Our next meeting will be on Wednesday February 29, 2012 at 4:00pm, Room 5109.

We will meet with Prabhat Patnaik to discuss economic recession and the world food crisis. All are welcome to attend. For a copy of the pre-circulated paper, “The Emerging Context for Social Science Practice,” please email nagarwal@gc.cuny.edu.

Prabhat Patnaik challenges the notion that fast-growing economies of India and China will escape the recession politics and austerity measures of the current crisis. He describes how the structural contradictions of capitalist accumulation are being displaced onto agricultural production in the global South. Framing his analysis around broad themes of the transformation of state institutions, capital controls, and class relations in India, Patnaik suggests that the immediate crises facing the world economy today are both global recession and a world food crisis.

Prabhat Patnaik is a renowned Marxist economist and political writer, vice-chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board, and member of a four-person UN task force on the 2008 financial crisis. He taught economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for over thirty years.

Note: Prof. Patnaik will be giving a separate public lecture following this session at 6:30pm.