PRAGOTI

In the general elections 2009, BJP had a distinct advantage in Jharkhand. The party won 8 out of total 14 Lok Sabha seats and planned to win a clear majority in the state assembly elections. The assembly results, however, came out to be a rude and shocking retreat for the BJP that too when circumstances absolutely favoured it. And for insiders, this turnaround is neither unexpected nor undesired.

The Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2009 has been awarded to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. Their work separately on economic governance and rationale for property right structures is a more sophisticated rationale for capitalism and by extension its reigning-ideology-now-in-crisis - neoliberalism. The works of Coase, North and Williamson are the three pillars on which the ‘sophistication’ of ‘new institutional economics’ that informed the ‘good governance’ agenda of post-Washington neoliberal consensus was built upon. So it is not surprising that the Nobel memorial prize goes to the more 'sophisticated' theorists at a time when the 'crude' version faces a severe crisis of legitimacy.

While attention is focussed on the imperialist rigging of the Nobel 'Peace' Prize, Professor Jayati Ghosh argues in the Guardian that the Nobel prize for Economics may need its own bail out. Facing a similar crisis of legitimacy, the prize needs to prove it is much more than an award for stockmarket speculators.

The full article can be read here

"The entire period of the agrarian crisis has been marked by an enormous wave of peasant suicides rather than peasant struggles. Of course, protest movements are there, but they no longer acquire, or even threaten to acquire, the dimensions that such movements used to acquire in the past. The question that obviously arises is: why this difference?" asks eminent Marxist, Professor Prabhat Patnaik, who then goes on to answer the question