the coming into being of socialism, where the nature of property relations is such that people can shape their economic lives through collective political intervention. The case for socialism arises precisely because capitalism is not a malleable but a spontaneous system.

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