Capital and Imperialism Quotes

“Protectionism, such as what U.S. president Donald Trump was attempting, amounts in effect under these circumstances (that is, in the absence of any significant expansion of state expenditure financed either by a fiscal deficit or by taxes on capitalists) to an export of unemployment to other countries. It can work only if the other countries do not retaliate.

If they do, then it gives rise to a competitive “beggar-thy-neighbor” policy that only worsens the crisis by creating further uncertainties and reducing investments further.”
― Utsa Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present

“Imperialism is a relationship between capitalism and its setting, central to which is an imposition of a regime upon the setting that entails income deflation as a means of preventing the threat of increasing supply price. No matter what happens to the bourgeoisies of the South or the workers of the North, this relationship, which existed in the colonial era, persists to this day and the system cannot do without it.”
― Utsa Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present