Awkward Classes and India’s Rural Development

Abstract

Marx’s model of capital and labour, dynamised by contradictions and the compulsion to accumulate, leaves deviations from the polar classes of capital and labour ignored, regarded as precapitalist outliers, or as headed for extinction. But the two considered here, petty commodity production (and trade and services) and merchant’s or commercial capital, persist widely. Here in tribute to the major contributions to political economy of Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, their structure and dynamics are discussed in general and in the contemporary Indian case. They are argued to be awkward both analytically and politically. Petty production overlaps with both wage labour and small capitalist firms; it reproduces and expands by multiplication, not accumulation; it does not mobilise in a politically coherent way. Commercial capital is in turn suffused with productive activity; it encompasses petty trade and accumulating enterprises which pursue a reactive opportunistic politics which preserves their independence. Further awkwardness results from the disjuncture between analytically useful categories and the policy concepts used by the state.