The Agrarian Question and the Marxist Method

R Vijay

n periods of economic crisis there is always a tendency to read/reread Karl Marx to understand his formulation of crisis. In the present context, where the crisis in the economy and the agrarian sector has been accelerated by the neo-liberal policies, the two volumes titled The Agrarian Question in Marx and His Successors edited by an eminent Marxist scholar on agrarian questions are a welcome addition. Given the existence of alternate methods of analysis of agrarian situation, these two edited volumes present a strong case for the appropriateness of Marxist method to analyse the agrarian question and issues of agrarian transformation. Utsa Patnaik presents a case for the need to go back to the works of Marx and his successors such as Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. The compilation of articles in these two volumes broadly addresses two sets of issues. The rst volume is a collection of articles, predominantly by Marx, to understand the agrarian question and transformation. These articles focus on two issues: one, on pre-capitalist relations and aspects of primitive accumulation and two, on the issue of identication of different forms of rent and importance of ground rent. The second volume has a collection of articles, by successors of Marx, on application of the Marxist method of analysis to study the agrarian question in Russia and to some extent in China. Patnaik seems to have two objectives one, to present the Marxist method of analysis as a suitable method to study the process of development and two, to provide an incisive criticism on inadequacy of mainstream economic theories, as they are not equipped to handle the agrarian question for economies under transition. One important illustration given in the introduction is the issue of
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book reviewS
The Agrarian Question in Marx and His Successors, Vol I and II edited by Utsa Patnaik (New Delhi: LeftWord Books), Vol I: 2007; pp 319, Rs 450; Vol II: 2011; pp 332, Rs 500.

rent while studying the agrarian question in developing countries. Mainstream economics, following the Ricardian tradition to analyse rent, relegates the alternate conception on rent by Smith-Marx to the background. In her opinion the latter has more relevance when studying the agrarian question in developing economies. Given the broad canvas being covered in the two volumes, this reviewer had a major problem of trying to contextualise the two volumes. One can conceive of three methods to review these two volumes. One, to contextualise this compilation in the existing literature, two, to study the applicability of these ideas to understand the agrarian question and transformation in a concrete situation such as in India and three, to focus on the introduction written by the editor as it introduces the reader to the Marxist method and its application. Given that this is not the rst volume presenting the collection of writings by Marx and his successors and hopefully will not be the last, this present review proposes to follow the third method and focus on the introduction. Pre-Capitalist Relations In this volume, Patnaik brings together articles written by Marx on primitive accumulation of capital and the theory of ground rent. The author starts with the basic proposition that developing countries are not entirely capitalist and have predominant elements of precapitalist and transitional relationships. These relationships are created on the basis of earlier pre-capitalist relationships
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which are modied under the impact of commercialisation. Based on this feature of developing countries, she criticises mainstream economic literature on agrarian issues in developing countries. The authors major criticism is the absence of categories in mainstream literature to analyse modied pre-capitalist relations even though these scholars do recognise the existence of modied relations. The main reason given by Patnaik for this absence of appropriate categories for analysis is near censorship of historicallyspecic analytical categories in mainstream economic literature. Given this censorship in the economic literature, she feels there is a need to go back to Marx and identify theoretical categories appropriate for analysis of modied pre-capitalist relationships. She is of the opinion that Marxist method has appropriate tools/categories to analyse various class societies. The unifying concept generated by Marx to analyse all class societies is production of economic surplus by workers and its appropriation by a minority of property owners. In this method of analysis, production relations between classes take centre stage. Here she highlights that a form of exchange can exist in alternative modes of production and so there is a need to analyse the content which is to see the production relations between classes to identify modes of production. One of the central features of Marxist method is the concept of discreteness in the forms of organisation based on modes of surplus extraction and appropriation leading to the centrality of classes in their analysis. The changes in the forms of organisation are part of a complex process and the process is not unique. Given the notion of discreteness in the form of organisation, the transition from pre-capitalist to a capitalist form necessitates a phase of primitive accumulation. In this process, a labourer ceases to be attached to the soil or be a serf or bondsman of another and becomes double free: neither do they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production nor do they own any means of production. The capitalist class also has to displace
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the guild masters of handicrafts as well as the feudal landlord. The expropriation of self-supporting peasants from their means of production results in the destruction of rural domestic industry, providing the internal demand for goods produced by the capitalist system. Primitive accumulation can be identied as consisting of two processes, one, formation of labour market and two, the generation of capitalist class and these processes must take place simultaneously. Patnaik, in this compilation, gives importance to the phase of primitive accumulation to understand the process of transformation and makes a pertinent critique of mainstream economics for missing to identify this phase. But if there are multiple pre-capitalist structures, like in India a tribal system, agriculture with different levels of entry of capital and also a capitalist structure it is not clear whether one needs to identify multiple stages/forms/dimensions in primitive accumulation or if all pre-capitalist forms can be lumped into one category to understand change. Conception of Rent The major part in the introduction to this volume is to bring to centre stage the formulations on rent in the SmithMarx tradition in contrast to Ricardian conception of rent. In the Adam SmithMarx formulation, rent arises from the very existence of property and is identied as ground rent while Ricardo identies rent that arises owing to varying fertility of different pieces of land or varying application of capital. In other words, in Ricardian formulation, some farmers are able to produce under better than average conditions and hence at lower than average unit cost of production or assuming given price of the product, these favourably placed farmers obtain higher than average prot which is identied as rent. In contrast to the Ricardian conception on rent, in a thought-provoking article, Marx (which is used in the introduction by Patnaik) uses a production system involved in industry to explain the conception of ground rent. Comparing two production situations, in one, a waterfall (a natural resource) is used as a source of power to run textile machines
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while in the other, the production system uses steam-produced power to run machines. The capitalist who uses natural resource runs the machine at a lower cost when compared to the capitalist who uses produced steam power. If an individual can establish property rights on the natural resource, they can potentially demand rent for allowing the use of the resource. The property right on natural resource does not create the portion of value which is transformed into surplus-prot but it can encourage the owner to coax surplus-prot out of the hands of the manufacturer. This is identied as ground rent (by Marx). The potential to derive ground rent depends on establishing property rights on natural resource and also dominantly on the power to withhold the use of the natural resource like land until the capitalist gets a surplus, i e, rent. A logical fallout of the Ricardian formulation, as identied by Patnaik, is that Ricardian rent in fact exists even without landed property, and thus has no analytical connection to agriculture (p 22) and on the other hand, has nothing to do with landlord and tenants (p 17). The mainstream literature which follows the tradition of looking at rent in the Ricardian formulation identies institutional arrangements in the production system. But a problem that continues is that they reduce tenancy relations also to the economic categories used in the capitalist system. In the case of sharecropping for example, the output retained by tenants is equivalent to wages and in this process of abstraction, Patnaik says, the real content of tenancy is ignored. Patnaik opines that historically the burden of ground rent has been heavy on producers and absolute ground rent absorbs (on an average) the entire economic surplus generated by producers. In this context, rent is presented as a subversive concept to the existing order because (i) rent is appropriated due to property rights on land (inherited property) and not due to investment on land, (ii) as rent is not due to investment by the landowners, these households may not reinvest their surplus on productive purposes but spend it on lavish consumption having implications for the growth of the sector, (iii) a structural
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intervention like radical land reform is essential for transformation. Here land reform can be seen not as a process of surplus land redistribution nor as a process to provide land to small farmer (as their productivity is high) but should be seen as a political question of seizure of land from landlords who derive ground rent and distribute land to cultivators who have an incentive to invest. An interesting part in the introduction, for the reviewer, is where Patnaik adapts the argument of ground rent by Marx to a developing economy. This addresses the question whether a landlord gets converted to a capitalist farmer in the Indian context.
The transition of a rentier landlord to a capitalist producer thus requires protability conditions which are onerous, for the pure rent income of landlord is already high on average, half of the gross output: hence the return to investment of any capital in direct production requires quantum rise in surplus equal to this high rent, over and above the usual rate of prot on capital in the economy, which is only possible if this investment embodies land augmenting technical change to the required extent (p 47).

Continuing her argument she says that this transition could be reversible depending on protability conditions. Following the green revolution it looks like the shift took place from rentier landlord to capitalist farmer but in recent period as a response to neo-liberal policies, usury and rentierism have reasserted themselves. If by reassertion, the shifting of (rich) peasants into landlords deriving ground rent is true, a few questions arise in this context. These relate to the nature and extent of capitalist tendencies in Indian agriculture and the potential of capital to transform pre-capitalist relations. Also, does this process strengthen the pre-capitalist relations not in an earlier form but in a modied form? Conscious Experiment Volume II is a compilation of articles which apply the Marxist methodology to study the process of development. The application of Marxist method is to two countries Russia and China where there was a conscious and sustained experiment for establishing egalitarian
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social order where peasantry played an important role in their analysis as well as practice. The key words here are conscious and sustained experiment to bring about a structural change in an economy. According to Lukacs (quoted by Patnaik in the introduction), the actuality of revolution is decisive in the analysis of Lenin and maybe also true for the analysis of Mao in case of China. In other words, in the analysis of Lenin as well as Mao of their concrete economies, the potential for change (read as revolution) had a decisive inuence in their method of analysis of their economy and looking for friends and enemies to overthrow the semi-feudal system. Here, I would identify two central analytical categories. First, on the emphasis on change:
specic class congurations and the class alliances appropriate for achieving the aim of overthrowing the old semi feudal order but establishing the conditions for transition to a more egalitarian and just society (p 9).

Two, the method of looking at an economic system is to identify parts in a structure (colonised colonies, classes) and the relations between parts. The categories are used to analyse trends in two areas. One, trends in the development of capitalism in agriculture and peasant differentiation and two, the impact of colonial and later imperialist exploitation in less developed countries. The introduction to this volume, in addition to presenting the above trends, analyses the impact of globalisation on the peasantry in the last section. The major part of the Volume II has interesting articles (mostly by Lenin), on the study of development of capitalism in agriculture, class relations and differentiation of peasantry. The discussion on agrarian question by Lenin should be seen in the context of his debate with the Narodniks. As specied in the introduction of the volume, the Narodniks believed in homogeneous peasantry and efciency of peasant production when compared to capitalist production. In addition, they believed that one can enter a socialist economy bypassing capitalism, with village communities being the basis for the new formations. The debates with Narodniks initiated by Lenin have
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relevance even today in India given the predominance of small and marginal farmers and a debate on their efciency as producers. This kind of an argument was also presented by A V Chayanov and later other theorists who use utility calculus and applied it to peasant equilibrium. Lenin takes on the Narodniks by using the same data set used by them but by presenting distribution of resources over classes to show the differentiation of the peasantry and the growth of a capitalist class as well as the formation of a landless labour force and by implication the growth of capitalism in Russia. Extending the debate of Lenin with Narodniks to present times, Patnaik criticises mainstream economics saying that it does not identify differentiation of peasantry and assumes efciency of smaller farmers when there is a largescale entry of capital and formation of a landless labour force. Mao extends the analysis of Lenin on development of capitalism in Russia to the case of China. Following basically a labour-based classication of rural households he argues that there are constraints to capitalist transformation and hence the necessity of a new democratic revolution. The volumes under review have a greater emphasis on Lenins formulation. In the process of reading this compilation of articles, I was looking for a discussion by the editor of the distinction between the Leninist and Maoist conceptualisation of the agrarian system and their analysis of possibilities of change, which perhaps was out of the scope the author set up for this volume. In addition to the discussion on agrarian systems, this volume also presented works of Marx and extensions of Rosa Luxemburg on the relations between the coloniser and the colonised in the imperialist phase. Rosa Luxemburg formulates that a closed system of capitalists and workers is an impossibility and this system needs external markets. This external market is created by the destruction of petty commodity production of artisans and peasants in the rst stage within the national boundaries and later in the colonies. In the process, Rosa Luxemburg believed that capitalism for its own requirement will destroy all earlier forms
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of organisation. Patnaik proposes that some parts of the arguments presented by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg continue to be relevant in the present stage of globalisation. The military aggression to acquire natural resources in developing countries and ooding the markets with machine-made goods changes the forms of imperialist exploitation keeping the content same. Applying these arguments to the Indian context, I was looking for Patnaiks views on whether imperialism is able to annihilate pre-capitalist forms of organisation and generate capital labour relations or does it coexist with earlier forms of pre-capitalist relations and generate modied pre-capitalist relations. Once again this may have been beyond the scope the author set out for explanations in the volume. The Indian Agrarian Structure Primitive accumulation necessitates simultaneity of two independent processes, i e, the genesis of the capitalist class and a different process for the generation of labour who are doubly free. These labourers should be available for the capitalist class to organise production as well as to form the home market. If these two processes are not simultaneous, as might have happened in India, there is displacement but they are not reintegrated into capitalist system. The process of primitive accumulation might continue without capitalist system being generated. In the nal section (of the introduction to Volume II), Patnaik says that even in the European case peasants were displaced but not reintegrated into industry but emigration was a route to absorb this surplus labour. The option of emigration which was available to peasants in Europe, if not as easily available in India and other developing countries, would lead to resistance by the peasantry to the entry of capital. In the imperialist phase, where there is lack of reintegration of displaced people into the capitalist economy, a question that arises is the basis for stability of this conict-ridden social order. The last part of the introduction to Volume II presents the implications to peasantry and the process of agrarian change in the neo-liberal phase of
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growth. As a response to public policies in the post-1991 period, the contribution of primary sector to national product has declined even though the share of people dependent on primary sector continues to be substantial; the contribution of secondary sector has stagnated. So the surplus from the material productive sector is siphoned off to sustain the unproductive consumers in the service sector. Patnaik identies one implication of this growth process in terms of substantial decrease in per head foodgrain and cloth consumption in the neo-liberal phase. In addition to the above, what are the implications of this growth process to the agrarian question? One, what are the responses of the households with surplus and two, the responses of labour supplying households (agricultural labour households and poor peasantry) to the above changes? Will households with some surplus in the agrarian economy shift out of agriculture to the non-agricultural sector? Do these households sell land or do they lease out the land? Patnaik refers

to literature to present a view that land transfers are taking place to the top one-twentieth of landowners (but is land transferring to rich peasantry or to households wanting to appropriate ground rent is not specied, which is important when one reads this compilation). My own observation from studies in Andhra Pradesh shows a different trend. In the irrigated coastal belts of Andhra Pradesh, erstwhile cultivating households have diversied out of agriculture and moved to the non-agricultural sector but continue to own land and want to appropriate ground rent. These households predominantly enter the land lease market. This has led to an increase in land being leased out (in these districts nearly 60% of the cultivable land is under land lease) and the major share in leased-in land is of agricultural labour and poor peasantry. In addition, the lack of alternative employment opportunities for these segments of the population provides sufcient condition for appropriation of ground rent by non-cultivating

households. Is it possible that these evolving structures bring back the importance of ground rent resulting in the generation of new type of landlords, necessitating radical land reforms in the economy? While there remains an urge to get greater clarity on some of the issues dogging the Indian economy, especially since Utsa Patnaik is an acknowledged scholar in this eld, these volumes are a commendable effort to bring back to centre stage Marxist methods of analysis of transition. These issues are especially relevant to developing countries which have a signicant presence of modied pre-capitalist relations. In the present context of (agrarian) crisis and search for categories to analyse the crisis, the timely publication of these two volumes would initiate students and researchers to Marxism and its application to issues of transformation.
R Vijay (rvss@uohyd.ernet.in) is with the School of Economics, University of Hyderabad.

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