(Praful Bidwai)
This summary offers insights from the two decade long debate among the Indian academics who sought to understand the tendencies in Indian agriculture and determine if it was feudal or if it was moving away from feudalism towards capitalism. Assessing the mode of production was deemed essential to shape the nature of struggle that the Left politics should undertake. Many field studies from many corners of Indian sub-continent formed the backbone of varying assessments arrived at by participants in the debate. The summary is based on Praful Bidwai’s overview of the debate on mode of production in Indian agriculture titled ‘Mode of Production Debate in India’ included as an appendix in his book The Phoenix Moment. We chose this review over others (such as Daniel Thorner’s) as it takes into account the impact of colonialism and also discusses the political implications of each of the positions taken by the participants. The essay concludes that, given the evidence of growth of capitalist relations of production in agriculture, the Orthodox Left should stop fighting ‘phantom of feudalism’ and focus on organizing and articulating the interests of the landless labourers and the marginal farmers against capitalist exploitation. This debate forms an important and integral part of the broad Marxist debate on the agrarian question that we seek to introduce to the readers through this issue of the Broadsheet.
A passionate debate raged for one-and-half decades among the Indian and foreign scholars of broadly Marxist persuasion on mode of production prevalent in Indian agriculture during the 1960s and 1970s. The participants included prominent scholars like Ashok Rudra, Amit Bhaduri, Utsa Patnaik, Jairus Banaji, John Harriss, Daniel Thorner, Nirmal Chandra, Pradhan Prasad, Hamza Alavi and several others. The debate raised a series of questions, such as:
– What are the dominant production relations in Indian agriculture?
– Are they ‘pre-capitalist’ or ‘semi-feudal’ or ‘capitalist’?
– Are landlordism, sharecropping, tenancy, and rent extraction, and unfree labour necessarily semi-feudal?
– How did colonialism impact agrarian relations and land property regime?
– Is petty commodity production in agriculture evolving towards capitalism?
– Which is the main line of class conflict and what alliances should the Left forge?
The exchange of ideas between scholars was built on the foundations of the classical debate on transition from feudalism to capitalism between Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Takahashi and others in the fifties regarding European and other experiences. Although the participants in Indian debate were scholars and activists who explored various themes based on evidence and argumentation, it’s backdrop was provided by radical mobilizations from late 1960s onwards, including Naxalbari upsurge in West Bengal, South India and northern states. The debate, although it did not influence the tactics and strategies of various communist parties, did provide the basis at a broader level for the relevance of a protracted agrarian people’s war vis-a-vis urban working class mobilisation within bourgeois democracy.
The Beginnings
The debate was inaugurated in 1969 by Ashok Rudra with a sample survey of villages in Punjab. He contended that there had been no significant growth of capitalist farming even in this relatively prosperous region. The category of ‘capitalist farmers’ – who cultivated their lands with higher proportion of hired labour than their own family labour, generated market surplus and used farm machinery and investment – was not statistically significant among the total number of farmers.
Rudra was challenged by Utsa Patnaik on the methodological ground ‘of using unhistorical categories’. She argued that the use of wage labour and market surplus were not adequate to define capitalist relations. Equally indispensable were `capitalist intensification’ or accumulation and reinvestment of surplus value on an ever-increasing scale. Ex-colonial countries like India were characterised by a limited and distorted development of capitalism which did not revolutionize the mode of production. She contended that farm size by itself was not an indicator of feudal or capitalist relations; and that private property could exist with functioning land and labour markets without capitalist relations of production. Paresh Chattopadhyay intervened to argue that this was impossible since property relations were only juridical expression of relations of production.
Indian agriculture as Semi-Feudal in Nature
In 1956, Daniel Thorner, an American Marxist scholar exiled in India, observed that there were ‘built-in depressors’ in the production regime in the Indian country side, generated by a combination of legal, economic and social relations unique to Indian society. Skewed land distribution, tenancy with sharecropping, usurious money lending, high rents extracted by landlords, poor technological progress, etc, made peasant-cultivator too impoverished. Such ‘depressors’ ensured agrarian stagnation and low productivity. This argument came to be seen as describing ‘semi-feudal’ relations in Indian agriculture.
Amit Bhaduri was a prominent exponent of this thesis. After a survey of 20 villages in West Bengal in 1970 he prepared an elegant mathematical model of semi-feudalism: a sharecropping tenant borrows money for production and consumption purposes from Jotedar –the landlord at exorbitant rate of interest. The jotedar now has twin incomes of rent and interest; the total output of tenant necessarily falls below this combination of rent and interest; resulting inability to repay keeps the kisan in a debt bondage. The landlord can develop a vested interest, not to invest in technology, which may give scope for the tenant to get out of the trap with increased productivity. The semi-feudal landlord becomes the parasite on the producer and the relations of production of the system becomes an obstacle for the growth of production forces in classic Marxian sense. [Any intervention such as access to formal credit, regulation of rent through tenancy regulation and/or new agricultural technology should logically end semi-feudal relation].
These conclusions were further supported by studies of Pradhan H. Prasad in Bihar and Nirmal Kumar Chandra in West Bengal which also argued that landlords would oppose any new technology and would want to preserve the servile relations, low productivity and under-utilisation of resources. All the three concluded that for the period 1951-71 semi-feudal characterisation held true for most parts of India.
Such semi-feudal forces were created and consolidated during the colonial rule and later on, Nirmal Chandra pointed out and continued to hold onto the massive labour surplus on a scale that was probably unparallelled in history. Given the extreme weakness of industrial capitalism in India one could also not envisage any rapid improvement on the industrial front.
Ranjit Sau supplemented Chandra with the argument that small peasants continued to cultivate land despite meagre returns because of lack of alternative opportunities in industry to the point of reducing their own consumption to an unbelievable minimum. Capitalist farmers would face a formidable task of displacing these self-exploiting small tenants.
In a radical shift from his earlier position, Ashok Rudra (1974) criticized Chandra for claiming that there was any such class in West Bengal that resorted to usury and rental income rather than make capital investment in irrigation, fertilizers and new technology. He even gathered micro evidence to demonstrate the trend of concentration of land by large landowners. Rudra wondered why farmers found it hard to find labour during the peak times if there was such a huge surplus labour. Contradicting his own position on Punjab in 1969, he stated that if generation of surplus value using wage labour and appropriation of surplus through reinvestment amounted to capitalist relations in agriculture, such relations were abundant in West Bengal.
Colonial Mode of Production
Along with understanding of complex relation between ‘observable’ phenomena like wage, labour, capital formation or size etc many scholars also focused on the complex of juridical, economic and political developments that took shape under the prolonged colonial rule. Crucial were the interventions of scholars like Jairus Banaji, Ashok Rudra, Kathleen Gough, and Gail Omvedt.
Jairus Banaji, to consider one example of the above, took up the issue of the seemingly incompatible coexistence of wage labour and tenant-landlord-moneylender bondage relations, raised by Amit Bhaduri and Utsa Patnaik. He brought in issues of production and realisation to explain the latter. Banaji drew attention to a critical distinction made by Marx between the two forms of ‘subsumption of labour into capital’. First was the historical process wherein the small producers get incorporated into the supply chain, Marx referred to this as ‘formal subsumption’. The second variety is when workers get incorporated into production. This process of appropriation was referred to as ‘real’ subsumption. The former involved indirect exploitation of surplus value of peasants, while the latter involved direct exploitation.
Yet, Banaji contended that even the formal subsumption of labour into capital implied that the very process of production had become part of the process of Capital itself, i.e., of the self-expression of value, of the conversion of money into capital. This in turn implied that capital was here the actual owner of the process of production and the immediate producer was merely a factor in the production process and dependent on the direction of the capitalist. Banaji further argued that without explicit emergence of the capitalist commodity-wage relations at national scale, capitalist relations of exploitation might be widespread. He cited the case of Deccan during 1850-90, when villages were drawn into production of cotton, sugar, groundnut, and garden crops for growing populations of Bombay and Pune. This led to thorough exploitation of the petty commodity producer through unequal exchange and impoverished the countryside while allowing the cities to accumulate. The pure capitalist nature of relation between the peasant and money lender was concealed by the fact that surplus value extorted from small producer would be called “interest”. Banaji held that different forms of tenancy prevalent in India therefore were neither pre-capitalist nor semi-feudal, but were perfectly capitalist. It did not matter if the peasants farmed using large number of permanent farm labour or used different forms of tenancy as it did not effect the social character or content of production. Similarly, indebtedness as such could not be seen as hall-mark of `pre-capitalist’ relation, because it was precisely through the power of money that the despotism of capital would initially get established.
Hamza Alavi also held a similar perspective. Alavi held that peasant farming continued in India on the basis of largely unchanged techniques. But it was nonetheless subject to formal subsumption of labour by capital through extraction of rent and at a later stage, by ‘real’ subsumption through direct exploitation of labour under capitalist relations of production. Peasants, he argued, were more resilient than urban petty commodity producers because they need not depend on market for their food and shelter and desperately held onto their tiny plots of land. But their conditions were progressively undermined by the ‘dynamics of peripheral capitalist development’.
Kathleen Gough on the basis of her analysis of Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, argued that the capitalist mode of production was dominant for late 19th to 20th century despite the persistence of certain pre-capitalist features, like giving traditional gifts, caste discrimination, corporal punishments to labour etc. During 1947-80 Thanjavur district experienced remarkable growth backed by adoption of new technology in hybrid seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, tube wells, and electric pump sets. She noted a continuous rise in deployment of machinery and other tools (organic composition of capital) particularly among large holdings and the extraction of relative surplus value.
Omvedt and Rudra brought the issue of caste oppression into the discourse, to argue for the need to fight both social oppression and caste exploitation simultaneously. Omvedt held that capitalism was dominant in Indian agriculture now, unlike in pre-Independence times, because of dependence of over half of rural population on wages, generalised commodity production, marketed surplus, means of production in agriculture produced industrially and modern methods of cultivation. In short, the dominant mode of surplus extraction was capitalist.
Rudra made a foray into history to argue that proponents of Indian feudalism like R S Sharma or BNS Yadav were comprehensively wrong. He held that the struggle against reactionary element of Brahmanic ideology should constitute an important element in any struggle for progress in the countryside.
The debate was greatly enriched empirically by a discussion of the rural class structure in its interplay with caste by Mencher, Chandra, Patnaik, Rudra, Prasad, and Bardhan among others. They engaged with issues of labour exploitation, the complex and changing relationship between strata of peasantry, the ‘hybridity’ of class of big landowners (part feudal, part-capitalist) and the growing or emerging contradictions between the landlords and big peasantry on the one hand and the poor peasantry and landless labour on the other. Further insights were provided by Jan Breman in his work on different forms of labour bondage and their compatibility with capitalism, and the historical analysis of landlordism in Bengal by Rajat Ratna Ray.
Also explored in the discussion was the emergent bonding between different class and caste groups in the Hindi belt; the changing power balance between the traditionally dominant upper castes and the rising middle castes (OBCs), a phenomenon that would soon lead to the ‘Forward March of the Backward’ and the Mandal scheme of reservations for the OBCs.
The majority opinion here was that most important contradiction in the countryside was between the big landowners (including the rich peasants) and the labourers (landed or landless) –although there were differences on the role of middle peasant and other issues.
Political Implications of this debate/ Implications of the debate for political practice
A the end of one-and-half decades of the debate, Alice Thorner concluded, “there would no longer appear to any doubt that capitalism today dominates Indian agriculture as it already was generally seen to dominate industry. Does this mean that the mode of production which prevails in contemporary India is capitalist and subject to the Marxist laws of motion of capitalist development? Here, the answer is less evident, since India’s capitalism has emerged in a colonial setting, markedly different from conditions in metropolitan countries where capitalism was born”. Yet argued Thorner, “it has been abundantly shown that the existence of widespread tenancy, and/or sharecropping does not necessarily indicate feudal relations of production, nor does concentration of landholding together with cultivation of small units by large number of peasants. By the same token, the use of wage labour cannot by itself be taken as a sure sign of capitalist relations. Yet, the shift from exploitation through tenants to large scale or intensive farming by means of hired labour is significant”.
Further Thorner argues, “the growth of capitalist farming in India has been accompanied by, in fact amounts to a transformation of relations of production and forms of exploitation. Servile, debt-bonded, and/or traditionally tied labour has been largely supplanted by free, relatively mobile, wage labour, paid in cash. Investment in modern scientific agriculture has enormously expanded, and has resulted on the whole, in enhanced production, at least in certain areas in certain crops. Tenancy and sharecropping arrangements have in many regions been adapted to new economic and technical requirements. Nevertheless, there is agreement that capitalism in agriculture cannot be depended upon to solve the crucial problem of access to land and to food of whole rural population”.
Rudra and Chakravarty reached an important political conclusion that “orthodox Left standpoint in this country has been that main enemy of progress in rural areas is feudalism. This gave rise to demand for land to the tiller. Feudalism being the only enemy, the orthodox Left parties have treated, in practice, all remaining classes from rich peasants to landless labour as possible allies. Feudalism in countryside is considered as regressive and emerging capitalism as progressive. However, tenancy is not necessarily any more feudal or any less capitalistic as in a non-agricultural setting.”
Rudra, who started the entire mode of production debate, had the last word on its political significance. “In the meanwhile, the political interest of landless labourers and poor peasants has gone by default. That is bound to happen whenever attempts are made to build a united front of all non-feudal rural classes against a phantom of feudalism. The orthodox Left parties have thus ended up by supporting the emergent forces of agrarian capitalism to the hilt in the name of fighting feudalism”. This comment was doubtless eloquent, and acerbic, even vitriolic. But it drew virtually no response from the `orthodox’ parties at which it was directed.
Four decades later, the understanding of the major Left parties, including the ML, continues to hang onto the ‘semi-feudal’ character of Indian agriculture and is still focused on either organizing or speaking on behalf of the farmers or peasants as an undifferentiated sector. Despite the large scale evidence of real subsumption of agriculture into capitalist relations of production, very rarely do we find the interests of the landless labourers and poor peasants being spoken about separately.
Note:
1. Praful Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment: Challenges Confronting the Indian Left, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015.