Mainstream Weekly

India's Budget 2026-2027 overlooks poor & jobless, instead has sops for private sector | Prabhat Patnaik

Prabhat Patnaik — 2026-02-07T05:10:16Z

(via: India Press Agency, February 6, 2026) Since even the highest bourgeois oracle, the IMF, has cast doubts on the veracity of India

- 2026

Tribute to Professor Aijaz Ahmad | Prabhat Patnaik

Prabhat Patnaik — 2022-03-11T14:27:35Z

(The below tribute by Prabhat Patnaik was received by us via multiple sources including WhatsApp groups and via public listserves on the evening on March 10, but there was no publication source attributed. Just prior to publication we have discovered that the tribute has been published by The Hindu. We are proceeding to publish this tribute in public interest and for non-commercial use)
Professor Aijaz Ahmad who passed away on March 9, 2022, was a truly outstanding Marxist thinker of our (…)

- 2022

2022-23 Budget Whose Silences on Immediate Issues Are Ominous | Prabhat Patnaik

Prabhat Patnaik — 2022-02-04T18:31:37Z

February 4, 2022
There Is No Recognition Of Hard Times And Distress In The Proposals
No budget in recent memory has-been presented at a time when the economy is in such dire straits: unemployment is so bad that there are job riots in Bihar and UP; wealth and income inequalities are among the worst in the world; millions more have been pushed into poverty because of the pandemic and the lockdown; and inflation is accelerating even in the midst of massive unemployment. There is an urgent (…)

- 2022

A Clarification

Prabhat Patnaik — 2013-07-07T15:23:20Z

COMMUNICATION
I have become aware, very belatedly alas, of a piece by Comrade Sailendra Nath Ghosh (Mainstream, April 16, 2011), which takes me to task for an article of mine “Why the Left Matters” (Mainstream, March 26, 2011). The only reason I can adduce for not reading Comrade Ghosh's article when it was published is that I was myself located at the time in Thiruvananthapuram, working for the State Planning Board of the LDF Government in Kerala, and had at best sporadic access to (…)

- 2013

Bolsheviks and Death Penalty

Prabhat Patnaik — 2013-04-12T19:01:02Z

COMMUNICATION
This is with reference to Paresh Chattopadhyay's (PC's) response in the March 16 issue of Mainstream to my article “Leninism and Class Consciousness” (originally published in People's Democracy, January 13, 2013). PC is entitled to his views on Lenin and Leninism, but at the end of his note he accuses me of speaking an untruth (bold in original) in an earlier article in The Telegraph, December 12, 2012, where I had said that the Bolsheviks had abolished the death penalty (…)

- 2013

Leninism and Class Consciousness

Prabhat Patnaik — 2013-03-20T21:01:52Z

[Prabhat Patnaik's contention in this article (published in People's Democracy) has been sought to be contested in the following piece. We are carrying both for the benefit of our readers; we are reproducing Patnaik's article with due acknowledgement.]
A basic proposition of Leninism is that theoretical understanding that leads to the formation of class consciousness comes to the proletariat from “outside”; the proletariat does not spontaneously achieve revolutionary class consciousness. (…)

- 2013

Why the Left Matters

Prabhat Patnaik — 2011-03-28T19:07:37Z

The following article, by one of the CPI-M's intellectual pillars, appeared in The Indian Express (March 17, 2011). We are reproducing it with due acknowledgement alongwith a reply by a noted Left-wing journalist and writer who has sent it for publication in Mainstream.
India has witnessed a veritable social transfor-mation in the 20th century. A society characterised for millennia by institutionalised inequality in its most grotesque forms, like “untouchability” and “unseeability”, has (…)

- 2011

EMS on Planning

Prabhat Patnaik — 2009-06-22T17:03:32Z

Marxism, as is well-known, does not see ‘theory' and ‘praxis' as two separate entities. The journey from the abstract to the concrete, from ‘theory' to ‘praxis' is as much a theoretical effort as an effort of praxis. E.M.S. Namboodiripad's theoretical greatness therefore lay in the fact that he developed this theory-praxis totality in the context of rthe reality of the Indian society. And one very significant feature of this reality that he had to grapple with was that India was a planned (…)

- June 2009