 Awkward Classes and India's DevelopmentBarbara Harriss-White Review of Political Economy, 2018, vol. 30, issue 3, 355-376 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 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, 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 that pursue a reactive opportunistic politics that preserves their independence. Further awkwardness results from the disjuncture between analytically useful categories and the policy concepts used by the state. Date: 2018 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:30:y:2018:i:3:p:355-376 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2018.1478507 Access Statistics for this article Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Steve Pressman and Louis-Philippe Rochon More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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