Abstract
Although the concept of Petty Commodity Production (PCP) has become extremely important to Marxist political economy analyses of the Global South, it is generally assumed that the concept is not contained in Marx’s own work and is an innovation by later scholars. Going against this established view, this chapter argues that although the term PCP is not found in Marx’s own writings, his writings do contain a rich set of references to the development of small-scale production in pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, albeit in an incoherent manner. It discovers three problematics related to PCP that are found in Marx’s writings—dissolution, conservation, and exploitation-autonomy—and goes on to explain the rationale behind each, arguing that it is the third which ties most closely to the critical Marxist scholarship on petty production developed by future scholars. In the rest of the chapter, the agrarian transformation and trajectory of capitalist development in India is studied with respect to the existence of PCP and it is argued that all three problematics are found to be operating in India’s small-scale property-dominated form of capitalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Barbara Harriss-White, “Capitalism and the Common Man: Peasants and Petty Production in Africa and South Asia,”Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 1, no. 2 (2012): 118.
- 2.
Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question (London: Zwan Publications, 1988), 168.
- 3.
Barbara Harriss-White, “From Analysing Filieres Vivrieres to Understanding Capital and Petty Production in Rural South India,” Journal of Agrarian Change 16, no. 3 (2016): 485.
- 4.
Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 82.
- 5.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 729.
- 6.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 471–9.
- 7.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 637.
- 8.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 78.
- 9.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 878.
- 10.
Ibid., 886.
- 11.
Ibid., 876.
- 12.
Jairus Banaji, “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Economic and Political Weekly 12, no. 33/34 (1977): 1375–404.
- 13.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 1075; Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 379.
- 14.
Banaji, Capitalist Domination, 1376.
- 15.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 1021.
- 16.
Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, 767.
- 17.
Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 452.
- 18.
Marx, Capital, Vol. II (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 318.
- 19.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 911–12.
- 20.
Ibid., 1023.
- 21.
Marx, Grundrisse, 510.
- 22.
Henry Bernstein, “Capitalism and Petty-Bourgeois Production : Class Relations and Divisions of Labour,” Journal of Peasant Studies 15, no. 2 (1988): 260.
- 23.
Harriss-White, From Analysing Filieres Vivrieres, 479.
- 24.
Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), 452–3.
- 25.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 932.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid., 933.
- 28.
A. Srijia and Srinivas V. Shirke, An Analysis of the Informal Labour Market in India (New Delhi: Confederation of Indian Industry, 2014), 1.
- 29.
Government of India, Economic Statistics (New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics, 2014).
- 30.
Alessandra Mezzadri, “Globalisation, Informalisation and the State in the Indian Garment Industry,” International Review of Sociology 20, no. 3 (2010): 492.
- 31.
John Harriss, Capitalism and Peasant Farming: Agrarian Structure and Ideology in Northern Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).
- 32.
Muhammad Ali Jan, “Rural-Commercial Capital: Accumulation, Class and Power in Pakistani Punjab” (PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 2017).
- 33.
No doubt, some who present agriculture as their main occupation are combining work in agriculture with work in non-agriculture.
- 34.
Venkatesh et al., “Trends in Agriculture, Non-Farm Sector and Rural Employment in India: An Insight from State Level Analysis,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences 85, no. 5 (2017).
- 35.
Walter Fernandes, “Singur and the Displacement Scenario,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 3 (January 2007): 204.
- 36.
Shapan Adnan, “Primitive Accumulation and the ‘Transition to Capitalism,’ in Neoliberal India: Mechanisms, Resistance and the Persistence of ‘Self-Employed’ Labour,” in Indian Capitalism in Development, ed. Barbara Harriss-White and Judith Heyer (London: Routledge, 2015), 33.
- 37.
Harriss-White, Capitalism and the Common Man, 117.
- 38.
Deepankar Basu, “An Approach to the Problem of Employment in India,” UMass Amherst Economics Working Papers 239 (2018).
- 39.
NCEUS, Reports on the Financing of Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector and Creation of a National Fund for the Unorganised Sector (New Delhi: Government of India, 2007), 50.
- 40.
Ibid., 66–73.
- 41.
Olsen et al., “Multiple Shocks and Slum Household Economies in South India,” Economy and Society 42, no. 3 (2013): 412.
- 42.
Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, in MECW (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), 34: 102.
- 43.
Mezzadri, Globalization, Informalization and the State, 496.
- 44.
Barbara Harriss-White, “Debt, Credit and Contractual Synchrony in a South Indian Market Town,” in Microfinance, Debt and Over Indebtedness: Juggling with Money, ed. Isabelle Guerin, Solene Morvant-Roux, and Villarealm Magdalena (New York: Routledge, 2014).
- 45.
Caroline Moser, “Informal Sector or Petty Commodity Production: Dualism or Dependence in Urban Development,” World Development 6, no. 9/10 (1978): 1056–60.
- 46.
Christine Lutringer, “A Movement of Subsidized Capitalists? The Multilevel Influence of the Bharatiya Kisan Union in India,” International Review of Sociology 20, no. 3 (2010): 518.
- 47.
Michael Lieven, Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).
- 48.
NCEUS, Reports on the Financing of Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector and Creation of a National Fund for the Unorganised Sector (New Delhi: Government of India, 2007).
- 49.
Sunny Sidhu, Trends in Self-employment in the UK: Analyzing the Characteristics, Income and Wealth of the Self-employed (London: Office for National Statistics, 2018).
- 50.
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 91.
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Jan, M.A., Harriss-White, B. (2019). Petty Production and India’s Development. In: Gupta, S., Musto, M., Amini, B. (eds) Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24815-4_16
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