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Reply to Utsa Patnaik: If the Cap Fits …

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Tom Brass
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In her comments on my article, Utsa Patnaik makes a number of interrelated claims. First, that I unjustifiably characterize the “semifėdal” thesis as revisionist. Second, that my view about the existence of a link between capitalism and unfree labour is commonplace. And third, that I fail to differentiate unfreedom in terms of its implications for and effects on metropolitan capitalist countries on the one hand and developing ex-colonial countries on the other. According to her, this difference arises from a situation in which surpluses generated by Indian agriculture during the colonial era were exported to finance industrialization in metropolitan contexts, resulting in forced commercialization by landlord, trader and usurer; in short, a process which failed to eliminate semi-feudal unfree agrarian relations and consequently to develop capitalism in colonial countries, and thus promoted in these contexts not proletarianization but pauperization.

Type
Suggestions and Debates
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 1995 , pp. 93 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1995

References

1 Brass, Tom, “Some Observations on Unfree Labour, Capitalist Restructuring, and Deproletarianization”, International Review of Social History, 39 (1994), pp. 255–275CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For her claim that agrarian change in India corresponded to pauperization and not Proletarianization, see Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 80, 90. Despite frequent changes of mind on details and theory, this position has been expounded by Patnaik in a number of previous texts. See, for example, her various contributions to the mode of production debate, contained in Rudra, A. et al. , Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India (Lahore, 1978)Google Scholar and Patnaik, U. (ed.), Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The “Mode of Production” Debate in India (Bombay, 1990)Google Scholar, and also “The Agrarian Question and Development of Capitalism in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, 21 (1986), pp. 781–793.

3 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 79–80.

4 The complete text is as follows: “it will be necessary to confront two interrelated revisionist interpretations of unfree production relations: on the one hand neo-classical economic theory, and on the other the ‘culturalist’ arguments derived from moral economy, survival strategies and resistance theory, (re-) interpretations which involve either a denial or a dilution of unfree labour. Faced with the coexistence of unfreedom and capitalist production, yet unable to theorize the connection between them, one variant of Marxism (the semi-feudal thesis) is in some senses a mirror image of revisionism. The latter accepts the presence of capitalism, and accordingly redefines unfree relations of production as a form of free wage labour; the former, by contrast, accepts the presence of unfreedom, but redefines the mode of production itself as feudal or semi-feudal.” Brass, “Some Observations”, p. 255. The portion in italics is missing from the version quoted by Patnaik.

5 For my views on the “semi-feudal” thesis, see Brass, “Some Observations”, pp. 268–271. There is a rather obvious clue in the organization of the text itself as to why I do not regard the “semi-feudal” thesis as revisionist. Hence the “semi-feudal” thesis is included in a section all of its own, thereby separating it both physically and theoretically from the arguments considered revisionist (pp. 260–268). Perhaps the difficulty is simply one of mis-reading: the term “variant”, which Patnaik seems to think applies to a link with revisionism (semi-feudalism = variant of revisionism), in the relevant section of my text actually applies to a link with Marxism (semi-feudalism = variant of Marxism). Brass, “Some Observations”, p. 269.

6 Here I follow the exchange as set out in Rudra et al., Studies, the earlier of the two collections about the “mode of production” debate in India. The latter volume presents a fuller and more accurate version of the debate between Utsa Patnaik and her critics, Paresh Chattopadhyay and N. Ram. Utsa Patnaik, “Capitalist Development in Agriculture – A Note”, pp. 53–77, “Development of Capitalism in Agriculture”, pp. 152–172, and “On the Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture – A Reply”, pp. 200–225; N. Ram, “Development of Capitalism in Agriculture”, pp. 140–150; Paresh Chattopadhyay, “On the Question of the Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture – A Preliminary Note”, pp. 174–198, and “Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture – An ‘AntiKritik’”, pp. 227–257. However, in the later version, edited by Patnaik herself, not only have these exchanges been reduced from 109 pages (chapters 8–12) to a mere 32 pages (chapters 6–8), in the process diluting the full force of the critique made of her by Chattopadhyay, but the contribution by Ram has been replaced with yet another piece by Patnaik herself (chapter 5), aimed at Rudra. Utsa Patnaik, “Capitalist Development in Agriculture - Further Comment”, in Patnaik, Agrarian Relations, pp. 62–71. In a similar vein, not only are the later sections of a text in the Rudra collection by Banaji containing criticisms of Patnaik absent from the text reproduced in the version edited by her, but his repudiation of an earlier critique (and hence an endorsement) of Chattopadhyay's argument about proletarianization is also missing; the Patnaik version, however, does contain the earlier text in which Banaji is critical of Chattopadhyay. Cf. Jairus Banaji, “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century”, in Rudra et al., Studies, pp. 407–412, 418–419, note 24; and Jairus Banaji, “For a Theory of Colonial Modes of Production”, and “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century”, in U. Patnaik, Agrarian Relations, pp. 119–131, 234–250.

7 See my review of Patnaik, Utsa and Dingwaney, Manjari (eds), Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India (Madras, 1985)Google Scholar, in the Journal of Peasant Studies, 14 (1986), PP. 120–126. Even Patnaik herself has admitted to being confused, so on this point atleast we can agree. Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, p. 158.

8 On this point, see Frank, Andre Gunder, “On ‘Feudal’ Modes, Models and Methods of Escaping Capitalist Reality”, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 (1973), pp. 36–37Google Scholar. As Frank rightly discerned, an important political consequence of reinvestment having to occur at the level of the surplus-generating farm for capitalism to exist is that socialism itself is postponed until the Greek Kalends. Much the same point is made by Chattopadhyay, “‘Anti-Kritik’”, pp. 237–238.

9 Banaji, Jairus, “The Farmers' Movements: A Critique of Conservative Rural Coalitions”, in Brass, Tom (ed.), New Farmers' Movements in India (London, 1995), pp. 228–245Google Scholar. Another proponent of the “semi-feudal” thesis who ignores the implication of off-farm investment for his argument is Prasad, Pradhan H., Lopsided Growth: Political Economy of Indian Development (Bombay, 1989)Google Scholar.

10 Late in 1991, General Motors announced the closure of twenty-one of its car manufacturing plants across the US, with an expected loss in the latter context of 74,000 jobs. Within a matter of days, General Motors announced that it was taking a 70 per cent share in Poland's state-owned car industry, in a deal worth US$400 million. Late in 1992, Opel (the German subsidiary of General Motors) opened its new assembly plant on a greenfteld site at Eisenach in what used to be East Germany. The reason for relocating from the US to Eastern Europe in this way is simply put: higher unemployment, lower wage rates and a longer working day. In short, what had occurred in this case was a massive process of capitalist restructuring (about which see more below), guided by considerations of profitability.

11 Although Patnaik is not guilty of revisionism in the sense that it seeks to dilute/deny unfreedom, she nevertheless comes close to this when observing that: “there were many who regretted the passing of the old lack of freedom, when they saw what the new freedom could mean in suffering, within the first capitalistically developing countries themselves. In a feudal system as in all pre-capitalist systems generally, those at the top of the traditional hierarchy who lived by exploiting those at the bottom, also had a traditional obligation to protect and maintain the viability of their way of life: and all without exception within such a system subscribed to the world-view that every creature however mean had his or her allotted place, and a customary right to continue to occupy that place”. Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 81. It is anyway necessary to note that this highly idealized – not to say sentimental – account of the demise of feudalism sounds rather odd coming from someone who claims to be a Marxist.

12 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 78.

13 Significantly, Patnaik makes no reference to the continuing debate about the nature of the similarities and the differences between European and non-European variants of feudalism. Banaji, Jairus, “The Peasantry in the Feudal Mode of Production: Towards an Economic Model”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 3 (1976), pp. 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Byres, T.J., (ed.), Feudalism and Non-European Societies (London, 1985)Google Scholar; and Berktay, Halil and Faroqhi, Suraiya (eds), New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History (London, 1991)Google Scholar. For the claim that European feudalism declined in the fourteenth century, and the development of European capitalism was accompanied by the emergence of free labour, urbanization and large-scale manufacturing, see Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 80, and “Development of Capitalism”, p. 98. In contrast to the view advanced here by Patnaik, one recent text puts the disintegration of feudalism much later. Albritton, Robert, “Did Agrarian Capitalism Exist?”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 20 (1993), pp. 419–441CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Patnaik, “A Note”, pp. 57, 58. In the latter text she refers to the existence of a “predominantly free class of wage-labourers [ … ] a large force of free wage-labourers”; in her subsequent contribution to the mode of production debate, she observes that “one of the earliest sources of proletarianization was undoubtedly displacement of craftsmen by imported manufactures [ … ] [r] igid enforcement of high revenue assessments in ryotwari areas and the sharp fluctuations in prices to which the peasant became increasingly vulnerable, led to the growing indebtedness of the poorer mass of the peasantry and the alienation of land from them by their creditors [ … ] ”. Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 92–93. The arbitrary and tenuous nature of her theoretical approach to the issue of the presence/absence of pauperization/proletarianization, together with a belief that even in the mid–1970s a rural proletariat was still largely absent, is evident from Patnaik's observation that: “full-time labourers would normally constitute an agricultural proletariat. However, given the Indian experience of the break-up of petty production in the colonial period without a simultaneous or sufficient growth of capitalist production in agriculture (other than the plantations, which remained a tiny enclave), it seemed more realistic to regard the labourers as being the outcome of a process of pauperization, rather than proletarianization. In recent years, in specific areas sections of the landless labourers are perhaps being converted into genuine proletarian sections employed in capitalist production, but the extent and importance of this remains to be explained” (emphasis added). Utsa Patnaik, “Class Differentiation within the Peasantry”, in Rudra et al., Studies, p. 307.

15 For her view that the existence of a proletariat depends on urbanization and the expansion of manufacturing, see Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 82–83. For an earlier claim along the same lines, see Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, p. 99. Elsewhere she denies that this is the case, observing that “[i]t is quite true [ … ] that the development of capitalist manufacturing is associated with urban development, but it would be incorrect to identify capitalist production with urban production” (emphasis added). Patnaik, Utsa, “Classical Theory of Rent and its Application to India: Some Preliminary Propositions, with Some Thoughts on Sharecropping”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 10 (1983), p. 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See, for example, Patnaik, “A Note”, p. 58, and “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 127–128. Her confusion about this issue is evident from the observation that: “[t]he big landowner does not employ free wage labour for profit; he maximises the returns from destitute labour tied to agriculture and forced to accept bare subsistence wages”. Ibid., p. 59 (for a similar claim, see Patnaik, “Capitalist Development”, pp. 97, 110; and “Development of Capitalist Production”, p. 157). Workers whom she herself refers to as “tied'/”forced” are nevertheless characterized by her as “free”.

17 Ram, “Development of Capitalism”, p. 143; Chattopadhyay, “On the Question”, p. 192. This is the definition used not only by me in my analyses of unfree labour but also by other proponents of the “semi-feudal” thesis. Cf. Prasad, Lopsided Growth, p. 96.

18 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 77.

19 Hence the observation that moneylending, which has “not been completely ousted by productive investment”, corresponds to unproductive investment. Patnaik, “A Note”, p.74. On this point see also Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 99–100, 118. Unlike Patnaik, for whom moneylending and debt bondage are characteristics of pre-capitalist agriculture, Lenin by contrast regarded them as economic activity undertaken by rural and urban capitalists, the object of which was to enable members of the peasant bourgeoisie and informal sector employers to compete more efficiently by reducing wage costs. Lenin, “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 78–79, 444–445.

20 In attributing this argument to Eric Williams, Patnaik makes a common mistake. As Williams himself acknowledged, this view was in fact elaborated some six years earlier by C.L.R. James. On this point, see Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1964), p. 268Google Scholar, and James, C.L.R., Vie Black Jacobins (London, 1938), pp. 38–41Google Scholar. For the continuing debate about the influence of Eric Williams' work, see Solow, Barbara L. and Engerman, S.L. (eds), British Capitalism A. Caribbean Slavery: Tlie Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

21 This dynamic entails not just the monetization of bondáge – a cange Patnaik admits, yet fails adequately t o explain – but (perhaps of greater importance) a precise relocation of unfreedom in terms of the agrarian labour process. In the case of Green Revolution states such as Punjab and Haryana, such a transformation entails, amongst other things, the bonding of casual labour as well as attached workers. This involves a shift in the immobilizing function of debt from a continuous and inter-generational basis t o a more period- and context-specific basis; not only is this arrangement more profitable from the view of capital (since it requires n o payment for time not spent o n productive activity), but its operationalization is as a result confined to the months of peak demand in the agricultural cycle, when sellers of labour-power would otherwise command high prices for their commodity. Brass, Tom, ”Class Struggle and the Deproletarianization of Agricultural Labour in Haryana (India)”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 18 (1990), pp. 36–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For the claim about the non-existence of pre-capitalist landless labour, see Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 81. For a contrary view, that historically “the classic process of the dispossession of small peasants and their conversion to labourers did not constitute the only source – although it was the main one – of the modern agricultural labour force” (emphasis added), and that land and labour markets operated under colonialism, see Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 90, 99. He r confusion over this issue is evident from her reply t o the critique by Chattopadhyay, where she complains: “One really fails to see what [he] is driving at [ … ] or how the ‘industrial reserve army’ is at all relevant to my argument [ … ] How is Marx's concept of the ‘industrial reserve army’ within a capitalist mode of production at all relevant to my argument about a pauperised Indian peasantry forced to subsist on the land as wage-workers?”. Patnaik, “On the Mode”, p. 215.

23 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 83–86. Equally curious is the claim by Patnaik that political “stability” has been and is an important effect of this privileging by capital of workers' conditions in the metropolitan contexts, the implication being that in this regard a contrast can be drawn between politically stable metropolitan contexts and a politically unstable Third World. Not only does such a view ignore the history of bloody repression and class struggles in European and North American history, the occurrence and impact in these contexts of the periodic crises of capital (during the 1930s and the 1980s), the rise of the political right and the strong state (during the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1980s), but it seems to be blind to the fact that current examples of political instability in the Third World which take the form of regional/national/religious conflict find an almost exact European parallel in Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain.

24 The many examples of the resort by capital to unfree production relations in metropolitan contexts include the United States (peonage in the American South, migrant farm workers from Mexico and Central America, H-2 contract labour from Jamaica employed in the Florida sugarcane industry, workfare schemes), Japan (female textile workers in the Meiji era), the UK (sweatshop industries, camps for the unemployed during the 1930s), Germany (slave labour in the concentration camps, domestic and foreign workers under the Nazi regime) and South Africa (the apartheid system). For these and other examples, see Tom Brass, “Some Observations”, pp. 269–274, notes 33, 34, 35, 38; and also “Slavery Now: Unfree Labour and Modern Capitalism”, Slavery & Abolition, 9 (1988), pp. 183–197. Her claim about the “unexceptionable” nature of the capitalism/ unfreedom link notwithstanding, such cases of unfree labour in what Patnaik refers to as “pure” capitalism cast doubt on the substance of her argument: either Nazi Germany was an example of “pure” capitalism, in which case her claim about the incompatibility between the latter and unfree labour does not hold, or it is necessary to recategorize fascism as a form of “semi-feudalism”. On this, Mandel – a source that Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 77, cites with approval – has commented: “[E]ven under conditions where the working class is completely atomized [ … ] the laws of the market which determine short-term fluctuations in the price of the commodity labour-power do not disappear. As soon as the industrial reserve army contracted in the Third Reich, workers were able to try, by means of rapid job mobility – for instance into the spheres of heavy industry and armaments which paid higher wage-rates and over-time – to achieve at least a modest improvement in their wages, even without trade union action. Only a violent intervention by the Nazi state to sustain the rate of surplus-value and the rate of profit, in the form of the legal prohibition of job changes, and the compulsory tying of workers to their job, was able to prevent the working class from utilizing more propitious conditions on the labour market. This abolition of freedom of movement of the German proletariat was one of the most striking demonstrations of the capitalist class nature of the Nationalist Socialist State” (original emphasis). Mandel, Ernest, “Labour and the State in Nazi Germany”, in Nichols, T. (ed.), Capital and Labour: Studies in the Capitalist Labour Process (London, 1980), p. 105Google Scholar.

25 Lenin himself warned against essentializing the peasantry, which h e condemned as the province of neo-populism. For him, therefore, the rural proletariat is composed of “the class of allotment-holding wage-workers”, which refers to “the poor peasants, including those that are completely landless; but the most typical representative of the Russian rural proletariat is the allotment-holding farm labourer [ … ] Insignificant farming o n a patch of land, with the farm in a state of utter ruin (particularly evidenced by the leasing out of land), inability to exist without the sale of labour-power ( = ‘industries’ of the indigent peasants), and extremely low standard of living (probably lower than that of a worker without an allotment) – such are the distinguishing features of this type [ … ] It should b e added that our literature frequently contains too stereotyped an understanding of the theoretical proposition that capitalism requires the free, landless worker. This proposition is quite correct as indicating the main trend, but capitalism penetrates into agriculture particularly slowly and in extremely varied forms. Th e allotment of land to the rural worker is very often to the interests of the rural employers themselves, and that is why the allotment-holding rural worker is a type t o b e found in all capitalist countries[ … ] Each of these bears traces of a specific agrarian system, of a specific history of agrarian relations – but this does not prevent the economist from classing them all as one type of agricultural proletarian. Th e juridical right to his plot of land is absolutely immaterial to such a classification. Whether the land is his full property (as a small-holding peasant) or whether h e is only allowed the use of it by the landlord [ … ] or, finally, whether h e possesses it as a member of a Great-Russian peasant community – makes n o difference at all. In assigning the indigent peasants to the rural proletariat w e are saying nothing new. This term has already been used repeatedly by many writers, and only the Narodnik economists persist in speaking of the peasantry in general, as of something anti-capitalist, and close their eyes t o the fact that the mass of the ‘peasantry’ have already taken a quite definite place in the general system of capitalist production, namely as agricultural and industrial wage-workers.” Lenin, V.I., “The Development of Capitalism in Russia”, Collected Works, 3 (1964), pp. 177–179Google Scholar.

26 Ironically, Patnaik herself appears t o accept that poor peasants are in reality n o more than “peasants” when she observes: “The terms of tenancy in many cases made it difficult to distinguish between tenant and labourers; for a tenant might provide livestock and labour while landlord provided seed and water; while sometimes the tenant's provision of livestock and labour was itself dependent upon obtaining a loan from the landlord or other sources. In these circumstances the small share of output remaining to the tenant could b e regarded as similar t o wages, rather than his income from cultivation after payment of rent [ … ] the small peasant [ … ] is often forced to hire himself out as a labourer.” Patnaik, “Capitalist Development”, pp. 95–96.

27 On the latter point, see Ghosh, Jayatt, “Differential and Absolute Land Rent”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 13 (1985), p. 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Furthermore, such a position runs the danger of conveying the impression that, were rents t o b e reduced or abolished, these subjects would as a result become the efficient peasant family farmers that neo-populists such as Michael Lipton and Paul Richards claim they could be.

28 Now that the basic theoretical difficulty in continuing to categorize as “peasants” those who are nearly or actually landless must finally be dawning even o n Patnaik, the “semi-feudal feature” in her argument has undergone an interesting and subtle shift of emphasis, away from the economic content and towards the ideological form of agrarian relations. Accordingly, the concept “semi-feudalism” no longer applies simply to production relations but rather to “caste-based relations of domination”. Patnaik, “The Agrarian Question”, Pp. 786, 791.

29 Hence the odd assertion by Patnaik (see the text cited in note 16 above) that, because a “dominant landlord” takes advantage of worker destitution, he consequently neither seeks to make a profit nor is he a capitalist! Patnaik, “ A Note”, p. 74, and “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 99–100. This curious piece of “theory” demonstrates nothing other than her ignorance of the role of the industrial reserve army of labour in depressing wages and/or conditions by diminishing or eliminating the bargaining power of workers vis-á-vis capitalists. While Patnaik accepts that “a tractable labour supply” is the object of moneylending and debt bondage, therefore, she nevertheless persists in regarding the latter as pre-capitalist, despite the fact that agrarian capitalists are themselves also interested both in “a tractable labour supply” and in the relational forms which give rise to this.

30 See, for example, Patnaik, “Capitalist Development”, pp. 98, 99–100. By contrast, recent evidence from, for example, Haryana does indeed suggest that labour tying and not interest is the main object of moneylending by capitalist landowners. Based on interviews during 1988 with 110 farmers and 75 labourers in three villages in Karnal district, Jodhaka's D.Phil, thesis on the causes and effects of worker indebtedness demonstrates that 86 per cent of farmers who engaged in moneylending openly admitted that its object was to tie labour-power on a seasonal or permanent basis. Jodhaka, S.S., Development and Debt – A Sociological Study of Changing Credit Relations in Haryana Agriculture (Chandigarh, 1990), pp. 258–259Google Scholar, Table 5.11. The use by capitalist land-holders of moneylending explicitly to obtain, secure and cheapen the labour-power of agricultural workers also confirms that investment in the form of debt bondage is in an economic sense – and from the viewpoint of capital accumulation – productive and not unproductive. Patnaik herself implicitly concedes the latter when she observes elsewhere that: “On all except two holdings [male farm servants] were in some form of debt bondage [ … ] On large-scale farms with increasing mechanisation the wage bill is a lower proportion of total costs while productivity is higher than on small-scale holdings. Far from higher productivity labour receiving higher wages, if anything large-scale farms are often able to hire labour on more advantageous terms to themselves than are small-scale holdings.” Patnaik, “A Note”, p. 75. Precisely! This is exactly the reason why agrarian capitalists not only use bonded labour but also will not voluntarily change to employing free labour-power. Having informed us that Haryana is an area of capitalist production in general and peasant capitalism in particular, Patnaik unsurprisingly then changes her mind, and maintains that agriculture in this state is indeed “semi-feudal”. Cf. Patnaik, Utsa, “Some Methodological Problems of Analysing Changing Agrarian Structure under Conditions of Capitalist Development and Technical Change”, in Gupta, A.K. (ed.), Agrarian Structure and Peasant Revolt in India (New Delhi, 1986), pp. 41–42Google Scholar; and “Ascertaining the Economic Characteristics of Peasant-Classes-in-Themselves in Rural India: A Methodological and Empirical Exercise”, in Breman, J. and Mundle, S. (eds), Rural Transformation in Asia (Delhi, 1991), p. 419Google Scholar.

31 The theory about distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital is set out in the final section of Capital (“Results of the Immediate Process of Production”). Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1 (London, 1976), pp. 1019–1038Google Scholar. Patnaik is aware that the formal/real subsumption position, whereby the “analytical distinction between profit and rent was considered unimportant', is the antithesis of her own. Patnaik, Agrarian Relations and Accumulation, pp. 2–3. Among those who have applied the concept real/ formal subsumption of labour under capital to the analysis of agrarian relations in India are Jairus Banaji, Sudipto Mundle and Dipankar Gupta. Banaji, “Capitalist Domination”, pp. 351–428; Mundle, Sudipto, Backwardness and Bondage: Agrarian Relations in a South Bihar District (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 82ffGoogle Scholar.; Dipankar Gupta, “Formal and Real Subsumption of Labour under Capital – The Instance of Sharecropping”, in Gupta, Agrarian Structure, pp. 1–19.

32 The search b y Patnaik for th e holy grail o f “pure” capitalism in Indian agriculture Parallels a similar kind of mythological quest by neo-classical economics for evidence of Perfection in markets, prices, competition, and knowledge.

33 Chattopadhyay, “‘Anti-Kritik’” pp. 238ff., makes exactly this point, which Patnaik failed to answer.

34 For the “impure” structure of agrarian capitalism in these pre-revolutionary contexts, see among many others Robinson, G.T., Rural Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1932)Google Scholar; Tawney, R.H., Land and Labour in China (London, 1932), pp. 51–77Google Scholar, and Agrarian China (Shanghai, 1938); Buck, J.L., Chinese Farm Economy (Chicago, 1930)Google Scholar.

35 The characterization here by Patnaik of the Prussian path of agrarian transition as one in which unproductive landlords employ bonded labour – but not for profit – is in marked contrast to an earlier view, when she maintained that such landlords were “investing in land improvement, and producing for profit with hired labour”, and further that during the colonial era India was following neither the Prussian nor the American path of agrarian transformation. Cf. Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 90, and “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 101–102, 110, 113. Her initial characterization of the Prussian road suggests that landlords not only used free labour but also invested in the labour process –one of Patnaik's own criteria for capitalism – in order to generate profit.

36 The reformist politics to which this kind of argument gives rise were accurately described some thirty years ago by one Marxist in the following manner: “All three [left] parties at present assume that the state structure which has been elaborated by the Indian bourgeoisie is in fact and can work as a neutral institution which can be utilized for both good and evil. All of them assume that the basic task confronting socialists is to rectify the errors committed by the ruling class. According to them, to pursue this task they should [ … ] include in their programmes attempts at changing the personnel of the central and state governments, and demand association of non-government groups in framing national policies, and even the formation of a coalition National Government composed of members of different parties or composed of the best men in the country, irrespective of their party affiliations [ … ] These parties are thus engaged only in the task of counteracting ills arising out of the implementation of bourgeois policy, of healing wounds caused by the Indian bourgeois programmes. They are not interested in organizing movements to destroy the perennial source of these evils, the very structure which is being generated by the Indian bourgeoisie”. Desai, A.R., India's Path of Development: A Marxist Approach (Bombay, 1984), pp. 151–152Google Scholar.

37 The sample of 66 “relatively big landowners” interviewed by Patnaik in 1969 contained a category of eight “urban entrants” (or “gentlemen fanners”), referred t o by her as “pure” capitalists, or those “urban and monied people” from the bureaucracy, industry, or the professions, who had turned to cultivation because of its profitability. Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 109, 125–127, and “Development of Capitalist Production”, p. 167. What is of particular interest here is that, in her initial contribution to the mode of production debate, she also observed with regard to the 508 adult male farm servants in her 1969 sample that o n “all except two holdings they were in some form of debt bondage”, which suggests that unfree labour was indeed employed by at least some of those in her category of “urban entrants”. Patnaik, “ A Note”, p. 75. In terms of production relations, therefore, “pure” capitalists appeared to be no different from the “impure” capitalists in Indian agriculture who used “semi-feudal” agrarian relations. Having put in a brief appearance in her early contributions to the debate, however, this category of “urban entrants”/“pure capitalists” together with the implications for her argument of its production relations, vanished rather suddenly and mysteriously.

38 Frank, Andre Gunder, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

39 That it is not – nor has it ever been – the intention of any component of the Indian bourgeoisie to usher in a bourgeois democratic stage that would empower workers as workers has long been clear to many of those concerned with problems connected with an agrarian transformation in India, from Michal Kalecki in the 1950s to A.R. Desai in the 1960s. Kalecki, Cf. Michal, Essays on Developing Economies (Hassocks, 1976)Google Scholar; Desai, India's Path. On this issue Patnaik's views are predictably confused. Having conceded that “no third world bourgeoisie ever has or ever is going to carry out [ … ] the practical tasks of the classic radical bourgeois revolutions”, and by implication accepted the theory of permanent revolution, she then asserts that the two-paths approach is nevertheless still relevant, as a consequence of which the “semi-feudal characterization is appropriate”. Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 91–92. Astonishingly, and the antithetical nature of their politics notwithstanding, Patnaik manages to subscribe to both views simultaneously within the confines of a single text!

40 Not the least significant aspect of all this, and a salutary lesson for those who care to take note, is the subsequent trajectory of Frank's main critic, Ernesto Laclau, who is now to be found in the vanguard of the politico-ideological counter-revolution within the academy. Initially, and by implication, Laclau sided with those who argued against immediate revolution, on the grounds that capitalist relations of production had yet to develop in these Third World contexts, and it was therefore necessary to wait until they had. For him, like for so many others, the revolution is now not merely postponed but cancelled, along with class and class struggle. Instead, Laclau advocates a populist/postmodern form of mobilization based on what are termed “new social movements”, a plural-identity/non-class (or anti-class) form of empowerment within (and thus compatible with) capitalism – or precisely the kind of conservative politics to which Frank was opposed and against which he polemicized. Laclau, Ernesto, “New Social Movements and the Plurality of the Social”, in Slater, D. (ed.), New Social Movements and the State in Latin America (Amsterdam, 1985)Google Scholar; and New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London, 1990). In politico-ideological terms, the project of revisionism in the academy is now to eliminate the very concept (and hence the possibility) of revolution itself. Examples of attempts by conservative historiography at disinventing revolution include Clark, J.C.D., Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knight, Alan, The Mexican Revolution, vols 1 and 2 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; and Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution 1899–1917 (London, 1990)Google Scholar. The result of this approach is counter-revolution by an act of (re-)definition, which invites historical closure by asserting that the existing social order is “natural” – the central emplacement of conservative ideology. In the present conjuncture, this amounts to the proposition that bourgeois democracy is the best system one can hope for, and hence the objective of any and all political activity – such as it is – becomes nothing more than a “redemocratization” that is compatible with the survival of capitalism. The similarity between this project, the object of which is the end-of-(socialist)-revolutionary-politics, and Patnaik's own position, whereby postponement-of-socialist-revolutionary-politics in effect merges with (and thus becomes) the cancellation-of-socialist-revolutionary-politics, ought to worry her a great deal more than it seems to.

41 On this point, see Salvadori, Massimo, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880–1938 (London, 1979), pp. 48Google Scholarff.

42 Cf. Lenin, V.I., “A Draft Programme of Our Party”, Collected Works, 4 (Moscow, 1964), pp. 250–251Google Scholar; and “The Agrarian Programme of Russian Social Democracy”, Collected Works, 6 (Moscow, 1964), pp. 113–114.

43 As the cases of Peru from the mid–1970s onwards and of Cuba from 1980 onwards show, if private peasant property is permitted to survive, sooner or later it challenges and then displaces collective and/or cooperative property. Gonzales, A. and Torre, G. (eds), Las Parceladones de las Cooperativas Agrarias del Peru (Chiclayo, 1985)Google Scholar; Deere, Carmen Diana and Meurs, Mike, “Markets, Markets Everywhere? Understanding the Cuban Anomaly”, World Development, 20 (1992), pp. 825–839CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Deere, Carmen Diana, Pérez, Niurka and Gonzales, Ernel, “The View from Below: Cuban Agriculture in the 'Special Period in Peacetime'”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 21 (1994), pp. 194–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For one of many examples of land reform beneficiaries turning on their erstwhile working-class allies, see Krishnaji, N., “Agrarian Relations and the Left Movement in Kerala: A Note on Recent Trends”, in Desai, A.R. (ed.), Agrarian Struggles in India after Independence (Delhi, 1986), pp. 384–402Google Scholar.

44 Luxemburg, Rosa, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Michigan, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Trotsky, L.D., The Permanent Revolution [1928] and Results and Prospects [1906] (London, 1962), p. 154Google Scholar. See also Trotsky, L.D., “The Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution”, Writings, 1938–39 (New York, 1969), pp. 115–116Google Scholar. For a discussion of the importance and political significance of the concept “permanent revolution” in the theory of Trotsky, see Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (London, 1954), pp. 145Google Scholarff.; and Molyneux, John, Leon Trotsky's Theory of Revolution (Brighton, 1981), pp. 17Google Scholarff. On the question of the necessity for the proletariat to effect “deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property”, Trotsky notes: “The programme of the equal distribution of the land thus presupposes the expropriation of all land, not only privately-owned land in general, or privately-owned peasant land, but even communal 'and. If we bear in mi'id that this expropriation would have to be one of the first acts of the new regime, while commodity-capitalist relations were still completely dominant, then we shall see that the first ‘victims’ of this expropriation would be (or rather, would feel themselves to be) the peasantry. If we bear in mind that the peasant, during several decades, has paid the redemption money which should have converted the allotted land into his own private property; if we bear in mind that some of the more well-to-do of the peasants have acquired – undoubtedly by making considerable sacrifices, borne by a still-existing generation – large tracts of land as private property, then it will be easily imagined what a tremendous resistance would be aroused by the attempt to convert communal and small-scale privately-owned lands into state property. If it acted in such a fashion the new regime would begin by arousing a tremendous opposition against itself among the peasantry”. Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, p. 235.

46 This is in essence the theory of permanent revolution: “that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly [ … ] to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day[ … ] an uninterrupted [ … ] revolution passing over directly from the bourgeois stage into the socialist [one]”. Trotsky, ibid., pp. 8, 12. Towards the end of her commentary, Patnaik appears to suggest that the real reason for not pursuing socialism is quite simply that it is too dangerous. Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 92. Such an “argument” could be advanced for abandoning all attempts to introduce socialism, and licenses the kind of reformist political strategy criticized by Gramsci in 1917: “To wait until one has grown to half the voters plus one is the programme of cowardly souls who wait for socialism by a royal decree countersigned by two ministers” (quoted in Pozzolini, Alberto, Antonio Gramsci (London, 1970), p. 58.)Google Scholar.

47 Trotsky, ibid., pp. 9,22. Writing in 1930, Trotsky observed: “If we take Britain and India as polarised varieties of the capitalist type, then we are obliged to say that the internationalism of the British and Indian proletariats does not at all rest on an identity of conditions, tasks and methods, but on their indivisible interdependence. Successes for the liberation movement in India presuppose a revolutionary movement in Britain and vice versa. Neither in India, nor in England is it possible to build an independent socialist society. Both of them will have to enter as parts into a higher whole. Upo n this and only upon this rests the unshakeable foundation of Marxist internationalism” (original emphasis). Ibid., p. 26.

48 On the question of this nationalist sub-text on e merely notes either that Patnaik is aware of its presence but attaches no importance to this politically, or – less charitably –that she is unaware both of its existence and political implications. Given her theoretical confusion about so many of the issues she discusses, it is impossible unfortunately to b e sure which of these two observations applies. The reasons for Patnaik's gradual shift towards a more nationalist position can only be guessed at. In part, this may b e an effect of the methodological reorientation she describes elsewhere, which entails a shift from the mainly micro-level analysis which characterized her original contributions t o the mode of production debate to a more macro-level analytical approach. Patnaik, Agrarian Relations p. 4. Such a change in focus, from intra-national to international relationships, would account for her current emphasis on exchanges between countries rather than the differential relationship to means of production by classes within countries. Another reason for this change in focus, and one understandably not referred to by Patnaik herself, may be the comprehensive nature of the critique to which her micro-level analysis was subjected in the exchanges with Paresh Chattopadhyay and N. Ram.

49 On this point, see Brass, Tom, “Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements, and the (Re-) Emergence of a (Post-) Modernised (Middle) Peasant”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 18 (1991), pp. 173–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “A-Way with Their Wor(l)d: Rural Labourers through the Postmodern Prism”, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 (1993), pp. 1162–1168; and “Post-Script: Populism, Peasants and Intellectuals, or What's Left of the Future?”, in Brass, New Farmers' Movements, pp. 246–286. For the claim about the uniqueness of the European experience, and by implication the uniqueness of other (non-European) trajectories, see Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 83. Two things should be remembered about the argument claiming uniqueness for national paths of development. First, that it was the ideological mainstay of a Slavophile populism which rejected capitalism on the grounds that it was an “alien”/(European) imposition, inappropriate to Russian conditions. And second, that against the universals of European capitalist economy the Slavophile populists counterposed the folkloric particularisms of a specifically peasant/jnational/natural) culture. For more on this issue, see Brass, “The Politics of Gender, Nature and Nation in the Discourse of the New Farmers' Movements”, in Brass, ibid., pp. 27–71.

50 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 83, 87.

51 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 82. Having denied that capitalism can be progressive does not prevent Patnaik from holding the opposite view: namely, that for India a future bourgeois democratic ( = “progressive” capitalist) stage is desirable, necessary and possible.

52 On this point Patnaik would do well to acquaint herself not only with the work of European Marxists such as Fox, Kidron and Hobsbawm but also with that by non-Indian and Indian non-Marxists such as Digby, William, Furber, Holden, Mukerjee, Tapan and Banerji, A.K., Fox, Cf. Ralph, The Colonial Policy of British Imperialism (London, 1933)Google Scholar; Kidron, Michael, Capitalism and Theory (London, 1974), pp. 143Google Scholarff.; Hobsbawm, E.J., Industry and Empire (London, 1968), pp. 116Google Scholar, 123–125, and The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (London, 1987), p. 69; Digby, William, India for the Indian – and for England (London, 1885), and Prosperous British India (London, 1901)Google Scholar; Furber, Holden, John Company at Work – A Study of European Expansion in the Late Eighteenth Century (London, 1951)Google Scholar; Mukerjee, Tapan, “Theory of Economic Drain: Impact of British Rule on the Indian Economy, 1840–1900”, in Boulding, K.E. and Mukerjee, T. (eds), Economic Imperialism (Ann Arbor, 1972)Google Scholar; Banerji, A.K., Aspects of Indo-British Economic Relations 1859–1898 (Bombay, 1982)Google Scholar.

53 This kind of argument was deployed against two kinds of target, one internal and the other external, each of which constituted a challenge to colonialism. The first of these was Indian nationalism, against which the notion of ethnically-specific “others” within India itself was used to undermine the possibility of a united India: hence the adoption by colonialism of the divide-and-rule tactic, based on the recognition of an ethnically distinct Muslim and/or tribal “other” within India itself. The second target was those from outside India who attempted to express international solidarity with Indian nationalism in order to challenge British Imperialism; into this latter category, for example, fell non-Indians seeking to obtain better conditions for Indian workers. An example from the realm of Anglo-Indian popular fiction of the way in which this innateness-of-Indian-“otherness” argument was deployed against such expressions of international solidarity is the depiction by Duncan, Sarah Jeanette, The Simple Adventures of the Memsahib (London, 1893)Google Scholar, of the character Jonas Batcham, MP. The latter is represented as an ignorant and interfering “do-gooder”, a gullible, “globetrotting” English parliamentarian, an outsider who thinks he “knows” and “understands” India, but does not – and indeed cannot. First held up to ridicule for disbelieving what is true (as told him by Indigo planters) and believing what is untrue (as told him by an Indian member of Congress), Batcham is then shown to be someone who approves of the anti-colonial struggle and disapproves of the oppression and exploitation of factory workers in India, thereby differentiating what for the author is authentic and positive (planters = honest) from what is inauthentic and negative (Congress, anti-colonial struggle – dishonest; worker exploitation = “exploitation”). In what is a symptomatic presentation of the issues, Duncan writes: “The pay of a full-grown [factory] operative – not a woman or a child, but a man – was represented by the shockingly, incredible sum of eight annas – eightpence! – a day! [ … ] [Batcham] was so completely occupied in shuddering over this instance of the rapacity of the Indian manufacturer, that the statement of what it cost the same operative to live according to the immemorial custom of his people – about five shillings a month – entirely escaped his observation. In the stress of his emotion Mr Batcham failed to. notice one or two other facts that would have tended to alleviate it – the fact that a factory operative is paid twice as much as a domestic servant and three times as much as a coolie, though the cost of life weighs no more heavily upon him than upon them; the fact that he often works only two or three months of the year at gunny-bags, and spends the rest of his time in the more leisurely and congenial scratching of his fields; and, above all, the fact that in India the enterprises of the foreigner accommodate themselves – not of philanthropy, but of necessity – to the customs of the country. It is not the service of the sahib, with his few thousand personal establishments, his few hundred plantations and shops, his few dozen factory chimneys rising along the Hooghly, tainting the sea breeze of Bombay, that can revolutionise their way of life for two hundred and fifty million people with whom custom is religion and religion is more than rice. But Mr Batcham had no heart to be comforted by such trivialities. He made emotional notes, dwelt upon the ‘eight anna daily pittance’, and felt still more poignant private grief that there was no cause for louder sorrow.“ Ibid., pp. 182–183. The sub-text and political objective of this attack against “interfering outsiders” is not difficult to discern. Hence the two reasons for the inappropriateness/undesirability of improvement in the conditions of the workforce; custom would not permit this, and anyway itself provided sufficient to meet their needs. Not only did the invocation of universals offend against unchanging/unchangeable indigenous custom/tradition, therefore, but there was no need for this in the first place since the latter actually ensured decent provision. In short, in the name of laissez-faire, universals are rejected in favour of what de Maistre called “unarguable intuitive fundamentals”. It is ironic indeed that some sections of the political left (or perhaps “left”) are now using the very same kind of arguments about Indian “otherness” that were once deployed by the British Raj against attempts, by Indians and non-Indians alike, to challenge colonial rule. Certainly, Patnaik herself appears to subscribe to just such a notion of “otherness” when contrasting the barbaric treatment of vagrants in European contexts with the benign attitude towards them in India and China. Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 82. Such a view, which (one notes yet again): odd coming from someone who claims to be a Marxist, not only overlooks the presence of a similarly “positive value” attributed historic-ally to poverty/charity in European culture (“blessed are the poor”, etc.) but also idealizes alms-giving/receiving, the object of which as understood by Marxism is to “normalize”/ justify poverty/inequality wherever/whenever this occurs.

54 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 85.

55 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 83–84, 85–86.

56 Elsewhere it has been argued that because of a failure to distinguish between a progressive/modern anti-capitalism which seeks to transcend bourgeois society, and a romantic anti- (or post-) modern form the roots of which are located in agrarian nostalgia and reactionary visions o f an innate “nature”, the response by many academics/intellectuals/ activists to this process o f economic globalization has been (and continues to be) supportive of conservative/nationalist/(fascist) ideology. Brass, “Post-Script”.

57 Patnaik, “Agrestic Unfreedom”, p. 86. One would like t o know in passing how, in a context o f culturally sanctioned “subsistence guarantee” (see note S3), it was nevertheless possible for the “genuinely pauperized” to starve to death.

58 Whereas those on the political right in metropolitan capitalist contexts would claim that “our-poor-are-more-deserving-than-yours” simply by virtue of “being-ours”, Patnaik's view merely reverses this and maintains that “our-poor-are-more-deserving-than-yours”, again by virtue of “being-ours”. In contrast, the Marxist view does not privilege poverty on a national basis but seeks rather to eliminate all forms of this condition any/everywhere they occur.

59 For Patnaik's updated version o f the “drain” theory, see “Agrestic Unfreedom”, pp. 86–90, and also “Food Availability and Famine: A Longer View”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 19 (1991), pp. 1–25. It should b e noted that, when linked to the spread of global capitalism, the “drain” theory can discharge a politically progressive role, in that it focuses on the appropriation of surplus-value from workers of whatever nationality, and not – as in Patnaik's version – the transfer of a non-specific form of surplus from one country to another.

60 It is a commonplace that conquest in all contexts and at every historical period has to some degree resulted in the distortion of the development pattern of the location/ population that is subjugated, and that invariably this takes the form of some kind of surplus extraction (raw materials, land, labour-power) which is then used for the benefit of the conqueror. In the case of India, such a “what-might-have-been” argument about “lost opportunities” could be made about most historical periods and localities, all of which had an adverse impact on the future economic growth of populations in the regions affected. Indeed, Patnaik herself mentions just such an instance. Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 91–92. Rather than indulge in such speculation, akin to the populist hankering after a “golden age”, the political task for Marxists should be to identify the main contradiction at each conjuncture and the kind of struggle this involves.

61 Both the nationalist and populist character of the “drain” theory as propounded by Patnaik emerge clearly from a recent text on the struggle against British colonialism: “The drain theory incorporated all the threads of the nationalist critique of colonialism[ … ] Indeed, the drain theory was the high water-mark of the nationalist leaders' comprehensive, interrelated and integrated economic analysis of the colonial situation[ … ] Moreover, the drain theory possessed the great political merit of being easily grasped by a nation of peasants. Money being transferred from one country to another was the most easily understood of the theories of economic exploitation [ …] No other idea could arouse people more than the thought that they were being taxed so that others in far off lands might live in comfort [ … ] It was, therefore, inevitable that the drain theory became the main staple of nationalist political agitation during the Gandhian era.“ Chandra, Bipanet al., India's Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947 (New Delhi, 1989), pp. 97–98Google Scholar. For more detailed consideration, from different points of view, of the role of “drain” theory in nationalist economic thought and philosophy generally, and in particular that of Congress stalwarts such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Gopal-krishna Gokhale and Romesh Chandra Dutt, see Gopalakrishnan, P.K., Development of Economic Ideas in India (1880–1914) (The Hague, 1954)Google Scholar; Banerji, Aspects, pp. 176ff.; and Dasgupta, A., A History of Indian Economic Thought (London, 1993), pp. 74ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Laclau, Ernesto, “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America”, in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Tlieory (London, 1977), pp. 15–50Google Scholar.

63 Although acknowledging the existence and importance of the satellite/metropolis connection as argued by Frank, not least because it corresponds spatially to her own colonizer/ colonized link, she nevertheless rejects the possibility that such a relationship can result in capitalist development within the satellite/colony. Patnaik, “Development of Capitalism”, pp. 133–134, note 34.