Finance Versus the People in the Era of the Pandemic
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- Published on Monday, 20 April 2020 09:40
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2065 ... April 20, 2020
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Finance Versus the People in the Era of the Pandemic
Prabhat Patnaik
The current pandemic has brought to the fore, and with exceptional clarity, the fundamental contradiction underlying contemporary globalization, namely, the contradiction between the interests of finance and those of the people. Indeed this contradiction, which characterizes the era of globalization as a whole, has now come to a head.
It is becoming clearly visible in country after country. Take the case of India. Millions have been suddenly rendered jobless, and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers trekking home from far away places, where they had been employed but no longer are, find themselves quarantined with little or no money. The paramount need of the hour is for the government to provide succor to these working people; and the government can do so immediately by enlarging the fiscal deficit.
But it refrains from doing so because a large fiscal deficit is not to the liking of globally mobile finance capital. The finance minister comes up therefore with a package of measures that... is paltry beyond belief, where the total expenditure promised as help to the distressed households, ignoring re-packaged measures, comes to a mere Rs 92,000 crores (consisting of Rs 34,000 crore of cash transfers, Rs 45,000 crore of transfers through the public distribution system, and Rs 13,000 crore of transfers in the form of gas cylinders). This comes to about 0.5 per cent of the country’s GDP, which is a trivial sum in the context of what is generally considered the worst tragedy to hit the country after independence!