Capitalism in Agriculture, Modes of Production and Revolutionary Strategy

1. The “mode of production” debate: the controversy that would not ask the essential question

The controversy over the mode of production in Indian agriculture was one of the weightiest to have been carried out in the decades following independence within Indian Marxism. Attracting the attention of economists, historians and political activists in almost equal measure, it produced both detailed empirical research and theoretical discussion and debate, and, unlike a good deal of academic Marxism since, it was not pursued in a political vacuum. Whether Indian agriculture was capitalist or semi-feudal, or precapitalist in the main, or in some sense a loose articulation of different modes of production, was not a matter of terminology. Behind the terminology were conflicting judgements on the character of the Indian social formation, the Indian state, the classes which could carry through the unfinished tasks of the bourgeois revolution and, therefore, of revolutionary strategy. A communist organisation which described India as essentially semi-feudal could logically come to very different political conclusions from Marxists who held that capitalist relations of production had become dominant. The theoretical argument, therefore, however technical some of its protagonists may have sought to make it, could never be disentangled from politics.

The controversy proper lasted from the late 1960s until most of the following decade. Utsa Patnaik’s 1990 collection Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The ‘Mode of Production’ Debate in India, which reprinted a large part of that discussion, shows how persistently the participants returned to the identification of capitalist production, the differentiation of cultivators, tenancy, labour utilisation, accumulation and the relation between productive forces and production relations.^[1] Four or five decades later, there is little point in rehearsing the controversy as though the task were to decide retrospectively which participant scored most points. What matters is that it asked indispensable questions while simultaneously generating conceptual habits which could make those questions more difficult to answer.

Arguably the most serious such formulation on the other side of the argument came from Amit Bhaduri’s analysis of agricultural backwardness under semi-feudalism. Sharecropping, insecure tenancy, indebtedness and interlocking land and credit markets formed, for Bhaduri, a structure within which the dominant landowner-moneylender might have an interest not in revolutionising production but in maintaining the tenant’s dependence.[2] This cannot be answered by announcing that markets existed or that crops were sold. Commodity production long predates capitalism; so do merchant capital, moneylending and long-distance trade. Any argument which seeks to establish capitalist production by pointing towards the bazaar has already conceded too much to its opponent.

But the opposite procedure is no better. Tenancy is not feudal because tenancy existed under feudalism. Debt is not semi-feudal because usury preceded capitalism. Sharecropping does not acquire a permanent class character at the moment of its historical birth and carry it around for several centuries thereafter. Attached labour, personalised domination and extra-contractual coercion require analysis, but their mere presence does not permit us to announce that capitalism has temporarily left the room.

Rudra’s devastating attack on precisely this procedure merits quoting, rather than taming into a bland assertion that he “questioned” the semi-feudal thesis. He wrote that Indian discussions have “consistently treated ‘tenancy, money-lending, attached labour’ as the three symptoms of feudal relations”, until it has become an “uncritically accepted habit of thought”. His response was categorical: “there is no basis for such equivalence”.[3]

That is not a semantic quibble. The question is whether the presence or absence of an institutional form itself tells us, without further historical investigation, which relation of production it mediates. It does not. Tenancy can be a form of mediating rentier appropriation by a landlord largely removed from production; but it can equally be a means by which an accumulating cultivator increases the scale of operation by leasing in land from a poorer proprietor. Rudra himself made the point still more sharply a few pages later. “Tenancy,” he wrote, “can fit very well into a capitalist social organisation”; indeed, it can become “a full-fledged capitalist institution” where the economically dominant tenant leases land from a poor owner in order to expand production.[4]

This distinction is important, especially when we move from the institutional form to control over conditions of production. A landlord who advances working capital, pays part of the costs, decides on inputs and appropriates a share of the output stands in a different relation to the labour process from a landlord who simply receives a customary rent. Conversely, a tenant who leases in additional land, buys inputs and machinery services, hires labour and accumulates may be the capitalist party to the relation even though juridically he is somebody else’s tenant. The question is, therefore, not whether tenancy exists, but who controls production; who advances the conditions of production; how surplus is appropriated; and what happens to that surplus.

Banaji’s intervention was significant because it moved the argument away from a taxonomy of visible forms of labour towards the domination of production by capital. His 1977 essay on the Deccan peasantry was, as Henry Bernstein later put it, a “pioneering and provocative application” of Marx’s concept of formal subsumption.[5] The significance of formal subsumption for the Indian debate lies precisely in what it does not entail. Capital need not immediately technologically restructure every labour process. It can assume command of an inherited process, subordinating its reproduction to accumulation while older technical or juridical forms persist.

This needs qualification, because formal subsumption has sometimes become another formula capable of explaining everything and therefore very little. Mezzadri’s formulation is useful because it makes the distinction precise. Under formal subsumption, capital encounters the labour process substantially “as it finds it”; labour may continue to possess means of production while losing the capacity to reproduce itself outside the market. Real subsumption begins when capital “revolutionises the mode of production and imposes its own labour process”.^[6] The distinction concerns not whether capitalism exists in one case and does not in the other, but the depth and form of capital’s command over production.

That is why the survival of a peasant proprietor, a household loom, family labour or a small plot cannot settle the issue. Capitalist domination does not possess a rule book requiring it first to expropriate every direct producer before exploitation may begin. Commercial capital can advance money or inputs, secure future commodities through debt, influence production decisions and appropriate a substantial part of the surplus while leaving formal ownership of the means of production dispersed. Harriss-White’s later discussion of commercial capital makes exactly this point: commercial capital can constrain the independence of petty commodity producers by subsuming them, while merchant and commercial capital advance money or loans in kind for production through networks of intermediaries.[7]

The problem with this alternative concept of a “social formation” which harboured a number of articulated modes of production should now be evident. Superficially this was a more nuanced approach than simply proclaiming an entire society to be feudal or capitalist. India could contain capitalist industry, petty commodity production, semi-feudal agriculture and tribal or other pre-capitalist relations, all elbowing each other within one social formation. Empirical diversity was thereby acknowledged rather than forcibly homogenised.

But the conceptual gain was often illusory. If each apparently archaic form is first assigned to a pre-capitalist mode and those modes are subsequently “articulated” with capitalism, the procedure assumes precisely what requires demonstration. Instead of asking why capitalist accumulation reproduces small production, debt dependence, caste-regulated labour-markets or forms of unfreedom, it declares them exterior to capitalism and then devises a theoretical bridge by which capitalism may be connected to them. The categories have performed the historical analysis in advance.

Rudra eventually became merciless about this. His complaint was not simply that scholars disagreed about how many modes there were. It was that the proliferation of modes had outstripped any attempt to show that each had an identifiable dynamic. He asked, with some justification, whether one could simply assume that every mode had a discoverable “Prime Mover” and “Laws of Motion”.[8] We need not follow him to the conclusion that the notion of mode of production should therefore be abandoned. Capitalism is not simply a collection of exploitative relations; it is a social totality structured by accumulation, commodification, exploitation and the law of value. But Rudra’s critique of the casual use of the category remains devastating.

The key question is, thus, one of hegemony and reproduction. If capitalist accumulation is hegemonic, pre-existing institutions may persist, while their social meaning is transformed. Capitalism has never been about homogeneity. It has continuously re-appropriated older relations where they lower costs, discipline labour, externalise risk to households, cheaply organise social reproduction or where they allow the extraction of surplus. Caste and patriarchy need not disappear before capitalism becomes possible; they can become mechanisms through which labour-markets are segmented and labour-power cheapened. Small production need not disappear if it enables capital to externalise costs. Debt need not disappear if credit becomes one of the principal means through which production is subordinated to the market.

This is the theoretical proposition. But if it is to be more than a theoretical proposition, it has to survive confrontation with the empirical transformation of Indian agriculture. And here the evidence accumulated since the original debate is formidable.

 

 

1. Fragmented land, capitalist agriculture: the transformation of the labour process

 

If the mode-of-production debate is to be revisited some forty years on, it cannot be done simply by restating the categories through which the original debate was conducted. The problem is not that those categories were empty. The debate forced Marxists to pose questions about tenancy, rent, wage-labour, differentiation, accumulation and the character of the state which were usually side-stepped in liberal accounts of Indian agriculture. The problem lies elsewhere. Too much of the debate tried to identify capitalism with a historically specific image of capitalist agriculture: concentration of holdings, expropriation of the peasantry, the emergence of a relatively clear division between capitalist farmers and landless wage-labourers, and accumulation taking place substantially within the agricultural enterprise itself. Once that model became the measuring rod, everything which diverged from it could be treated as evidence of the incompleteness of capitalist transformation. Indian agriculture then seemed to contain capitalism, semi-feudalism, petty commodity production and various survivals, each jostling with the others in a heterogeneous social formation.

Four or five decades of subsequent development render that simple formulation increasingly difficult to defend. The truth is, in one sense, the exact opposite of what an axiomatic model would have led us to expect. Capital has more deeply entered the agricultural labour process; it has done so without generating a parallel concentration of operational holdings. The numbers of small holdings have multiplied; average holding size collapsed; family labour continues to be of enormous importance. But the conditions of its productivity have become more and more dependent upon the supply of commodities from industry, credit from formal and informal financial institutions, machinery that the cultivator need not own, and commodity chains stretching from seed and fertiliser to processing, storage and retail. The fragmentation of landed property and the socialisation of the productive forces have gone hand in hand. The simultaneous presence of what appears to be a contradiction is not in any way an embarrassment to an argument that Indian agriculture is capitalist. It is one of the principal forms in which Indian capitalist agriculture has come to be.

 

Fragmentation did not stop capitalist development

The long-run series from the Agriculture Census is a good place to start, not least because it immediately dispenses with one possible explanation. The number of operational holdings increased from 71.01 million in 1970–71 to 146.45 million in 2015–16. Over the same period operated area did not double, or even increase much at all: it fell a little, from 162.32 million hectares to 157.82 million hectares. Average operational holding therefore fell, from 2.28 hectares to 1.08 hectares. The decline was continuous: 2.00 hectares in 1976–77, 1.84 in 1980–81, 1.69 in 1985–86, 1.55 in 1990–91, 1.41 in 1995–96, 1.33 in 2000–01, 1.23 in 2005–06 and 1.15 in 2010–11.[9]

 

Table 1A. Long-run change in operational holdings and average holding size, 1970–71 to 2015–16

Agriculture Census year	Operational holdings (million)	Operated area (million ha.)	Average holding (ha.)
1970–71	71.01	162.32	2.28
1976–77	81.57	163.34	2.00
1980–81	88.88	163.80	1.84
1985–86	97.16	164.56	1.69
1990–91	106.64	165.51	1.55
1995–96	115.58	163.36	1.41
2000–01*	119.93	159.44	1.33
2005–06*	129.22	158.32	1.23
2010–11	138.35	159.59	1.15
2015–16	146.45	157.82	1.08

Figures for 2000–01 and 2005–06 do not include Jharkhand. Source: Government of India, All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015–16, Table 4.1.

 

There is no use in trying to explain these figures away. If capitalist development in agriculture necessarily entailed the rapid concentration of operational holdings, then India poses a serious problem. But that is precisely why we have to distinguish the concentration of land from the concentration and socialisation of the means through which agricultural production is done. The first has been limited and contradictory. The second has advanced enormously. The 2015–16 distribution brings out the first side of the contradiction particularly sharply.

 

Table 1B. Distribution of operational holdings by size class, 2015–16

Holding class	Holdings (million)	Share of holdings (%)	Operated area (million ha)	Share of area (%)	Average size (ha)
Marginal, below 1 ha	100.25	68.5	37.92	24.0	0.38
Small, 1–2 ha	25.81	17.6	36.15	22.9	1.40
Semi-medium, 2–4 ha	13.99	9.6	37.62	23.8	2.69
Medium, 4–10 ha	5.56	3.8	31.81	20.2	5.72
Large, 10 ha+	0.84	0.6	14.31	9.1	17.07
All	146.45	100.0	157.82	100.0	1.08

Source: All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015–16.

 

Marginal and small holdings together accounted for 86.08 per cent of all operational holdings and 46.94 per cent of the operated area. Large holdings, on the other hand, constituted only 0.57 per cent of the holdings, yet these controlled 9.06 per cent of the operated area.[10] The point is not that concentration has not happened. Nine per cent of the operated land in the hands of considerably less than one per cent of the holdings is hardly egalitarianism. But neither can we conjure up a process of concentration which the figures stubbornly refuse to reflect. The number of large and medium holdings, in fact, declined over this long period while marginal holdings multiplied spectacularly: from 36.2 million in 1970–71 to over 100 million in 2015–16.

If our definition of capitalism insists that the Indian countryside must first reproduce the English historical sequence, then the temptation is going to be strong to posit the existence of some other mode of production, every time Indian history refuses to behave according to the model. But Marxism cannot transform the history of one capitalist transformation into a universal checklist. The more useful question is, by contrast, a different one. What has been happening to the process of production on these proliferating small holdings?

 

Small production and capitalist inputs

The answer cannot be inferred from landholding statistics. According to the Input Survey 2016–17, agriculture was already one in which very small producers were substantially inserted into markets for seed, fertiliser, machinery and credit. Of 146.19 million operational holdings covered by the input survey, 40.37 per cent used certified seed and 16.54 per cent hybrid seed. Nearly 59.01 million holdings used certified seed. Of these, 66.4 per cent obtained certified seed from private seed dealers or retailers and 20.1 per cent from private seed companies; the two categories overlap because cultivators could report more than one source.[11] This was not the preserve of a thin stratum of large capitalist farmers.

 

Table 2. Selected indicators of commodity-input and financial penetration by holding size, 2015–17

Holding class	Holdings, Input Survey (million)	Certified seed (%)	Hybrid seed (%)	Institutional agricultural credit (%)	Net sown area irrigated (%)
Marginal	100.10	35.7	15.6	33.8	53.6
Small	25.77	50.8	17.8	49.0	46.5
Semi-medium	13.96	50.8	19.5	51.2	47.1
Medium	5.54	49.4	20.4	55.4	49.1
Large	0.82	40.3	20.4	53.3	44.4
All holdings	146.19	40.4	16.5	39.0	—

Sources: certified and hybrid seed percentages computed from the absolute numbers provided by the Input Survey; credit percentages reported directly by it. Irrigation is the 2015–16 Agriculture Census.

 

Let us also not lose sight of the absolute figures. Over 35.7 million marginal holdings used certified seed, as did 13.1 million small holdings.[12] There is no reason to consign these tens of millions of producers to some external pre-capitalist sphere simply because the farm on which they worked remained very small and family labour continued to be used.

The case is buttressed by the use of fertiliser. In 2016–17, 89.9 per cent of the gross irrigated area and 63.2 per cent of the gross unirrigated area were using chemical fertilisers; in all, the survey found 147.28 million hectares that were fertiliser-treated.[13] The distribution of irrigation itself does not map neatly onto holding size. In 2015–16, the net irrigated area as a proportion of net sown area was 53.6 per cent among marginal holdings, compared with 44.4 per cent among large holdings.[14]

This last figure is convenient because it cautions us against another crude dichotomy. We are not talking about a countryside of technically backward petty farms, on the one hand, and technically advanced capitalist farms, on the other. The spread of modern productive techniques is not coterminous with the structure of landholding. Uneven development does not mean that one geographical or social compartment is left over in an earlier historical epoch while another has entered capitalism. It means that capitalist development itself engenders radically unequal combinations of technology, property, labour and productivity.

 

Machinery without concentration of land

It is mechanisation, however, that provides perhaps the clearest evidence against the assumption that fragmented holdings necessarily mean an incompletely capitalist labour process. The crucial distinction is between ownership of machinery and access to machinery. The Input Survey records both.

 

Table 3. Ownership/use and hiring of selected machinery by holding size, 2016–17

Holding class	Own/use tractor (%)	Hire tractor (%)	Own/use power tiller (%)	Hire power tiller (%)	Own/use pumpset (%)	Hire pumpset (%)
Marginal	5.3	41.6	2.0	10.4	16.3	11.0
Small	10.2	43.0	3.5	10.8	30.4	7.9
Semi-medium	16.9	37.3	5.0	8.3	35.9	6.0
Medium	29.6	32.6	6.5	7.4	42.6	4.2
Large	39.3	32.3	6.7	5.2	41.4	2.5
All holdings	8.4	41.0	2.8	10.1	21.8	9.7

Source: All India Report on Input Survey 2016–17, Tables 3.8 (a), 3.8 (b).

 

These figures deserve more than a passing citation. Among marginal holdings, only 5.3 per cent owned and used a tractor, but 41.6 per cent hired tractor services. Among small holdings the corresponding figures were 10.2 and 43.0 per cent. Nationally, 8.4 per cent of holdings owned and used tractors, whereas 41 per cent hired them. In absolute terms, about 60 million operational holdings hired tractors.[15]

The very tendency of the relationship is interesting in itself. Tractor hiring is proportionately higher on marginal and small holdings than on medium and large holdings. The smallest farm therefore need not become a large capitalist farm before its labour process is transformed by machinery. Nor need the cultivator accumulate enough capital to buy the machine. Machinery confronts him via a market in productive services.

This challenges us to revise our understanding of concentration. A tractor belonging to a significant farmer, contractor, machinery entrepreneur or hire centre, which works consecutively on dozens of separately owned parcels, is physically concentrated capital deployed on legally parcelled-up landed property. The land is fragmented. The productive force is not. Its use is commoditised. The price of access is factored into the reproduction costs of the small holding, while the owner of the machine will seek to make a return on his capital by selling his capacity to produce.

Capital has, thereby, found a way around one of the material impediments that resulted from the fragmentation of Indian holdings. The significance of this point is easily lost if we ask only, “How many peasants own tractors?” The more revealing question is, “How many processes of agricultural production are reorganised by tractors?” The two questions no longer produce remotely similar answers.

This is not a semantic difference. Machinery alters the labour process. Ploughing or harvesting done mechanically is not turned into a technologically precapitalist process because the machine was hired for six hours rather than bought by the cultivator. The separation of ownership and use means that modern means of production can enter and change the nature of millions of petty production units without first having to destroy them as juridically independent farms.

We thus have the strange but entirely understandable form of capitalism: division of the landholding and concentration of the capital of the machines. And this is precisely where an analysis which posits the coexistence of several modes of production “pushing” each other in the social formation is less enlightening than at first it seemed. What from the point of view of landed property appears as the continued existence of petty production can, from the point of view of the labour process, correspond to a permanent subordination to a concentrated capital outside the farm.

 

Credit and the reproduction of production

The same issue is seen from another angle when we look at credit. Thirty-nine per cent of operational holders availed of institutional credit for agriculture in 2016–17. The proportion was 33.8 per cent among marginal holdings, 49.0 per cent among small holdings, 51.2 per cent among semi-medium, 55.4 per cent among medium and 53.3 per cent among large holdings. Primary Agricultural Credit Societies were the most significant institutional source, followed by commercial banks and Regional Rural Banks.[16]

More important for our purposes is the composition of that borrowing. Short-term loans accounted for 72.9 per cent of the total institutional loans at the all-India level and 76.6 per cent among marginal holdings. The share of long-term loans among marginal holdings was a mere 4.6 per cent and increased with the size of the holding.[17]

The difference is important. Long-term credit can be used to purchase an asset. Short-term agricultural credit is very much bound up with the reproduction of the existing cycle of production. Seed, fertiliser, pesticides, hired machinery, hired labour and other costs must be paid before the crop is sold and turned into money. In so far as the producer does not have enough accumulated money, production must start with an advance on future production of commodities.

The cultivator may therefore own the land and retain his juridical independence while being deprived of a substantial measure of economic autonomy as to the conditions under which production can be continued. It is one of the reasons why the juridical categories of owner, tenant and labourer, indispensable though they remain, cannot by themselves reveal the relations through which contemporary agricultural production is being reproduced. A marginal owner-cultivator may own the main parcel of land, buy seed from a private dealer, purchase fertiliser produced by industrial capital, borrow working capital, hire a tractor from a machinery owner, hire labour at one stage in the crop cycle, sell her own labour-power at another and finally sell the crop to a trader whose superior liquidity and storage capacity determine the price obtained. What single “mode of production” does an inventory of the title deeds to the land reveal? The question is badly posed. What is relevant is the totality of relations through which the unit is reproduced.

 

Formal and real subsumption: avoiding a false choice

At this point the distinction between Marx’s categories of formal and real subsumption becomes useful, provided we do not convert them into successive sociological boxes into which every Indian farm must be placed. Under formal subsumption capital takes command of a labour process which it has not yet fundamentally reorganised technologically. Under real subsumption, capital transforms the labour process itself, increasing productivity and reorganising production through machinery, cooperation, science and the specifically capitalist development of the productive forces. The historical movement from manufacture to modern industry supplied Marx with the classical form of this distinction. But it would be a mistake to conclude that real subsumption can occur only where an individual capitalist directly owns the enterprise and employs a complete workforce of wage-labourers.

Indian agriculture forces us to ask the question at several levels. At the level of the individual marginal farm, family labour and petty commodity production can remain central. It would, therefore, be reckless to announce that every such holding has become a capitalist enterprise in the narrow sense. But, at the level of the agricultural production process considered socially, the evidence points towards something considerably stronger than the external domination of an untouched precapitalist labour process. Improved and hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers, irrigation, tractors, power tillers, pump sets and other purchased inputs have altered how cultivation is actually carried out. The producer is not merely selling the product into a capitalist market after producing it through an inherited labour process. Capitalist industry increasingly enters the production process before the crop exists.

The existence of machinery figures here makes this particularly difficult to maintain. Tractors can hardly be hired by sixty million holdings which can be reasonably described as sixty million technologically autonomous petty economies which just happen to encounter capitalism in circulation. The distinction I would therefore want to insist on is between the capitalist character of the social process of agricultural production and the class character of every individual agricultural producer. The conflation of the two has led to a great deal of theoretical mischief. Capitalist agriculture does not mean that every farmer is a capitalist farmer. Capitalism as a mode of production can be dominant in the reproduction of agriculture while still retaining large numbers of petty commodity producers whose own contradictory position is itself reproduced by capitalist accumulation.

This is also where the notion of formal subsumption can be held on to and yet stretched. Commercial and financial dependence can subordinate petty producers without turning them into wage-workers. But when capital provides machinery, scientifically produced seed, agrochemicals and other means which transform the labour process itself, then elements of real subsumption are clearly present. They do not necessarily take the ‘pure’ form described in the factory chapters of Capital. They are mediated through commodity relations and through the continued juridical independence of the cultivator.

What we face, then, is not an either/or between proclaiming that Indian agriculture has been totally and uniformly “really subsumed” or retreating to the thesis that petty production demonstrates the persistence of another mode. The real movement is one of uneven development. Capital has more or less changed the labour process, while it has left responsibility for much of the reproduction of labour and much of the risk of production to the petty producer. This arrangement can be extremely favourable to capital.

 

The petty producer carries the risk

The persistence of the small farm should not be seen as proof of the inability of capital to abolish it. Capital does not need to abolish a form which can serve useful functions for accumulation.

The petty producer provides family labour without it being costed in the way of a capitalist wage-bill. Family members can work extremely long hours at times of peak labour requirements. In particular, women’s labour may be subsumed statistically under the heading of family work, even when it is critical to both production and social reproduction. The household will absorb a crop failure, an illness, fluctuations in output prices and hikes in input costs. Consumption can be pared back when income is low. Members can seek wage-employment off the holding. Remittances and non-farm earnings can subsidise cultivation.

The independent producer thus ends up incurring risks which a capitalist employer would otherwise have to face directly. This, therefore, is one reason why the coexistence of petty commodity production and capitalist accumulation is not anomalous. Barbara Harriss-White’s insistence that petty commodity production not be treated as an archaic residue is especially apposite in this context. Petty commodity production and commercial capital are not archaeological survivals from a world which capitalism has somehow neglected to eliminate. They are reproduced in contemporary capitalism. The petty producer is neither necessarily a precapitalist remnant nor merely a capitalist waiting to get bigger. The form can itself be modern.[18]

The statistical evidence adduced above provides the theoretical proposition cited earlier with a substantive Indian content. From 1970–1 to 2015–16, the holdings were fragmented in a breathtaking manner. At the same time, that is, as part of the same historical process, the conditions of cultivation came to be more and more dependent upon purchased industrial inputs, irrigation, credit and hired machinery. This is not a case of two histories which accidentally came to run alongside each other. They form one history.

 

Differentiation has not disappeared

None of this means that class differentiation within agriculture has ceased to matter. On the contrary, the tables demonstrate it. Tractor ownership rises steeply with holding size: from 5.3 per cent among marginal holdings to 39.3 per cent among large holdings. Pump set ownership rises from 16.3 per cent among marginal holdings to more than 40 per cent among medium and large holdings. Institutional credit access is markedly lower among marginal holdings than among all the larger groups.[19]

Differentiation has to be measured not in acres alone. The farmer who owns four hectares, two tractors and a threshing machine and who regularly hires out labour-power and machinery to neighbouring farmers has a different class location to another farmer with the same acreage who has no machinery capital and whose family is highly dependent on wage-income. On the other hand, a family with half a hectare who derive a large part of their yearly income from the sale of labour-power cannot be attributed an unambiguous peasant class location simply because they own land.

The household may be on both sides of the wage-relation at different times. That is not a criticism of class analysis. It is a reason for undertaking class analysis rather than using land-size categories as a substitute for classes.

The household-income evidence examined in Section V shows how cultivation, wages, livestock and non-farm activities combine in household reproduction. The Input Survey establishes a related point: neither technological modernisation nor dependence upon capital maps tidily onto holding size.

 

Capital accumulation beyond the farm gate

There is one more corollary to be drawn. If, by seeking an answer to the question whether or not the cultivator accumulates enough to turn himself into a capitalist big farmer, we try to find agricultural capitalism, we shall be looking for a major part of the accumulation produced in agriculture in the wrong place.

Value is extracted at multiple points outside the farm. Seed companies earn income from the sale of the commodity necessary for production. Fertiliser and pesticide companies make profits from the derived demand for their products. Banks and other creditors earn interest. Owners of machinery earn a return from the sale of tractor, tiller, pumping, threshing or harvesting services. Traders buy crops, control liquidity and act on temporal and spatial price arbitrage. Processors add value by industrial processing of agricultural commodities. Storage, transport and retail capital come in even further downstream.

The small cultivator can, therefore, remain small, while capital elsewhere grows. Indeed, that is part of the explanation of why the expectation that capitalist development must manifest itself primarily through the concentration of farms is misleading. Accumulation generated around agriculture does not have to return to the cultivator as accumulation within agriculture. Capital can capture portions of the agricultural surplus through the input market, finance, machinery services and circulation.

The failure of the farm to expand is therefore not evidence for the failure of capital to accumulate. This much takes us a long way from the old discussion about whether rich peasants were becoming capitalist farmers quickly enough. That was a perfectly reasonable question. But it cannot exhaust the enquiry. We have to look at the whole circuit within which agricultural production takes place. When we do that, the distinction between “agricultural” and “industrial” capital begins to look very porous. The tractor manufacturer, fertiliser company, bank and food processor may never own an inch of agricultural land. Yet the reproduction of cultivation may be dependent on them. Capitalist domination of agriculture therefore does not have to take the form of capitalist ownership of agriculture.

 

What survives from the old relations?

The point is not to be misconstrued. Caste power, particularly attached labour in certain regions, usury, unequal tenancy, patriarchal property control, coercive relationships between labourers and powerful landholders, and forms of extra-economic domination have certainly not disappeared. Nor is there any reason to sanitise them by renaming every oppressive relationship capitalist.

The problem is one of determination and reproduction. Are these relations an autonomous precapitalist mode of production whose reproduction imposes the dominant logic of the countryside? Or are they progressively incorporated into a capitalist economy and reproduced in compatible forms?

The second proposition more accurately describes the trajectory under consideration. Caste can control access to labour, land, credit and markets without forming a distinct mode of production. Patriarchal household relations can reduce the costs of reproducing labour-power and hide women’s unpaid labour without ceasing to be patriarchal. Debt can have highly coercive personal relations while also financing the production of commodities. A landlord can exercise extra-economic force while producing for capitalist markets with machines and wage-labour.

Capitalism has never needed all social relations to be reduced to purely contractual relations between formally equal owners of commodities. To insist on that degree of purity before one will recognise the dominance of capitalism is to make capitalism impossible everywhere except in textbooks.

 

From several modes to one contradictory capitalist totality

This is why the notion of a social formation in which several modes of production coexist, or “jostle”, becomes progressively less helpful for understanding contemporary India. In warning against reducing every concrete relation to an abstract capitalist essence, the concept once served a legitimate function. As an account of a transitional historical formation in which genuinely distinct modes possessed significant capacities for autonomous reproduction, it can also be meaningful.

But coexistence is not the same thing as articulation, and articulation is not the same thing as domination. The question is whether the relations described as precapitalist reproduce themselves according to a logic substantially independent of capital, or whether their contemporary reproduction occurs increasingly through the requirements and contradictions of capitalist accumulation.

The balance of evidence reviewed in this chapter would weigh heavily in favour of the latter. A marginal cultivator with a 0.38 hectare holding, employing family labour, hiring a tractor and using certified seed and chemical fertiliser, availing himself of short-term credit, hiring a labourer to harvest and selling his labour-power for a part of the year while marketing his crop through commercial intermediaries, is not adequately described when one aspect of this complex is called capitalist, another petty commodity, another semi-feudal and another proletarian. It may accurately name the isolated relations. But it does not necessarily illuminate the totality which subsumes them.

Capitalism does. Not because every relation has become the same, but because the reproduction of those multiple relations increasingly takes place inside a capitalist system of commodity production, accumulation and state power. The extraordinary fragmentation documented in Table 1 is therefore not the refutation of the argument. When read alongside Tables 2 and 3, it becomes part of the evidence for it. The same society which reduced the average operational holding from 2.28 hectares to 1.08 hectares brought tens of millions of those holdings into markets for industrially produced seed, fertiliser, institutional credit and mechanised services. Capital did not wait for the petty producer to disappear.

It learned to accumulate through the conditions of the petty producer’s survival. And that is why the next question cannot simply be whether Indian agriculture is capitalist. We have to ask where accumulation occurs, which classes appropriate it, how the agricultural household is reproduced through the combination of cultivation and wage-labour, and how the state protects and reorganises those relations. Section V examines these questions through household-income evidence and the limits of the rural-wage series.

 

 

III. Uneven and combined development: why backward capitalism is still capitalism

 

The first qualification about the quantitative material, with which this section is concerned, is made at the beginning. The data assembled here are not from one dataset designed to test the argument advanced in this essay, but from surveys constructed for a variety of administrative and statistical purposes. Some series are available only for particular years; some categories change, and the material does not permit a complete reconstruction of class trajectories at household level. The figures should therefore be read as converging indicators of structural change rather than as a definitive econometric demonstration. Their value lies in the consistency of the direction they reveal: fragmentation of holdings has proceeded together with deeper dependence on purchased inputs, hired machinery, credit and wage-income.

The statistical reconstruction in the previous section brings us directly to a theoretical problem. Indian agriculture is now heavily dependent upon purchased inputs, machinery, credit and commodity markets, while at the same time retaining a fragmented structure of operational holdings and a vast mass of petty producers. The technical labour process has been transformed without the peasantry having been eradicated. Machinery capital can be concentrated while land remains fragmented. Labour can be partially proletarianised while households retain small plots. Caste and patriarchal relations survive alongside increasingly generalised commodity dependence. If capitalism is imagined as a sequence that every country must pass through in approximately the same order, these combinations are anomalies that need to be explained by the survival of several modes of production. If capitalism is instead understood as a world system which develops through differentiation, historical compression and combination, the anomaly largely disappears.

That is why uneven and combined development cannot simply be added on here as a Trotskyist flourish once the empirical research has been done. It has a direct bearing on how the evidence is read. The evolutionary model is well known enough. England’s agrarian transformation provides the implicit benchmark: dispossession of large sections of the peasantry, creation of large farms, generation of agricultural wage-labour, capitalist accumulation within agriculture, rising mechanisation and labour productivity. The rest are then ordered according to their distance from this picture. Where small production remains extensive, family labour persists, productivity is low or land concentration is slow, capitalism is said to be incomplete, immature or distorted. An empirical difference between capitalist societies is turned into a difference of historical stage.

The political conclusion is already inside the premise. If capitalism is seen as incomplete because some relations that belong to an earlier historical epoch survive, then somebody has to complete the capitalist transformation before socialism can be seriously posed. The task left over is defined as bourgeois-democratic, and the search then begins for a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois class capable of carrying it through. Stageism enters, not by an explicit political declaration, but by the apparently innocent decision about what “real capitalism” ought to look like.

But capitalism is not a certificate issued when sufficient peasants have disappeared. Nor is poverty evidence that capitalism has not yet arrived. A poor capitalist country remains capitalist. A capitalism with low labour productivity remains capitalism. A capitalism with hundreds of millions of petty producers and informal workers does not become half-feudal because its social morphology differs from Britain or Germany. The question is whether the reproduction of society is increasingly governed by capitalist commodity relations, accumulation and class power – not whether its institutions have converged upon some ideal type constructed from the history of the earliest capitalist countries.

Bernstein’s formulation is especially useful in this context, since he starts with commodification rather than with the withering away of the small farm. Commodification entails that the elements of production and reproduction have to be more and more acquired on markets, and are increasingly subject to the disciplines and compulsions of those markets. In capitalism the crucial development is what he terms the “commodification of subsistence”: reproduction can no longer take place outside commodity relations.[20]

This is precisely what Tables 2 and 3 of the preceding section displayed in a tangible, specifically Indian manifestation. The cultivator may own land, but seed has to be bought; fertiliser is sourced from industry; the use of machinery is a service that is purchased; short-term credit is used to finance the entire cycle of production; and finally, the output has to be sold to pay those costs. The act of participating in the market has ceased to signify simply getting rid of a surplus once household subsistence has been secured. The terms of continuing cultivation have become commodified.

Bernstein inverts the old concept of subsistence production for this reason. Once a household is enmeshed in capitalist commodity relations, apparently “subsistence” production itself can be financed from wages; wage-income can pay for production, while households purchase food when their own cultivation does not cover their consumption needs.[21] The household cultivating half a hectare, with one or more members selling their labour-power, is not therefore evidence that proletarianisation was arrested midstream. The holding may be one of the means by which a proletarianised household reproduces itself.

The point is not that every marginal cultivator should, by virtue of that, be reclassified as a worker. Petty commodity production is contradictory because capital and labour are not yet separated and remain combined within the household. As Bernstein puts it, it is a “contradictory unity” of the class locations of capital and labour: the household is a capital, with land, tools, seed, fertiliser and other means of production, but it is also a supplier of labour. Income is needed to reproduce both the means of production and the producer.[22] Some producers accumulate; others only succeed in simple reproduction; still others are kept in being because household members increasingly sell labour-power. The category is a dynamic one, therefore, rather than a permanent sociological identity.

For our immediate purpose, it is sufficient to note that the existence of petty commodity production within capitalism is one thing, and the persistence of an independent petty-commodity mode of production is another. The need to draw that distinction is particularly great in the case of India, where the phenomenal increase in the number of marginal holdings has taken place at the same time as the process of market-dependence described in the previous section. If petty production were the vestigial remnant of a stage through which capitalism has not yet fully passed, its survival would be expected to be associated with some degree of immunity from capitalist inputs and productive forces. The evidence we have examined shows almost the exact opposite. Operations on fragmented holdings are on a mass scale involving the use of tractors, tillers, pump sets, seed, fertiliser and credit, purchased in the market. Formal independence can therefore be combined with increasing economic dependence.

 

Capitalism does not develop by repetition

Trotsky’s starting point was the world economy. The law of uneven and combined development could not, as I argued in The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, have been adequately formulated before capitalism had created a world history which was “a contradictory but concrete totality”.[23] Once that totality exists, later-developing societies do not reproduce the route taken by the pioneers.

Trotsky’s terminology is worth preserving, not least because it is specifically intended as a riposte to vulgar evolutionism. A backward country, he argues, “does not take things in the same order”; it may be forced by its own historical backwardness to appropriate what already exists elsewhere but in so doing must “skip a whole series of intermediate stages”. Uneven development therefore gives rise to combined development: a “drawing together of the different stages of the journey”, which results in an “amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms”.[24]

This is sometimes reduced to the banal comment that old and new coexist. A bullock cart and a mobile phone side by side are then shown as an example of uneven and combined development. But Trotsky had something much more stringent in mind. The crucial point is that world-capitalist development precludes repetition. Productive forces, financial methods, organisational forms, and state institutions which have developed in other locations can be grafted onto social structures which have not experienced the process through which these forms first appeared. The very process of implantation modifies the inherited structure, while the latter changes the way in which the transplanted form operates.

Saccarelli neatly sums up this fundamental break. Trotsky dismissed the view that peripheral countries were to evolve their capitalism through the same agency and stages as the West had done. Capitalism had to be grasped “as a systemic totality – a world economy connecting and encompassing more and less developed political sub-units”. Capitalist expansion would, therefore, result in combinations of its highly advanced forms with inherited structures rather than a re-run of the Western sequence.[25]

India is not Russia in 1905 and nothing useful follows from pretending that it is. The value of the category lies not in analogy but in method. The Green Revolution is already an obvious example. Scientific plant breeding, manufactured fertilisers, large irrigation projects, electric pumping, institutional agricultural credit, modern agricultural research and progressively greater mechanisation were inserted into a countryside characterised by minute holdings, caste differentiation, family labour and very unequal regional development. The productive package was modern; the social structure into which it entered had not passed through an English-style agrarian transformation. The result was neither a repetition of England nor the simple preservation of “precapitalist India”. It was a new combination.

All this machinery data renders the combination ultra-visible. The farm can stay 0.38 ha while a tractor revolutionises ploughing. Means of production and landed property unit stop coinciding. Capital which would be individually uneconomic for the cultivator to own can be bought temporarily as a service. The machinery owner amortises cost, bids for profit across farms. Thus, capitalist technical transformation progresses, without land fragmentation being resolved into concentration first. This is exactly the sort of historical compression uneven and combined development was supposed to explain.

 

Unevenness is produced, not merely inherited

There is one last point that has to be made if “uneven development” is not to become another polite synonym for backwardness. Unevenness is not something which is there when capitalism comes along and discovers it as a residue. Capitalist accumulation reproduces and produces unevenness itself.

Competition differentiates enterprises. Technical innovation creates temporary advantages and destroys others. Investment concentrates geographically where infrastructure, markets or expected returns are superior. Credit is distributed unequally. Regions specialise. Productivity gaps grow and shrink unevenly. Capital abandons sectors or territories in which expected profitability falls and pours into others. Development and underdevelopment are therefore not merely two initial conditions which capitalism gradually erases.

They are reproduced in a continual manner. For this reason, the fact that Punjab and Bihar (or, alternatively, irrigated western UP and dry areas elsewhere) have a very different technical structure does not mean that they are in different modes of production. Extreme regional unevenness could be the outcome of the same national and international capitalist process of accumulation.

The data already give us a warning against simple rankings. The marginal holdings nationally had a higher ratio of irrigated to net sown area than the large holdings. Tractor hiring was proportionately more widespread among the marginal and small holdings than among the large ones. Yet tractor ownership rose sharply with holding size. These relations do not line up along one ladder called “modernisation”. Different components of capitalist development move at different speeds and in contradictory directions.

Mechanisation can then develop, through service markets, in countries where farm size remains very small. High-value commercial crops can be grown on small farms. Large holdings can survive in low irrigation areas. Extensive wage-labour does not imply the disappearance of family labour. Accumulation may take place in machinery, finance, processing or trade rather than as accumulation of agricultural land.

The whole notion of backward capitalism is only meaningful and helpful when it is applied to such disparities. It is only once it is used to pass misleading judgements about the degree of development of capitalism that the moment “backward” is permitted to signify less capitalist. The clarity of Mandel’s own analysis is that he repeatedly refused this equivalence. He thus showed, in discussing capitalist production in the so-called underdeveloped countries, how cheap labour can render extensive mechanisation unprofitable, thereby diverting accumulation towards forms which are more heavily based upon absolute surplus-value. Capitalist production can therefore be combined with labour processes which are technologically more backward than those of the advanced capitalist centres without thereby ceasing to be capitalist production.[26]

That distinction is crucial for the argument on real subsumption. Capital does not simply take up all the technically superior technology available to it. It takes up machinery where the interplay between machinery costs, wages, control over labour and anticipated profitability makes mechanisation pay off. Where labour is extremely cheap a technically “backward” labour process can continue to be profitable. Hence the persistence of labour-intensive production cannot of itself prove the persistence of another mode.

 

Formal and real subsumption do not define national stages

The distinction between formal and real subsumption can now be used with greater precision than would be the case if we attempted to categorise the whole of the Indian countryside as one or the other. Formal subsumption is the name given to those instances in which capital subordinates a labour process without fundamentally reconstructing it. Real subsumption is the term used to describe capital’s refashioning of the labour process through the deployment of specifically capitalist productive forces and organisation.

Nor does it follow that whole countries proceed from the first to the second in lockstep historical formation. One agricultural household may encompass them all. Land preparation can be tractorised, while transplanting remains highly labour-intensive. Irrigation may depend on electrically powered pumps. Harvesting may involve a hired combine in one region and large numbers of wage-labourers in another. Family members may supply unpaid labour alongside wage-workers. Production may be subordinated by commercial credit or dealer advances even where machinery penetration remains modest.

The labour process itself can, therefore, be unevenly transformed. The figures for machinery presented in the preceding section are important precisely because they move the argument beyond simple commercialisation. If capital had simply purchased output after a technically unchanged production process, formal subsumption would provide a large part of the explanation. But where industrial machinery and scientifically produced inputs reorganise production itself, we have moved onto the terrain of real subsumption. There is no theoretical virtue in choosing one label for the whole of Indian agriculture. The more important point is that capitalist command can deepen through both.

 

Where does accumulation occur?

When we stop thinking of the farm as the exclusive focus of agrarian capitalism, another apparent paradox evaporates. The fragmentation of operational holdings has often been taken as proof that capitalist accumulation in agriculture is still weak. But much of the capital accumulating from agriculture need not accumulate as larger farms.

It can accumulate as finance. It can accumulate as machinery capital. It can accumulate in seed and agrochemical industries. It can accumulate through storage, processing, transport and wholesale trade. It can accumulate in corporate retail and food manufacture.

The farmer may not accumulate because someone else does. This needs emphasis. If a petty cultivator buys inputs, repays interest, rents machinery and sells through a merchant or processor, a number of capitals can appropriate value added in the nexus of the crop’s production, leaving the farming family in simple reproduction or in debt. The persistence of the small size of the holding is not a sign that capital has not been able to extract and appropriate surplus.

It could be a sign of where the excess ended up. It is in this regard that Harriss-White’s work on petty commodity production and commercial capital is of special significance. Commercial capital can provide money and inputs, organise flows of commodities, be involved in processing, storage and transport, and act as a constraint upon petty producers whilst leaving the juridical ownership of their production intact. That is why she has never been willing to regard petty commodity production and commercial capital as “archaic” phenomena. They are contemporary forms that can be articulated to capitalist accumulation, not a fetter that first needs to be removed.

In light of this, the image of agribusiness as something that comes from the outside to face an essentially pre-capitalist peasantry is no longer adequate. Agribusiness is a concentration of capitalist power in the total circuit of agriculture. Its property can be upstream or downstream from the point of cultivation. Command over the cultivator can work through prices, patents, credit, processing capacity, storage or market access, rather than through ownership of the field itself. Formal property and real economic power are not the same thing.

 

The problem with “several modes jostling”

This brings us back to the conceptual fragility noted at the outset. Casting India as a social formation in which multiple modes of production coexisted at a certain stage was in fact a way of resolving a real problem. No serious observer could fail to note the coexistence of highly capitalised industry, petty cultivation, wage-labour, household production, tenancy, caste-regulated labour-markets and coercive forms with an archaic appearance. Pluralism seemed a superior position to attempting to shoehorn all these relations into a single abstract heading.

But the apparent solution is itself only a redescription of the problem. If petty production is given to one mode, wage-labour to another, attached labour to a third and household production to yet another, what account does it give of why these forms coexist, why some expand, why others contract, and why they become articulated through credit, commodity markets and the state?

The language of articulation only gives an answer when it specifies the direction of determination. Otherwise “various modes of production” becomes a way of saying that different things exist side by side. The more precise question is whether these heterogeneous relations have independent logics of expanded reproduction, or whether their contemporary reproduction is more and more subordinated to capitalist accumulation.

The facts already marshalled support the second. Capital does not need to wipe the slate clean of inherited institutions in order to be hegemonic. It can capture them, strip them of their social content, use them to discipline labour, or reproduce them, because this is less costly. Caste can order labour-markets. Patriarchy can socialise the costs of social reproduction into the household. Petty holdings can support workers between periods of wage-work. Debt can force commodity production. Household labour can internalise risks that otherwise would have to be borne by capital. The forms can look old while the relation reproducing them is new. This is exactly what a purely evolutionary conception cannot grasp.

 

Poverty is not evidence against capitalism

Here we can deal with another argument which is often left implicit as it would appear absurd if stated openly. Poorer countries are frequently characterised as not being capitalist enough because they exhibit low productivity, very large informal sectors, weak social security systems, low wages and very large reserves of underemployed labour. However, these very conditions may themselves promote certain forms of capitalist exploitation.

Mandel also stressed that low-cost labour in backward capitalism lowered the incentive to mechanise and it promoted dependence on absolute rather than relative surplus-value.[27] Low productivity could therefore coexist with capitalist exploitation not by chance but because capital modified its methods to the price and supply of labour.

The same is true of informality. Capitalist accumulation does not require that every labour relation be a legally regulated long-term wage-contract. Informality can shift the costs of unemployment, illness, reproduction and ageing onto workers’ households. Seasonal migration can provide labour when needed and return it to the village when it is not. Tiny plots can subsidise the reproduction of labour-power.

The countryside and city are thus increasingly part of the same process of reproduction of labour. A construction worker, whose household grows food on a small plot, is not a half-proletarian on Tuesday and a half-peasant on Wednesday. The household’s contradictory livelihood strategies are part of the very process through which labour-power is reproduced in Indian capitalism.

The 2013 and 2019 Situation Assessment Surveys discussed below allow us to measure a part of this combination of cultivation, wages, livestock and non-farm activity in household reproduction. Their limits have to be respected, but their evidence reinforces the theoretical conclusion: the persistence of cultivation alongside substantial wage-dependence is entirely compatible with capitalist proletarianisation.

 

From uneven development to revolutionary strategy

Uneven and combined development is not a political programme in itself. I argued this point at length in The Marxism of Leon Trotsky. A general sociological law has to be read in the “arithmetic” of a concrete historical situation; it does not supply a ready-made tactical key.[28] That warning is necessary, because otherwise invocations of uneven and combined development can become as ritualised as the stage theories they were intended to criticise.

But the empirical work does allow one strategic inference to be drawn. If capitalist development itself reproduces small production, regional backwardness, caste-organised labour relations and uneven technical transformation, then those phenomena cannot be simply located in a pre-capitalist stage and left to a progressive bourgeoisie to abolish.

Their continued existence does not demonstrate that the bourgeois revolution is still “unfinished” in the sense that the bourgeoisie has not yet completed its historically progressive stage. It demonstrates that the development of capitalism is compatible with – and can even reproduce – them.

The difference between incomplete tasks and an incomplete historical stage is thus crucial. Land reform can still be necessary. The caste system must be abolished. We must fight the subordination of women. Agricultural production must be changed. Imperialist oppression and global injustice persist.

None of these formulations asks us to recover a bourgeois-democratic phase. The organisation itself formed in Section II moves against that. The peasant production process itself is already bound to credit, industrial inputs, machinery capital and commodity chains. An agrarian transformation which wants to seriously contest current forms of exploitation will, therefore, face capitalist property not at some remote socialist phase but from the start.

The old question – has capitalism sufficiently developed to make socialist revolution legitimate? – has been badly posed. Capitalism has developed through combinations which make it look unlike the historical model derived from the earliest capitalist countries.

That does not make it less capitalist. It makes the politics of waiting for capitalism to become something other than capitalism before fighting it seem particularly counterproductive. The next question follows on directly. If this contradictory capitalism is already the dominant system, why does an organisationally autonomous state, staffed and run by state managers rather than by the capitalist class as such, nevertheless reproduce the institutional and material conditions of capitalist society, even while subsidising farmers, regulating corporations, providing welfare and periodically acting against powerful capitalist interests? That is the problem to which we now turn.

 

 

1. The capitalist state: organisational autonomy and the reproduction of capitalist society

 

Once the argument has been advanced from the survival of small holdings to the capitalist totality in which those holdings are reproduced, the nature of the state has to be posed with equal rigour. It is not enough to argue that India is capitalist and therefore the Indian state is a capitalist state. This formulation is correct only if we can give content to the adjective. Nor will it do to reduce the issue to the personal social origins of ministers, the number of businessmen elected to parliament, corporate donations to political parties or the undoubted real influence which major capitals exert on governments. Such evidence may bring to light important mechanisms through which capitalist interests exert pressure upon the state, and these mechanisms are not imaginary or politically insignificant. But they do not in themselves constitute a theory of why the state is capitalist, because the state is not simply the sum of the people who occupy offices in it, nor are state managers merely delegated capitalists carrying out instructions transmitted from outside.

The crudest version of instrumentalism simply envisages the bourgeoisie sitting outside the state and issuing orders that obedient politicians and bureaucrats carry out. It is politically attractive because examples are not difficult to find. Capitalists lobby ministers; industrial associations draft proposals; banks seek regulatory changes; corporations threaten disinvestment; electoral finance buys access; business personnel move into government and back again. Mandel himself, writing of late capitalism, noted the growing importance of capitalist lobbies, employers’ organisations and monopolies in shaping political decisions, and observed that the enormous economic power of monopolies could allow them to intervene directly in state policy.[29] None of this should be minimised. But to make these connections the defining explanation of the capitalist state would leave us unable to explain why the state can repeatedly act against particular capitalists, against substantial fractions of capital, or even in ways which no organised capitalist body has demanded.

Individual capitalists are competitors. Agricultural capital, industrial capital, finance, commercial capital, agribusiness, food processing and retail capital do not have identical interests. Exporters can demand a currency policy which import-dependent industry dislikes. Industrial capital may want lower food prices because the reproduction cost of labour sets a floor on wages, while capitalist farmers want higher agricultural prices. Banks want borrowers who pay interest; indebted cultivators want cheaper credit and periodic cancellation. Fertiliser producers want high volumes and profitable prices; cultivators want cheap inputs. Food-processing firms want reliable raw-material supplies at low prices; agricultural producers want higher farm-gate prices. Retail capital wants cheap and controllable supply chains. Machinery capital wants expanding demand for tractors and implements whether those machines are purchased by individual farms, contractors or hiring centres. If the state were merely the executive instrument of these capitals, the question of which capital controlled it at any given moment would have to do far more explanatory work than it can possibly bear.

Mandel’s use of the Engelsian formulation of the state as the “ideal total capitalist” remains useful precisely because it directs attention away from the immediate preference of each individual capital and towards the general conditions of capitalist reproduction. Competition between the “many capitals” generates conflicts which no individual capitalist can resolve for the system as a whole; legal order, currency, national infrastructure, coercive institutions, the maintenance of property relations and the reproduction of the conditions of accumulation have to be secured at a more general level.[30] Yet, I would formulate the relation somewhat differently from an argument in which the state is simply said to represent capital in general. The state is a materially existing organisational ensemble, possessing institutions, administrative routines, coercive capacities and personnel of its own. Its managers are not, in any simple sense, representatives of the capitalist class. But that organisational autonomy does not make the state neutral, because the state itself can reproduce its material and institutional existence only within, and through the continuing reproduction of, the social order from which its revenues, resources, monetary system, administrative capacities and infrastructural powers are derived.

 

Relative autonomy, organisational reality and the limits of Poulantzas

There is an important element in Poulantzas which has to be retained. Against any picture of the state as an instrument which passes intact from one class’s hands to another’s, he insisted upon its relative autonomy, upon the contradictory pressures which traverse state institutions, and upon the fact that state policy cannot be read directly from the wishes of individual capitalists. At the same time, his later formulation of the capitalist state as “the material condensation” of a relationship of forces among classes and class fractions pushes the argument in a direction I do not entirely share.[31] If the state is primarily conceptualised as a condensation of class relations, its own character as an organisational complex of institutions and personnel tends to become less distinct. Miliband’s insistence that the state system and state elite have to be analysed as real organisations and real state managers therefore remains indispensable, even if one does not accept every instrumentalist inference sometimes associated with his work. The point is not to return to a telephone theory of the state, but to retain the organisational reality which disappears if the state is reduced too far to a relation among classes.

The relative autonomy of the state follows, on this account, not merely from the need to reconcile competing capitalist fractions but from the fact that state managers have institutional interests, routines and projects of their own. Governments may refuse demands by industrialists because of inflation, restrict a bank because systemic financial stability is at stake, impose labour regulation which employers resist, subsidise peasants despite complaints about taxation, or nationalise an industry whose private owners have failed to maintain it. Capitalists complain about governments incessantly, and those complaints can be entirely genuine. None of this tells us that the state has ceased to be capitalist. What matters is that, whatever the immediate conflict, the state’s own capacity to maintain its organisations, revenues, currency, infrastructure and coercive apparatus remains embedded in the reproduction of a capitalist economy and a capitalist social order. The relation is therefore not adequately captured by saying either that capitalists directly command the state or, conversely, that the state stands above classes as an autonomous sovereign. Its autonomy is real, but it is an autonomy exercised inside a set of material dependencies generated by capitalist social reproduction.

This is where Ellen Meiksins Wood’s argument about the specifically capitalist separation of the “economic” and the “political” is particularly useful. Capitalism differs from precapitalist class societies in that the immediate extraction of surplus is organised principally within a formally economic sphere, through private property, commodity relations and the labour-market, while many of the general coercive, juridical and infrastructural preconditions of that exploitation are concentrated in a differentiated public power.[32] The political has not disappeared from production; rather, political functions have been divided, with some powers effectively privatised in the economy and others concentrated in the state. The state therefore need not stand at the point of production as the direct appropriator of surplus in order to be indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist production. This also means that capitalists do not have to “own” the state in any organisational sense for the state to possess an embedded capitalist character.

Mandel’s “ideal total capitalist” can, then, be read in a less functionalist and less class-instrumental sense. Decisions on taxation, tariffs, railways, budgetary allocation, credit, welfare or infrastructure may redistribute advantages among capitals and may even benefit workers or petty producers. The state can discipline particular capitals while strengthening the conditions under which capitalist society as a whole is reproduced. The crucial point is not that some supra-capitalist wisdom resides in the bureaucracy, but that the state’s own organisational reproduction confronts state managers with imperatives which are inseparable from the reproduction of the capitalist economy on which the state materially depends.

 

The state is not outside the economy

There is, however, a further theoretical error which matters even more for the agrarian argument. The state is often imagined as standing outside an independently constituted economy and subsequently “intervening” in it. A supposedly natural sphere of market relations exists first; taxation, subsidies, regulation, welfare and public investment are then introduced from outside. This imagery is shared, oddly enough, by neoliberal economics and a good deal of left discussion. They disagree only over whether intervention is excessive or desirable. Poulantzas was right to reject such a separation, even though I would not follow his relational conception of the state all the way. The economy, understood as relations of production and reproduction, has never constituted a hermetically sealed sphere capable of reproducing itself without political, juridical and ideological conditions; Wood’s argument reinforces the same point from another direction by showing that the apparent separation of the economic and political under capitalism is itself a historically specific mode of organising their interdependence.[33]

This formula is particularly relevant for agriculture. Private property in land is a juridical relation guaranteed by the state. Contracts need the law. Banks need money, regulation and ultimately the guarantee of the state. Irrigation systems, electricity grids, roads, agricultural universities, crop research, procurement institutions, subsidy and credit systems are not external additions placed on top of an otherwise enclosed agricultural economy. They are part of the constitution of the conditions in which present-day agricultural production is possible. The Indian Green Revolution makes the point with brutal clarity. It did not come about because millions of atomised cultivators spontaneously decided through market exchange to revolutionise the productive forces. The state underwrote irrigation, agricultural research, rural electrification and institutional credit; it subsidised fertiliser and seed systems; it put in place procurement structures; it created and shaped price incentives. International institutions and private capital were involved in major ways, but through essentially political and institutional forms inseparable from the state.

Rudra, who was hardly predisposed to eulogise the Green Revolution, nevertheless recorded how much the technological package relied on decisions about agricultural machinery, irrigation and industrial production. He pointed to the role of big Indian business houses in the tractor industry and the redirection of irrigation policy in favour of groundwater and tube-well technology because it fitted the needs of the new agricultural technology.[34] The state did not simply distribute some benefits once capitalist agricultural development took place. It helped to produce the form which that development took. That is why the distinction between “state” and “market” is particularly misleading here: state policy created and enlarged markets, institutional credit expanded the market for inputs, irrigation increased the profitability of fertiliser and seed use, agricultural research generated new commodities and practices of production, roads and storage widened commodity circuits, and machinery policy helped to create markets for tractors and implements. The market, which later confronts the farmer as an impersonal economic force, has itself been politically and institutionally constituted.

 

The state and the reproduction of capitalist agriculture

The statistical discussion in the earlier sections demonstrated that by 2016–17 millions of small and marginal farmers relied on purchased seed, fertiliser, institutional credit and hired-in machinery. That penetration is inextricable from decades of state policy. The Input Survey itself is an illuminating state text because its categories reveal the state’s conception of modern agricultural production: it captures fertiliser, pesticide and seed use, machinery ownership and hire, irrigation and institutional credit by operational-holding size. The administrative gaze is focused on the technical and financial transformation of cultivation because these have become central objects of agricultural policy. But the fact that the state furthers capitalist development does not mean that every policy directly furthers the interests of the largest capitalist farmer, or that state managers have simply been instructed by an agrarian capitalist class.

Input subsidies can benefit poor cultivators and also extend the market for fertiliser capital. Low-cost institutional credit can insulate small farmers from usury and also promote commodity production and machinery purchase. Irrigation can enhance peasant livelihoods and also increase land values and the possibility of more intensive capitalist farming. Procurement can stabilise small-producer incomes and yet disproportionately benefit regions and classes with marketable surpluses. Public agricultural research can raise yields and also promote input-dependent production. Rural roads can enable peasant access to markets and also facilitate penetration by traders, processors and corporate retail. These contradictions are not aberrations that distort an otherwise simple state policy; they are precisely the kinds of outcomes that arise when state managers attempt to reproduce an institutional order embedded in a differentiated capitalist society while also responding to social pressures, electoral conflicts and the demands of subordinate classes.

The state cannot therefore be classified by asking whether a particular item of expenditure benefits workers, poor peasants or capitalists. A welfare state remains capitalist; a government which subsidises poor cultivators does not thereby cease to reproduce capitalist relations; a state which provides free education or public health does not cease to enforce private property in the means of production. To infer the social character of the state directly from the destination of each rupee of expenditure would be to replace Marxism with public-accountancy analysis. The more demanding question is whether the organisational ensemble itself continues to reproduce the juridical, monetary, coercive and infrastructural conditions of an encompassing capitalist society, and whether its own material reproduction remains bound to the reproduction of that society.

 

Concessions are real

This has to be pushed from another angle, because a crude theory of the capitalist state can lead to sectarian politics. Concessions won from the state are not fictitious just because the state is capitalist. A rural employment guarantee matters insofar as it provides employment and bargaining power; a debt waiver can materially transform the position of an indebted household; subsidised food, cheap credit, public irrigation and land redistribution remain real gains even where the totality of capitalist property relations remains intact. It is not in the spirit of Marxism to tell people that reforms do not matter because they did not end capitalism. Such concessions exist because class struggle, electoral pressure and popular mobilisation can penetrate state institutions and force policies which sections of the capitalist class may oppose. Poulantzas’s insistence that the state is not an impenetrable object in the bourgeoisie’s possession remains useful at precisely this point, even if his wider relational conception is not accepted.

But a concession extracted through class struggle does not, by itself, alter the embedded capitalist character of the organisational ensemble through which that concession is administered. This allows us to defend every real gain without postulating a neutral state that can gradually transform itself into socialism through an accretion of reforms. The relevant question is not whether subordinate classes can force the state to act against particular capitalist interests; they plainly can. It is whether those victories transform the institutional and material relations through which the state reproduces itself and the capitalist social order within which it is embedded.

 

Competing capitals and the state

The agrarian question shows particularly clearly why the capitalist character of the state cannot be identified with representation of “agrarian capital”, or, indeed, of any other single capitalist fraction. Agrarian capital wants higher prices for agricultural output and lower wages; industrial capital has an interest in cheap wage-goods, especially food, because reproduction costs enter into the determination of wages; fertiliser, seed and machinery capital wants agricultural investment and growth in input markets; commercial capital wants profitable procurement and distribution margins; financial capital wants credit expansion in combination with repayment; food-processing capital wants standardised, regular, low-cost raw-material supplies; retail capital demands logistical control and low purchase prices. These interests conflict. A support-price policy may favour producers while increasing procurement costs; a cheap-food policy may favour urban workers and industrial capital while squeezing cultivators; higher agricultural wages may raise workers’ incomes while increasing the costs of labour-hiring farms; fertiliser subsidies may support cultivation while indirectly transferring public revenue to fertiliser producers; cheap electricity may sustain irrigation while creating fiscal and ecological problems.

The state mediates these contradictions, but I would hesitate to describe this primarily as the organisation of the bourgeoisie into a Poulantzian power bloc. The historical balance among landlords, industrial capital, finance, agrarian capital and corporate agribusiness certainly matters; regional capitalist groups can gain or lose political influence, parties mediate those shifts, and organised capital can secure privileged access to particular state institutions. Yet the capitalist character of the state does not have to be re-established afresh from the balance of influence among these fractions. It lies more deeply in the fact that state managers confront these conflicts from within an organisational structure whose own reproduction depends upon maintaining the monetary, fiscal, juridical and infrastructural conditions of capitalist society. They can therefore favour one capital against another, regulate one fraction, subsidise a subordinate group or impose a compromise without becoming neutral between capitalist reproduction and a social order which would supersede it.

 

Small farmers and the capitalist state

The position of small cultivators is therefore contradictory in relation to the state, just as it is in relation to capitalist markets. They can demand protection from capital through the capitalist state: cheap credit against banks and moneylenders, lower input prices against corporations, higher output prices against traders and processors, insurance against market and climatic risks, protection against dispossession and public investment in infrastructure. The state may concede these demands in part or in whole. But the same state simultaneously reproduces the commodity relations through which small producers remain dependent upon markets. Subsidised institutional credit is still credit; cheap fertiliser remains a commodity input; procurement sustains commodity agriculture; machinery subsidies deepen mechanisation; infrastructure integrates farms more tightly into markets. State protection can therefore improve the conditions on which petty producers participate in capitalism without emancipating them from capitalist relations.

This is why a socialist programme cannot be reduced to the demand for “more state intervention”. India has had extensive state intervention in agriculture for decades. The issue is not simply which class gains influence over the existing state, but what social relations the state is organisationally constituted to reproduce, how its institutions are financed and maintained, and how those institutions would themselves have to be transformed if production and social reproduction ceased to be governed by capitalist accumulation. That formulation also prevents us from imagining that state ownership is, by itself, a socialist answer.

 

Public ownership is not automatically socialisation

Poulantzas offers a timely warning in this respect from an unlikely quarter. In his reflections on the states of so-called “real socialism”, he differentiates statisation from genuine socialisation: state ownership can preserve hierarchy and the separation of producers from decision-making.[35] That distinction matters when we draw up the programme for finance, machinery, agribusiness and processing. If the alternative to private agribusiness is simply a bureaucratic state corporation directed from above, workers and cultivators remain divorced from real control. Socialism therefore cannot mean the simple enlargement of the range of possessions of the present capitalist state; the organisational character of the institutions, the social purposes they reproduce, and the forms of democratic control exercised through them must all change. Mandel makes a related argument from the other side. Nationalisation, under late capitalism, is fully compatible with capitalist reproduction where it consolidates or enhances the profitability of private capital, while public spending and nationalised concerns can perform tasks which private capitals need but cannot profitably undertake themselves.[36]

Neither private ownership nor state ownership per se therefore tells us the social character of the relation. A public electricity system can subsidise capitalist accumulation; a nationalised bank can discipline workers and peasants; a state-owned fertiliser enterprise can operate according to profitability and commodity exchange. The issue is not reducible to “class power over the state”, but to the transformation of the social relations and organisational forms through which production, distribution and the state apparatus themselves are reproduced, together with democratic social control over those institutions.

 

Democracy and the state

There is a further reason to reject both crude instrumentalism and reformist neutrality. The capitalist state is not just a coercive apparatus. Representative institutions, law, civil liberties and electoral competition provide real arenas of struggle. Workers and peasants can organise, vote, strike, litigate and force concessions through them. Formal political equality nevertheless coexists with vast inequality of economic power: a corporation and an agricultural labourer each possess one vote, but they do not have equal capacities to shift investment, finance political campaigns, hire lobbyists, influence media, retain lawyers or threaten governments with disinvestment and economic crisis. Capitalist democracy therefore involves a contradiction, not a simple fraud, and the socialist response can neither be contempt for democratic liberties nor the liberal assumption that formal institutions have already dissolved the social power conferred by capitalist property.

The difference is important because a socialist transformation cannot consist of capturing an otherwise neutral organisational instrument and ordering it to pursue a different programme, any more than it can consist of replacing capitalist democracy with bureaucratic command. It has to extend democracy into the terrain of the economy and into the institutions of the state itself, transforming both the privately organised powers of production and appropriation emphasised by Wood and the public institutions which secure the general conditions of social reproduction. This is particularly pressing in agriculture, where bureaucratic forms of planning imposed upon cultivators have been at the heart of some of the worst experiences associated with twentieth-century socialism. A genuinely socialist transformation would have to bring rural workers, cultivators and consumers into the institutions making decisions over credit, water, machinery, crop planning, procurement and ecological transition.

 

Why the state protects the system even when it protects peasants

We can now answer the apparent paradox with which this section opened. How is it possible for the Indian state to be capitalist when it subsidises peasants, operates employment programmes, periodically cancels debts, regulates prices and sometimes enters into serious conflict with corporations? The answer is not that every such measure secretly serves the immediate interests of capitalists, nor that the capitalist class collectively instructs state managers to make whatever concessions are required. The more fundamental point is that the state, as an organisational complex, reproduces itself within a capitalist society and materially depends upon the continuing reproduction of that society. Its fiscal capacities, currency, administrative reach, infrastructures and coercive powers are not external to capitalist accumulation, even though state managers retain substantial autonomy in the policies through which they seek to maintain them.

That reproduction can require the survival of millions of petty producers, food subsidies which reduce the cost of reproducing labour-power, employment programmes which contain rural crisis, concessions to farmer movements, monopoly regulation and even nationalisation. Protecting the small producer against destruction by one capitalist does not protect that producer from capital as a social relation; indeed, preserving petty production can simultaneously preserve a form which cheaply reproduces labour, absorbs risk, supplies commodities and buys industrial inputs. The state can, therefore, protect the small farmer and reproduce capitalism at one and the same time, not because the farmer has been deceived or because every concession is merely apparent, but because the reproduction of petty production can itself be incorporated within the reproduction of capitalist society.

 

The strategic consequence

This also explains the limitations of a programme confined to winning supportive policies from the existing state. Credit subsidies, employment guarantees, higher procurement prices, land reform and social spending can all be worth fighting for, and some are indispensable. But as such struggles deepen, they raise questions which cannot be settled by a more benevolent administration of the same institutional relations: who controls the banks, who owns machinery production, how input prices are determined, who controls procurement, storage and distribution, who decides investment, and who controls water and energy? As long as these decisions remain subordinated to capitalist accumulation, reforms operate within a social order whose reproduction the existing state is institutionally bound to secure. This does not make transitional demands specious; it is what gives them their transitional content.

The agrarian and state questions are therefore linked, but not because the strategic problem can be reduced to deciding which class will “dominate” the existing state. The agrarian revolution cannot be consummated merely by asking the present state to regulate capitalism more benevolently, because that state has itself been one of the principal agencies through which capitalist agriculture was constituted and reproduced, and because its own material existence is embedded in the reproduction of capitalist society. The problem is therefore not insufficient state intervention, nor simply class power over an otherwise available state apparatus. It is the embedded capitalist character of the state as an organisational ensemble. A socialist transformation would have to alter the social relations on which the state materially depends and, at the same time, transform the institutions, purposes and democratic forms through which collective power is organised. That brings us to the rural class alliance itself: if neither an undifferentiated “peasantry” nor a progressive capitalist state can carry the transformation through, we have to identify the classes capable of doing so and, above all, confront the conflict between agricultural labourers and the cultivators who employ them.

 

 

1. Rural class differentiation, wage-conflict and proletarian hegemony

 

Once the capitalist character of the state has been affirmed, the problem of strategy is no longer that of the state in general, but that of the classes which are in confrontation in the countryside. At this point, another banal formula becomes treacherous if it is not clarified: the worker-peasant alliance. The term itself is unavoidable, but only on condition that the two terms are not elided in a fictitious rural bloc. There is no homogeneous peasantry and there is no reason why the interests of agricultural labourers and all cultivators should be the same simply because they can both be victims of banks, agribusiness, traders or the state.

The empirical case made in Section II has already suggested this. Marginal and small operational holdings hugely predominate in numbers, but area alone tells us very little about class position. A household may work land with family labour, hire in a tractor, buy seed and fertiliser on credit, hire labour for a few peak operations, and sell the labour-power of one or more family members during other parts of the year. The same household can therefore face capital from above and confront labour from below. If the first is acknowledged and the second repressed, class analysis is replaced by agrarian populism.

Bernstein’s characterisation of petty commodity production as a “contradictory unity” of the class locations of capital and labour is helpful for precisely this reason. Land, implements, seed and other inputs confront the household as productive assets which have to be reproduced, while household members themselves perform labour and have to reproduce themselves. Once reproduction is linked to commodity markets, the household faces competing claims upon its income: replacement of productive assets, debt service, consumption and generational reproduction. The contradictions are themselves a source of differentiation among petty commodity producers.[37]

The conventional groupings of rich, middle and poor peasants are not analytically useless but only if used as relations and tendencies, not as acreage boxes. Bernstein directly links differentiation to the point at which petty producers are “locked into” commodity production: some reproduce themselves as capital on an expanded scale, others precariously, and still others increasingly rely upon the sale of labour-power.[38]

This makes a very big difference in India. The wage-working cultivator with less than a hectare, who is a wage-labourer for four months of the year, is on a different class path from the cultivator with the same land holding whose household owns a machine, runs a business and regularly employs labour. On the other hand, a four-hectare holding does not necessarily mean a capitalist farmer if the reproduction of the household is still based heavily on family labour and off-farm wages. Class has to be derived from the reproduction of the household, not taken as read from the land register.

 

 

Proletarianisation without complete dispossession

A major obstacle to the understanding of contemporary rural class formation is the assumption that proletarianisation must necessarily be accompanied by a complete break from the land. It is not. The worker can continue to own a small plot. The household can grow its own food while being overwhelmingly dependent upon wages. Agricultural income can be topped up by construction work, transport, factory work, public employment schemes, migration or petty trade. Wages can even be used to finance cultivation. Bernstein explicitly points to precisely this reversal of the conventional “subsistence plus” model. Small-farm production can be financed from wages and wage-earnings can also be used to purchase food where the holding is unable to meet consumption needs. The apparent peasant economy is therefore already partly reproduced through the labour-market.[39]

The two Situation Assessment Surveys at least enable us to move a step beyond this general proposition, even if they do not enable us to map the class structure of rural India in its entirety and must not be made to bear a weight heavier than their definitions allow. At the all-India level, the average monthly income per agricultural household in nominal terms increased from Rs 6,426 in 2012–13 to Rs 10,218 in 2018–19. More significant for the present purpose is the change in composition. While wage and salary income increased from Rs 2,071, or 32.2 per cent of total household income, to Rs 4,063, or 39.8 per cent, the share of crop production declined from 47.9 to 37.2 per cent. Income from animal farming increased from 11.9 to 15.5 per cent, while non-farm business declined from 8.0 to 6.3 per cent; the 2018–19 survey also recorded an income of Rs 134 per month from leasing out land. These aggregates do not prove that forty per cent of cultivators are proletarians, since the survey category is one of an agricultural household rather than one of a class category, but they do establish that the reproduction of the average agricultural household had become more, not less, dependent upon wages between the two surveys. The evidence therefore cuts directly against any assumption that possession of land can be treated as a proxy for insulation from the labour-market.^[40]

 

Table 4. Average monthly income of agricultural households by source, all India

Source of income	2012–13 (Rs/month)	Share (%)	2018–19 (Rs/month)	Share (%)
Wages/salaries	2,071	32.2	4,063	39.8
Crop production	3,081	47.9	3,798	37.2
Animal farming	763	11.9	1,582	15.5
Non-farm business	512	8.0	641	6.3
Leasing out land	—	—	134	1.3
Total	6,426	100.0	10,218	100.0

Sources: NSS 70th Round, Report No. 576, Income, Expenditure, Productive Assets and Indebtedness of Agricultural Households in India, 2012–13; NSS 77th Round, Report No. 587, Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India, 2019. Nominal figures. Paid-out-expenses approach in 2018–19.

 

The same point is made still more sharply if we consider land size rather than the number of households. The figures in this case are indicative rather than a finished class analysis. In 2018–19, households possessing 0.01–0.40 hectares received Rs 4,491 per month from wages out of total income of Rs 7,522, or 59.7 per cent; for 0.40–1.00 hectares the corresponding figures were Rs 3,906 out of Rs 8,571, or 45.6 per cent. Even among households possessing 1.01–2.00 hectares, wages supplied Rs 3,647 per month, nearly 31.9 per cent of total income. Only as landholding increased did crop and livestock receipts decisively dominate: among holdings of 4.01–10 hectares they accounted for about 81.6 per cent of income, and among holdings above 10 hectares for about 90.6 per cent. This gradient does not abolish the hybrid positions discussed above; it demonstrates why acreage alone cannot define class, while also showing that dependence upon the sale of labour-power is concentrated towards the lower end of the land distribution.

The parallel with 2012–13 underlines this point. Taking a broader classification of holdings, marginal households up to one hectare in size derived around 48.3 per cent of their income from wages and salaries, compared to 23.5 per cent among small holdings of one to two hectares, 13.7 per cent among holdings of two to ten hectares, and only 3.2 per cent among holdings above ten hectares. Caution on precise categories and survey definitions is required, and the two rounds are not to be treated as a panel following the same households through time. But taken together with the evidence on mechanisation, inputs and credit discussed above, the income data strongly suggest a countryside in which petty cultivation and wage-dependence are not two mutually exclusive social worlds but two increasingly interpenetrating elements of household reproduction.

The point is of strategic significance. A revolutionary organisation which draws narrow boundaries around the proletariat as permanently landless wage-workers will have an underdeveloped sense of the social weight of labour. Millions of people shift between agricultural labour, non-agricultural wage-labour and small-scale cultivation over the course of a year. These activities combine in their household reproduction because Indian capitalism itself is a combination of them. The rural household can function as a device for subsidising labour-power. The small plot provides food for workers when employment is not available. The village household looks after children, the elderly and workers between migrations. Women are often the ones who perform much of the unpaid reproductive labour which makes seasonal and migrant employment possible. Capital gets labour when it needs it without necessarily bearing the full cost of its continuous reproduction. It would be misleading to characterise this as incomplete proletarianisation. Partial access to land may be one of the forms through which proletarianisation is organised.

 

Attached labour does not settle the mode-of-production question

The same caution has to be applied to labour relations which appear less than fully “free”. Rudra’s treatment is particularly useful because he refused to infer the nature of a labour relation from the duration or terminology of the contract. Farm servants, attached workers, annual labourers and casual labourers could differ in duration, method and frequency of payment, medium of payment, hours, freedom to work for other employers and forms of indebtedness or dependence. He, therefore, insisted that dependence had to be analysed through the totality of the relationship, not inferred simply from a long contract or an annual payment.[41]

His later discussion is even more damaging to the practice of reading a mode-of-production label off visible forms. A labourer may be paid a daily wage and bound to an employer by debt; another may have a long-term contract but some freedom to work elsewhere. Patron-client obligations can determine to which employer a worker offers his labour and at what wage.[42] None of this makes coercion unreal. It means that coercion cannot be used as a deus ex machina to short-circuit analysis. Capitalism does not need every labour-market to approximate a textbook model of anonymous free competition. Caste, debt, village power and personal dependence can all shape the buying and selling of labour-power. A wage-relation mediated by domination is still a wage-relation.

 

The conflict over wages cannot be wished away

We are now at the political centre of the section. Whatever contradictions of petty commodity production we have been concerned with so far, the cultivator who hires labour enters the wage-relation from the side of the purchaser. The worker enters it from the side of the seller of labour-power. Their immediate interests are therefore antagonistic over the wage. This need not require elaborate theoretical demonstration, but much agrarian politics has been erected on an inability or refusal to say it clearly. A rise in agricultural wages raises the income of workers and the cost of labour to employers. A fall in wages has the reverse effect. The fact that the employer may himself be squeezed by debt, input prices or traders does not abolish this antagonism. Nor does the fact that the worker may also cultivate a small plot.

The wage evidence is less complete than the household-income material and must be used more guardedly. The Labour Bureau publishes a long series of Wage Rates in Rural India. For the years of our period, there are annual reports and for the more recent years monthly state-level observations (differentiated by operation and sex). Categories change over parts of the series; observations are not always available for all state-operation-sex combinations and, to be sure, serious comparison of real wages requires consistent deflation rather than a juxtaposition of nominal daily rates. I, therefore, do not propose to manufacture an all-India real-wage series from these incomplete observations. What the available material permits is a more limited but still important conclusion: rural wages are measurable class relations rather than an impressionistic claim about ‘labour shortage’, while the variations by operation, state and sex make any general assertion that rising wages either explain the agrarian crisis or have uniformly improved labour’s position methodologically indefensible. The wage evidence must therefore remain indicative, while the stronger quantitative claim rests on the Situation Assessment Surveys which show the increasing weight of wage-income in agricultural-household reproduction.^[43]

The case is not to be made like this: wages go up, ergo farmers get squeezed. Nor like this: farmers are squeezed by capital, ergo wages are too high. The issue is who is being asked to bear the costs of agricultural reproduction. That distinction is decisive whenever farmer organisations complain of labour scarcity or rising wages.

 

The worker cannot subsidise the farmer

A programme which exhorts agricultural labourers to limit their wage-demands because small cultivators are squeezed is not a proletarian programme. It seeks to shift the burdens that finance capital, agribusiness and commercial capital place on the countryside downwards. If a cultivator’s gross income is being squeezed by the cost of fertilisers, interest payments, machinery hire, low output prices and rising wages, there are multiple political responses possible. One is to lower the wage. Another is to lower the costs imposed by the bank, input company, machinery owner, trader or processor. The first protects petty production at the cost of labour. The second tries to build an alliance against capital. The difference between them is the entire political problem in miniature. The agricultural labourer cannot be told that her poverty is the price of preserving the small farmer. But socialists cannot greet the genuinely distressed petty producer with indifference either. If higher wages threaten the reproduction of a vulnerable holding, the solution must come from transferring resources from higher concentrations of capital: cheaper credit, public provision of machinery, lower input costs, insurance, procurement, storage and control over commercial margins. The principle must therefore be stated unambiguously: the survival of small cultivation should not be subsidised through the underpayment of agricultural labour. Where the farm does not generate enough surplus to provide both a good living and reproduction of the holding, the question is one of the redistribution of surplus in the broader agricultural commodity chain. This points straight to agribusiness, finance and commercial capital.

 

Petty commodity production is exploited – and can exploit

Harriss-White can be helpful because she accords seriousness to the exploitation of petty commodity producers through markets that are not the labour-market. Rental markets in land and in machinery, money markets, raw-material markets and markets for manufactured inputs all involve relations through which petty producers can be deprived of surplus. She argues that labour politics has largely failed to identify these arenas as sites of exploitation.[44] That insight should be built on. But it must not be taken over as the argument that petty producers are, therefore, simply labour. Harriss-White’s own account complicates the issue. The legal definition of “labour” in India can include employers of up to five persons because of the smallness of the scale of operation, thereby erasing the distinction between petty capital, petty commodity production and wage-labour.[45] The political problem cannot be resolved by reproducing that legal confusion on a theoretical level. The small employer can be subordinate to larger capital and still have an interest in keeping wages down. The tractor-owner can be squeezed by a bank and still appropriate income by renting out machinery to poorer producers.

A trader who is dependent on bigger commercial capital can still exploit cultivators. Class relations form chains; they do not always form two sociologically immaculate camps. This is what makes rural class politics difficult. It is also what makes it necessary.

 

MGNREGA and the wage-floor

Harriss-White offers an especially apt example on the subject of rural employment guarantee. She writes that rural employment programmes can “have an impact on petty producers precisely because they raise the wage floor in the formal sector against which petty commodity production must compete.”[46] That should not be taken as an indictment of the employment guarantee. On the contrary, viewed from the perspective of agricultural labour, it is one of the virtues of such a programme. An employment programme backed by the state provides an outside option for the worker, thereby loosening the employers’ stranglehold over the worker’s survival. Actual implementation may fall far short of statutory promise, but the mere existence of an outside option can enhance bargaining power.

The political answer to such complaints that MGNREGA or any other programme of employment “makes agricultural labour expensive” cannot therefore be to “weaken” the programme. That would restore labour discipline by increasing desperation. A workers’ programme must demand the opposite: expanded employment guarantees, higher wages, timely payment and stronger enforcement. But this again sharpens the need for an agrarian policy directed against the upper reaches of capital. Otherwise, the richer farmer can exploit the resulting conflict to mobilise small cultivators against labour.

 

Farmers’ movements and the fiction of a single farmer interest

The category farmer is politically powerful as it recodes an occupation or property relation as an apparently unified class identity. But farmers can be net sellers or net buyers of food. They can hire labour or sell labour. They can be heavily indebted or substantial creditors. They can own machinery or hire it. They can produce largely for household reproduction or accumulate on an expanded scale. They can control ten hectares or less than half a hectare. To treat all of them as one class because they cultivate land is analytically indefensible. Farmer movements can therefore contain contradictory class programmes. A demand for higher output prices can benefit poor market-selling cultivators, middle farmers and large agrarian capital simultaneously, though in radically unequal amounts.

Demand for cheaper fertiliser can also bring them together for some time. Demand for low agricultural wages divides them from labour at once. Demand for free use of ground water jars with the long-term interests of labourers, small cultivators and society as a whole.

An anti-corporate purchasing movement can bring together producers who are otherwise bitterly divided by class relations within production. Such mobilisations must be judged on their merits. The fact that agrarian capital fights corporate capital does not make agrarian capital proletarian. Inter-capitalist conflict remains possible in agriculture as everywhere else.

 

Differentiating the rural classes politically

A strategy for revolution therefore requires a political differentiation wider than the official fivefold classification of acreage. On one side are agricultural labourers and largely wage-dependent rural households, including many who have held on to small plots. The independent organisation of these is essential. On the other side are poor petty producers whose reproduction is based primarily on family labour, who may hire labour only episodically, but who are heavily dependent themselves on wage-earnings, debt and insecure sales of commodities. These are potentially the strongest allies of labour.

Middle producers are in a more contradictory situation. A middle producer may reproduce through family labour and still hire a lot of labour in peak periods; a middle producer may slowly accumulate and may be subject to downward pressures. Middle producers also cannot be assumed to be politically with us. At one end of the middle producers are capitalist farmers and agrarian entrepreneurs for whom expanded reproduction is systematically based on hired labour and expanded accumulation, and often also on the ownership or leasing of machines and/or their involvement in trade, processing, transport, moneylending or other commercial activities. No one quantitative indicator can pigeonhole each and every household. That is not a failing. Class reality itself is fluid.

 

The alliance requires independent organisation

This is where Gramsci’s formulation in the text on the Southern Question is of particular help. Writing about the alliance between workers and peasants, he did not suggest that poor peasants had to be organisationally subsumed into a proletarian party or into an amorphous popular bloc. On the contrary, he argued, the proletariat can shatter the agrarian bloc to the extent that it organises substantial numbers of poor peasants into “autonomous and independent formations”.[47] Notice the phrasing. Autonomy is not the negation of an alliance. It is a condition for an alliance. And this is even more true of agricultural labourers. Their organisation cannot be secondary to those of farmers in the name of unity. Wage-demands, struggles around working conditions, caste oppression, sexual violence, housing, common resources and land cannot be deferred because they are inconvenient for cultivators.

A worker-peasant alliance in which workers are asked to stop behaving as workers is not an alliance. It is class subordination. The converse also follows. Independent organisation does not mean that every contradiction must become an organisational rupture. Agricultural labour unions and poor-peasant organisations can coordinate around common demands while preserving the capacity to act separately when interests diverge. Indeed, only such independence makes durable cooperation possible. Unity imposed through silence accumulates grievances until it breaks.

 

Caste is inside the class relation

This becomes particularly important since agricultural labour-markets in India are organised through the institution of caste. The wage-relation is never simply the meeting of abstract labour and abstract capital. Entitlement to work, bargaining power, settlement, customary obligations, susceptibility to violence and control over land and common resources may all be mediated through caste. Rudra’s own characterisation of rural labour relations, in fact, already cautioned that custom, caste and status determined whether family members sold labour and which agricultural operations they performed, with especially critical consequences for women’s labour.[48] A socialist politics which approaches caste as a secondary cultural question therefore falters even at the level of class analysis itself.

If caste diminishes the bargaining power of workers, fragments the labour-market or strengthens dependency on the dominant agrarian class, then the fight against caste is a fight over exploitation. The same is true of gender. Women’s unpaid family labour can sustain petty production at levels of income that would be unviable if all labour had to be bought at market wages. Women may combine agricultural labour, household reproduction and wage-labour without property rights or control over the use of income. ‘Family labour’, in statistical representations, can thus mask complex power relations. The worker-peasant alliance has to be reconstituted through these oppressions, not over them.

 

Hegemony is not numerical majority

At this stage, the strategic import of proletarian hegemony becomes clearer. The assertion of the need for working-class leadership does not hinge on the (false) claim that wage-workers necessarily form an arithmetical majority in every village. Nor does it turn on some moral superiority of workers over peasants. Trotsky’s notion of hegemony revolved around the ability of the proletariat to lead other oppressed classes precisely because its class programme could advance democratic struggles beyond the limits dictated by bourgeois property. Dal Maso is right to emphasise that hegemony, for Trotsky, entailed political leadership of the peasantry and that the bourgeois-democratic dynamic could, under specific conditions of capitalism, open up the road to workers’ power rather than remaining at the level of its original tasks.[49] The point is not that of copying Russian history. It is that class leadership is a political matter. The working class becomes hegemonic to the extent that it proves that its programme can more consistently address the material conditions of subaltern rural producers than either agrarian capital or bourgeois populism.

It must convince the small cultivator that debt can be fought only by taking on finance. The cost of machinery can be brought down by socialising machinery services. Input dependence can be ended through public control of input industries.

It is possible to stabilise output prices with procurement and socialised distribution. Ecological transition does not have to mean bankruptcy. Workers’ higher wages do not require the destruction of small cultivation if surplus is taken from capital above. The basis of hegemony is, therefore, a programme which unites the interests of labour to the liberation of other oppressed layers without dissolving labour’s independent interests.

 

Against the popular-front logic in the countryside

This distinction also cuts off proletarian hegemony from the logic of a bloc where labour forces subordinate themselves to so-called progressive property-owning classes. The Menshevik strategy in Russia derived bourgeois leadership from the bourgeois-democratic nature of the tasks. Trotsky’s critique was that we have to start from the actual class forces, and not from the historic name we give to the revolution. Dal Maso neatly summarises the contrast: the Mensheviks put forward a bourgeois government which would pave the way for capitalism. Trotsky argued that the weakness of the bourgeoisie and the development of the proletariat made working-class leadership necessary.[50] The parallel methodological mistake is when Indian Marxists infer from the continuing presence of agrarian problems that some progressive capitalist or rich-peasant force must therefore have a historically necessary role. The task does not choose its agent. Class struggle does. If rich farmers mobilise against agribusiness, revolutionaries can support particular demands. But they do not give up leadership to them. If domestic capital fights multinational capital, particular anti-imperialist measures may be supportable. That does not make domestic capital into an ally for socialist transformation.

If farmer organisations resist dispossession, workers can fight alongside them. They do not stop organising agricultural workers against those farmers, where the struggle over wage-exploitation requires it. Alliance has to be material. Class independence has to be lasting.

 

The target is not “the farmer”

This allows us to state the agrarian programme much more precisely. The target cannot be the farmer as such. Nor can the target be the smallholder as such. The target has to be capitalist power within the agrarian system. That includes capitalist farmers who systematically exploit wage-labour and accumulate. But it also includes finance, machinery capital, agrochemical and seed corporations, processors, large traders, storage and logistics capital and corporate retail. The agrarian question can therefore no longer be reduced to the land question.

Land redistribution is still essential where concentration of land, caste monopoly and landlessness are still widespread. But redistribution that leaves credit, machinery and markets unaffected can substitute one bondage for another. On the other hand, socialising the agribusiness while leaving the land question unsettled will perpetuate gigantic inequalities in cultivation. The programme has to tackle the whole structure.

 

From defence of small production to its transcendence

There is also a strategic problem, beyond the immediate needs of defence. Socialists cannot and should not promise to freeze millions of minuscule holdings in their existing form, in perpetuity. There is nothing emancipatory about labour-intensive penury. There is nothing socialist about a backbreaking family-labour farm simply because it is small. Harriss-White sharpens the dilemma when she asks whether petty commodity production should be enabled to accumulate (thus hastening differentiation) or be transcended via collectivised, cooperative or socialised modes of production.[51] The answer should be the latter. But the method matters. Cooperation cannot be built by treating small producers as the roadblock to socialist modernisation. It has to prove materially superior. Public or cooperative machinery pools can lower individual capital thresholds. Cooperative storage can prevent forced sales.

Cheap social credit can remove financial dependence. Collective irrigation can reduce individual risk. Scientific support can raise productivity. Social insurance can reduce the catastrophic consequences of crop failure. Only when larger cooperative forms visibly improve security and reduce labour can producers be won to them democratically.

Forced collectivisation produced one of the greatest historical disasters committed in the name of socialism precisely because administrative coercion substituted for material and political persuasion. A socialist agrarian policy has to begin from the opposite premise. The first property to attack is concentrated capitalist property. The petty producer should be won, not crushed.

 

The material basis of the alliance

Thus, we can specify the material essence of a proletarian rural bloc. Agrarian labourers are paid higher wages and have greater job security. Marginal and small peasants are freed from debt and given access to low-cost credit, public machinery services, lower-cost inputs, insurance and protection from predatory commercial capital. Middle peasants receive security from corporate encroachment but have limits placed on their exploitation of labour. Big agrarian capital and agribusiness bear the burden. This does not resolve all conflicts between labour and cultivation. It relegates the main weight upward.

That is the difference between proletarian hegemony and peasant populism. Populism says “labour and capital in the countryside, unite as producers, against somebody outside”. Proletarian hegemony differentiates the countryside, organises labour independently, wins the poorer producers and leads the alliance against capital wherever capital is found: on the farm, in the bank, in the machinery depot, in the processing plant or in the retail chain. The alliance is therefore not founded on the fiction that workers and peasants have identical interests. It is founded on a programme capable of resolving their contradictions at the expense of capital rather than at the expense of the weaker ally.

And, once that programme is posed concretely, the old division between an agrarian democratic revolution today and a socialist revolution at some later stage becomes increasingly impossible to sustain. For the measures required to defend the worker and the poor cultivator simultaneously begin to encroach upon finance, agribusiness, machinery capital, processing and commercial property. The agrarian struggle itself begins to cross the frontier of capitalist property. That is where permanent revolution ceases to be an abstract doctrine and becomes the strategic conclusion of the class analysis.

 

1. Permanent revolution and the agrarian programme

The unfinished democratic and agrarian tasks remain real: land redistribution, secure tenancy, freedom from caste domination and labour coercion, women’s property rights, and protection against dispossession and imperialist power. Their persistence does not establish the availability of a separate bourgeois-democratic stage. As I argued in The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, tasks resembling those of the classical bourgeois revolutions do not necessarily have the same class content: “similarity does not mean identity”. Capitalist development within an imperialist world-economy changes both their possible agents and their revolutionary dynamics.[52]

The preceding analysis identifies the capitalist relations which an agrarian transformation must confront. Land redistribution remains indispensable where concentrated ownership, caste monopoly and landlessness persist. But a redistributed holding can remain subordinated to banks, input suppliers, machinery owners and commercial oligopolies. The agrarian question, therefore, extends beyond the land question. Its resolution requires an attack on the concentrations of capital which command the conditions of cultivation and the movement of food from producer to consumer.

Trotsky’s analysis of China offers a methodological comparison, rather than a historical model to reproduce. The interlocking of landed property with bourgeois and imperialist interests gave agrarian revolt an anti-bourgeois as well as an anti-feudal thrust.[53] His rejection of the claim that economic backwardness endowed the national bourgeoisie with a revolutionary role is relevant here. The question is which class can carry the struggle through, not which historical label attaches to its initial demands.[54] In contemporary India, conflicts between domestic and foreign capital, farmers and processors, or processors and retail capital do not produce a bourgeois class capable of abolishing capitalist command over agriculture.

 

Democratic demands and socialist measures

Permanent revolution does not mean bypassing democratic demands. Working-class leadership has to be established through struggles for land, tenancy rights, debt relief, remunerative prices, irrigation, access to common resources, anti-caste transformation and women’s emancipation. It cannot be secured by asking other oppressed groups to postpone their needs. The working class acquires hegemony by demonstrating that its programme can meet those needs more consistently than bourgeois leadership, while preserving its own political independence.[55]

This gives transitional demands their content. Debt cancellation challenges financial claims on future production; cheap productive credit raises the question of control over finance; assured prices require control of procurement, storage and distribution; affordable machinery raises questions of ownership and access; ecological transition requires decisions over investment, water and crop patterns. These struggles begin with immediate needs, but securing their gains brings them into conflict with capitalist property and the institutions which reproduce it. Their development depends on class organisation and the balance of forces; it is not guaranteed by the wording of a programme.

The principle established in Section V remains decisive: agricultural labourers must not subsidise the survival of small cultivation through low wages. Nor should vulnerable producers bear the entire cost of higher wages or ecological transition. Resources must, instead, be transferred from the concentrated capitals which appropriate income through finance, inputs, machinery services and commodity markets. The alliance rests on independent labour organisation and material support for poorer cultivators, not on the suppression of their conflicts. Middle producers must be won through security against corporate domination and improved conditions of production, while limits are imposed on their exploitation of labour.

 

Socialise the conditions of production

The first targets of socialisation should be the concentrated capitalist institutions on which dispersed holdings depend: major banks, machinery production, large seed and agrochemical industries, processing, storage, logistics and wholesale distribution. Irrigation, energy and agricultural research must likewise be organised according to social need. Agribusiness is part of the agricultural production system, not an external parasite which can be removed to restore a self-sufficient peasant economy. Capitalism has already created technical interdependence across the farm boundary; socialist transformation must change its ownership, purposes and control.[56]

Machinery hiring provides a practical starting point. Millions of cultivators already use equipment they do not own. Public or cooperative machinery centres could transform that existing technical arrangement by providing equipment at socially determined charges. They could reduce duplication, organise maintenance and choose techniques according to ecological conditions and labour needs. Concentrated machinery can serve dispersed holdings without making immediate consolidation of land a precondition of modern production.

Socialised credit would similarly allocate resources according to democratically determined productive priorities. A nationalised bank which continues to rank farmers solely by collateral, profitability and repayment capacity reproduces much of the existing hierarchy. Public ownership must therefore be accompanied by a change in the purposes and administration of lending. Debt relief, affordable working credit and protection against crop failure have to support household security rather than private accumulation.

The same criterion applies to agricultural science and input industries. Neither a return to traditional techniques nor indefinite intensification of chemical inputs supplies a socialist answer. Plant breeding, seed research and agricultural science remain necessary, but their direction must be governed by food security, ecological sustainability, labour requirements and producer welfare. Some inputs and techniques will have to be reduced or abandoned; others will require expansion. Poor cultivators must receive the resources needed for that transition rather than being left to absorb its costs.

 

Win producers to cooperation

Socialists cannot promise to preserve millions of minute, labour-intensive holdings indefinitely. But compulsory collectivisation substitutes administrative coercion for the worker-peasant alliance. The distinction between poor and middle producers and accumulating agrarian capital has to be realised through policy, not denunciation. Trotsky’s concern with the Soviet scissors’ crisis – the divergence between industrial and agricultural prices – warned against financing industrialisation through an indiscriminate squeeze on the peasantry. Maintaining the alliance required attention to prices, rural differentiation and the material conditions for collective production.

Cooperation must demonstrate its advantages: reliable machinery and irrigation, storage, assured marketing, insurance, scientific support, income security and reduced working time. Social care can relieve the unpaid labour, disproportionately performed by women, which sustains isolated household production. These gains can make cooperative cultivation attractive without making the surrender of individual plots a condition of access to basic support. The petty producer has to be won over, not crushed. Socialising the concentrated conditions of production creates the material basis for a democratic reorganisation of cultivation itself.

 

Democratic planning and international transformation

Nationalisation alone cannot accomplish this programme. As Section IV argued, the existing state is an organisational ensemble whose material reproduction is embedded in capitalist society. Its institutions must themselves be transformed, rather than simply instructed to administer a different set of policies. Decisions over credit, water, investment, energy, procurement and research require effective participation by workers, agricultural labourers, cultivators and consumers. Women and oppressed castes need institutional power sufficient to challenge household and local hierarchies. Scientific expertise must inform decisions without becoming an unaccountable authority.

Planning will involve conflicts. Higher producer prices can raise food costs; water conservation can require changes in cropping; mechanisation can displace labour; ecological measures can reduce short-term output. Democratic institutions are necessary because these choices affect groups with distinct interests. Producer security must be combined with affordable food, employment and social protection. An algorithm cannot settle the political question of who bears the costs.

The transformation also has an international dimension. Inputs, energy, technology, finance and agricultural prices are internationally connected; climate change and imperialist constraints cannot be resolved within India alone. A workers’ government could redistribute resources, socialise major concentrations of capital and reorganise agriculture, but the lasting resolution of uneven development requires the extension of socialist transformation beyond national borders. Permanent revolution retains this international meaning.

 

The programme

The resulting programme combines the following measures:

• land redistribution where concentrated ownership, absentee landlordism, caste monopoly and landlessness require it, together with secure tenancy and protection against eviction;
• autonomous agricultural labour organisation, enforceable minimum wages, expanded employment guarantees and universal social security;
• cancellation or restructuring of unsustainable small-producer debt, affordable productive credit and socialisation of major banks under democratic control;
• public and cooperative machinery centres and socialisation or stringent democratic control of major seed, fertiliser, pesticide and agribusiness corporations;
• public procurement, storage, processing and transport protecting producers and consumers from commercial oligopoly, with expropriation of dominant capitalist concentrations in processing, logistics and retail;
• voluntary cooperation encouraged through material improvements in productivity, security and working conditions;
• democratic planning of water, energy, crop patterns and ecological transition;
• abolition of caste discrimination in land and labour relations, enforcement of women’s equal property and labour rights, and protection of indigenous and forest communities;
• workers’, cultivators’ and community control over the institutions implementing these measures.

 

These measures belong together because of their class logic. They defend labour and poorer cultivators by challenging capital’s command over production and reproduction. Democratic demands lead towards socialist measures because the relations obstructing their fulfilment are already capitalist. The democratic tasks remain; their completion does not require subordination to a supposedly progressive bourgeois stage.

 

 

VII. Conclusion: backward capitalism is still capitalism

 

The mode-of-production controversy raised a strategic question which remains necessary: which classes can transform Indian society? Its answer cannot be read directly from the survival of tenancy, attached labour, small holdings or technological backwardness. The decisive issue is how these relations are reproduced, who controls the conditions of production and where the surplus accumulates.

The evidence reviewed here supports the dominance of capitalist relations without demonstrating either uniform technical transformation or the disappearance of petty cultivation. Fragmented holdings have become increasingly dependent on industrial inputs, credit and machinery services, while household reproduction combines cultivation with wage-income. These combinations are forms of capitalist development. They do not establish separate historical stages merely because they diverge from the English agrarian sequence. Nor do the administrative surveys constitute a complete class map: their categories and limits require further investigation of household trajectories, labour relations and regional differences.

The strategic consequence is a working-class-led alliance which differentiates the countryside. Agricultural labourers require independent organisation; poorer cultivators require an alternative to dependence on finance, agribusiness and commercial capital. Their immediate conflicts, especially over wages, cannot be abolished by declarations of peasant unity. A common programme must defend labour, while transferring the costs of producer-security away from the weakest rural groups and towards concentrated capital.

That programme must combine land reform with the socialisation of the wider conditions of agricultural production. It must extend democracy into economic institutions and transform the organisational forms of the state. Cooperation must offer cultivators material improvements rather than compulsory collectivisation. Anti-caste struggle, women’s emancipation and ecological planning are integral to this transformation because the relations they confront structure contemporary production and reproduction.

The persistence of democratic tasks therefore supplies no warrant for waiting for capitalism to complete a predetermined historical sequence. Indian capitalism reproduces the poverty, unevenness and inherited domination which stage theory assigns to an earlier epoch. Overcoming these contradictions requires a struggle to transcend capitalist relations, through a socialist transformation which begins from the immediate needs of workers and poorer producers and extends beyond national boundaries.

 

References

Banaji, Jairus 1977, ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Economic and Political Weekly, 12, 33–4: 1375–404.

Banaji, Jairus 2016, ‘Merchant Capitalism, Peasant Households and Industrial Accumulation: Integration of a Model’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 16, 3: 410–31.

Bernstein, Henry 2010, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change, Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Bernstein, Henry 2021, ‘Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on Researching Class’, in Marx in the Field, edited by Alessandra Mezzadri, London: Anthem Press.

Bhaduri, Amit 1983, The Economic Structure of Backward Agriculture, London: Academic Press.

Chattopadhyay, Kunal 2006, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, Kolkata: Progressive Publishers.

Dal Maso, Juan 2021, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Government of India n.d., All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015–16, New Delhi: Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.

Government of India 2021, All India Report on Input Survey 2016–17, New Delhi: Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.

Gramsci, Antonio n.d., ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, in The Gramsci Reader, edited by David Forgacs.

Harriss-White, Barbara 2018, ‘Awkward Classes and India’s Development’, Review of Political Economy, 30, 3: 355–76.

Labour Bureau n.d., Wage Rates in Rural India, annual and monthly series, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India.

Mandel, Ernest 1975 [1972], Late Capitalism, translated by Joris De Bres, London: NLB.

Mezzadri, Alessandra 2021, ‘Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India’, in Marx in the Field, edited by Alessandra Mezzadri, London: Anthem Press.

Miliband, Ralph 1969, The State in Capitalist Society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

National Sample Survey Office 2016, Income, Expenditure, Productive Assets and Indebtedness of Agricultural Households in India, NSS Report No. 576, 70th Round, 2012–13, New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

National Statistical Office 2021, Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India, 2019, NSS Report No. 587, 77th Round, New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

Patnaik, Utsa (ed.) 1990, Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The ‘Mode of Production’ Debate in India, Bombay: Oxford University Press.

Poulantzas, Nicos 1978, State, Power, Socialism, translated by Patrick Camiller, London: Verso.

Rudra, Ashok 1992, Political Economy of Indian Agriculture, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi.

Saccarelli, Emanuele 2008, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition, London: Routledge.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins 1981, ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review, I, 127: 66–95.

^[1] Patnaik 1990. The collection contains the major contributions on capitalist differentiation, labour use, productive forces and relations of production that shaped the controversy.

[2] Bhaduri 1983.

[3] Rudra 1992, p. 358.

[4] Rudra 1992, pp. 360–1.

[5] Banaji 1977; Bernstein 2021, pp. 20–1.

^[6] Mezzadri 2021, pp. 70–2. Formal subsumption is not necessarily transitory.

[7] Banaji 2016; Harriss-White 2018.

[8] Rudra 1992, pp. 338–9.

[9] Government of India n.d., Table 4.1.

[10] Government of India n.d.

[11] Government of India 2021.

[12] Government of India 2021, Table 5.

[13] Government of India 2021.

[14] Government of India n.d.

[15] Government of India 2021, Tables 3.8 (a)–(b).

[16] Government of India 2021, Table 3.9 (a).

[17] Government of India 2021, Table 3.9 (b).

[18] Harriss-White 2018, p. 370.

[19] Government of India 2021, Tables 3.8 (a) and 3.9 (a).

[20] Bernstein 2010, pp. 102–4.

[21] Bernstein 2010, pp. 103–4.

[22] Bernstein 2010, p. 103.

[23] Chattopadhyay 2006, p. 105.

[24] Chattopadhyay 2006, p. 105, quoting Trotsky.

[25] Saccarelli 2008, pp. 98–9.

[26] Mandel 1975.

[27] Mandel 1975.

[28] Chattopadhyay 2006, pp. 105–6.

[29] Mandel 1975, pp. 481–4; see also pp. 474–84.

[30] Mandel 1975, pp. 515–22.

[31] Poulantzas 1978, pp. 127–9; Miliband 1969.

[32] Wood 1981, pp. 66–95; Mandel 1975.

[33] Poulantzas 1978, pp. 17–25; Wood 1981, pp. 66–95.

[34] Rudra 1992, pp. 178–80.

[35] Poulantzas 1978, pp. 51, 175–6.

[36] Mandel 1975, pp. 480–90, especially pp. 480–7.

[37] Bernstein 2010, pp. 103–4.

[38] Bernstein 2010, pp. 104ff.

[39] Bernstein 2010, pp. 103–4.

^[40] National Sample Survey Office 2016, Table T1 and Appendix A, Table 1; National Statistical Office 2021, Summary of Findings and income tables. The two rounds are not a household panel; these figures indicate changes in household reproduction rather than constituting a complete class map.

[41] Rudra 1992, pp. 233–4.

[42] Rudra 1992, pp. 234–5.

^[43] Labour Bureau n.d., annual and monthly series. Changing classifications by operation, state and sex, together with missing observations, preclude construction of a synthetic all-India real-wage series without a separate harmonisation exercise.

[44] Harriss-White 2018.

[45] Harriss-White 2018, p. 363.

[46] Harriss-White 2018, pp. 363–4.

[47] Gramsci n.d., p. 185.

[48] Rudra 1992.

[49] Dal Maso 2021, pp. 48, 59.

[50] Dal Maso 2021, pp. 43–59.

[51] Harriss-White 2018, p. 363.

[52] Chattopadhyay 2006, pp. 84–5.

[53] Chattopadhyay 2006.

[54] Dal Maso 2021, pp. 52–8.

[55] Dal Maso 2021, pp. 48, 59.

[56] Mandel 1975, pp. 118–20.