BodhiCommons

R. Ramakumar (Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences) and V.  Sridhar (Associate Editor, Frontline) discusses the special package  announced by the Government of India to fight against the economic  downturn due to Covid-19 lockdown. They unpack the schemes devoted for  agriculture, industry, and other sectors in the wake of ongoing crisis,  exacerbated by the lockdown.

Professor Madhura Swaminathan talks about the situation of food security in India in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic has  struck India where millions of Indians are malnourished and the situation will be worsened with large scale unemployment. Professor Madhura Swaminathan explains why the state should step in with measures of universal public distribution system (PDS), doubling cereal transfers  to households, and expanded food basket under the PDS to tackle this crisis of mass hunger and malnutrition.

In this lecture, Prof R. Ramakumar talks about the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic and highlights the uniqueness of the crisis as it induces both demand and supply side shocks. The lecture shatters some misconceptions about the pandemic’s links to global agriculture and goes on to highlight the inadequacy of India’s economic package at a time when governments around the world are abandoning the orthodoxy of neoliberal economics.

In this lecture, Prof. T. Jayaraman talks about the history of science as well as how the benefits of scientific knowledge and practice often tend to get appropriated for private gain under capitalism. The lecture also includes a critique of mainstream environmentalism that tends to ignore the livelihoods question. Prof. Jayaraman highlights the significance of productivity and science to reasonably address the environmental question without losing sight of the impact on livelihoods.

In this lecture, Dr. Vijay Prashad looks into the history and talks about why the COVID-19 pandemic has paralysed the world. He explains the dramatic transformation of capitalism from the 1970s to the current time, its implications, and the tasks for the global Left in the way forward.

The fourth session of Marxian Political Economy lecture series has Prof. Venkatesh Athreya responding to the queries of the listeners, based on the previous three episodes. The queries and the discussion ranges from reading recommendations on Marxism to the role of mass movements, questions about stock markets, labour theory of value and the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production.

In the third episode of Marxian Political Economy lecture series, Prof. Venkatesh Athreya introduces the circuits of capital and the general production process under capitalism. As Marx notes, it is at the “abode of production” that bourgeois democratic ideals breaks down. This is explained in relation to surplus value that is fundamentally produced by the working class which is appropriated by the capitalist class that owns the means of production. The episode explains what constitutes surplus value and how converting labour power to a commodity alienates the worker from the process of labour as well as the product of labour.

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In the second lecture of Marxian Political Economy, Prof. Venktesh Athreya examines Karl Marx’s analysis of the commodity and how the value of a commodity is determined in a capitalist society. A clear distinction is made between how Marx’s theory which highlighted the social relations involved in commodity production was distinct from bourgeois conceptualisation. These relations between people are mystified under capitalism as relations between things – which Marx referred to as commodity fetishism. Marxian political economy, therefore, becomes a scientific framework, for understanding society not just at its surface level of appearances, but also its underlying reality that determines these appearances and the contradictions that arise between essence and manifestation.

In the first lecture, Prof. Venktesh Athreya talks about Marx's approach to the  study of society, which starts with the society as a whole. According to  Marx, man's fundamental activity is production, which does not exist in  isolation, but is essentially social production. As historical  development occurs, production relations change to keep up with change,  leading to contradictions with the existing production forces. The  Marxist approach thus emphasises that every society is transitory and  focuses on the use of historically specific analytical categories in the  study of societies. Reading material for this lecture can be downloaded from https://drive.google.com/open?id=12_P4w2_dYfAC2Yv7jCh_KqS19okzDsz2