Petty commodity production

ABSTRACT

Petty commodity production (PCP) is a key reality of contemporary capitalism. Deceptively simple, it is shrouded in synonyms, debates and neglect. This essay covers its definitions and roles in agrarian change. Four aspects relevant to critical agrarian studies are introduced: its gendering, persistence, ‘unviability' and roles in the wider economy. Three debates are summarised: PCP versus peasants, exploitation versus conflict over appropriated surplus, simple reproduction and PCP expansion. Last, PCPs’ relations to the state and PCP politics are reviewed with material mostly drawn from South Asia. PCP remains a form of contemporary capitalism that must not be ignored either analytically or politically.

KEYWORDS:

• Petty commodity production
• capitalism
• critical agrarian studies

Introduction

The woman with a cow, two bullocks and a small patch of land, whose menfolk are off working on construction sites; the self-employed pumpset engineer; the carter who sold off his family’s carts and bullocks for a motorbike and trailer; the deeply indebted rural seasonal weaver; the jobbing repairer of mouldboard ploughs with a scrap-metal shop in town; the local fertiliser dealer providing credit; the absentee seasonal trader in groundnuts, the night-time seller of adulterated kerosene and diesel in litre soda-bottles: while every specific form of economic activity produced by agrarian transformation has generated debate and controversy, petty commodity production (PCP), along with petty trade, petty finance and petty services has the real-world power of numbers and the capacity to persist.

One third of the entire world’s population works in one way or another on landholdings of under 2 hectares (Hazell et al. 2010). In twenty-first century India at least, 86% of landholdings are under this threshold while 95% of registered firms in the non-farm economy employ fewer than 5 wage-workers (NCEUS 2009). Mainstream Marxist analysis tends to ignore PCP, because according to some readings of Marx it would be outcompeted by capitalist production and eventually disappear; while other schools of agrarian scholarship – historical, theoretical and developmental – have generated a welter of different concepts, in myriad different contexts. A brief essay can do no more than outline the salient features of the debates about PCP. However, the concept of PCP illuminates a key reality of contemporary capitalism – especially in South Asia where, despite the might of corporate capital, the family remains the predominant building block of the economy.

Who and what is petty commodity production?

Nearly all the definitions include five relational aspects of PCP.¹ First, the contradictory combination of both capital and labour in a single enterprise, raising the issue of why the conflict between capital and labour doesn’t break up PCP enterprises. Second, its inability in many contexts to transcend relatively small-scale operation, raising the question of why it can undercut large-scale capitalist production while not itself undergoing more differentiation. Third, even though many PCP enterprises occasionally exchange, hire -in and/or hire -out some labour, the unit of production, consumption, reproduction and welfare is the household, normally the family.² Meanwhile the allocation of resources between consumption, savings and investment in the maintenance, replacement and expansion of equipment – the means of production – is flexible. Resources and tasks enabling this unit to operate over time are divided between family members who are either assumed not just to be unpaid but also to be subject to hierarchies of social status or unviable if their work is costed with imputed wages. Fourth and obvious in non-agrarian PCP, production is not for subsistence. While in agriculture it may cover some subsistence needs, production is for market exchange. Decisions about what commodities to produce are price-sensitive; the marketed surplus is only sporadic or residual if nature is delinquent or labour falls sick. Krishna Bharadwaj’s ‘compulsive engagement’ in ‘inequitous markets’ for purposes of survival (1985), Abhijit Sen’s ‘compulsive involvement’ (1981), gives way to Marx’s ‘dull compulsions of economic relations’ (1976, ch28). In agriculture this means that transactions in land, water (and their renting-in and renting-out), credit, inputs and machinery, products and consumption goods are market transactions. While labour is not itself commodified, PCP firms are unable to reproduce themselves outside the circuits of capitalist commodity economy. Fifth, insofar as PCP blocks a transition to the polar classes of capital yet shows no sign of evolving directly into socialist production relations, it is widely regarded as a backward form (Lenin 1913; Bernstein 1986).

PCP is a cumbersome term for such deceptively simple activity. It also privileges production over other parts of the circuits of capital in which petty activity is enmeshed. Yet, even if we confine ourselves to PCP, it is tempting and indeed very common to analyse it using the concepts familiar in the analysis of other forms of production. But none of them come without the balls and chains of their assumptions, their histories and contexts, their scales of abstraction, the deformations of official classifications or data-containers in terms of which they are discussed, not to mention more or less formal theories about them from a range of vantage points. So we have family farmers, family businesses, family enterprise farms, agriculturalists, small farmers, small producers, small-holders, small commodity producers, small enterprises, independent household production, household enterprises, household production, (domestic) self-employment, artisans, fishers, craftsmen, agrarians, survival activity, rural producers, own account enterprise, unorganised enterprise, unincorporated private enterprises, non-directory establishments, ‘MSMEs’³, micro-entrepreneurs, vernacular capitalists, bazaar intermediaries, citizen farmers, micro-capitalists, petty bourgeois capitalist enterprises, capitalised family farms, nong min, kisan, campesino, peasant, non-peasant, ‘peasant’, peasant-cum-smallholder-cum-farmer, peasant petty producer, peasant-capitalist, capitalist-peasant, peasant in transition, peasants of a sort, de-peasant, post-peasant …⁴ Often handled as categories rather than relationally, this multitude of different labels masks tendencies to essentialise and simplify the activity that each one denotes. Further, while paper battles are fought over terms and meanings,⁵ parties in contention frequently use terms associated with the theories they critically dismiss.

PCP is not a conceptual late-comer to the vast proliferation of terms of art in agrarian political economy. While in his model of capital Marx argued that the logic and dynamics of capitalist production would re-configure or destroy all forms inconsistent with capital accumulation, petty property and petty commodity production posed a problem for his theory. Although discussion of PCP is scattered through his work and is terminologically inconsistent and not always clear, three historical-empirical processes of capital triggered his recognition of its existence.

First, with reference to English history, through the combined power of, on the one hand, economic differentiation through failure to compete with economies of scale and vulnerability to shocks from disease, weather and adverse exchange relations, plus, on the other, primitive accumulation through coercive evictions, not only the peasantry but also artisan crafts and guilds are annihilated in the transition to a property-less proletariat. This ‘dissolution problematic’, in which PCP is at best transitional and ‘doomed to extinction’ (Lenin 1913), and at worst both socially oppressive and immiserating, is something of an agrarian Marxist orthodoxy (Thorner 1965; Dalton et al. 1972; Moser 1978; Bhattacharya 2014; Jan and Harriss-White 2019).

Second, however, where the separation of labour from land is historically incomplete, Marx allowed for a process of capitalist control over labour disguised by the labourers’ ownership of small-scale capital – land and tools – but ‘formally’ subsumed under capital proper. In putting-out production, out-sourcing, subcontracting, home-working or other forms of control by merchants’ and commercial capital, capital takes over an existing labour process and with the use of technology gradually converts disguised wage labour into open, ‘real’ (property-less) wage labour (Banaji 1977, 2020; Adnan 1985). The process is not linear and Marx acknowledges periods when capital may ‘resurrect’ rural production, for instance for the preparation of raw materials (Marx 1976, 911–912). Yet while Marx recognised the resilience of this form of PCP for him it was a transitional sub-form. Scholars interested in the conservation problematic have been encouraged by Henry Bernstein’s controversial argument that the ‘agrarian question’ posed by capitalist development has been superseded by neo-liberal global capital, so that national industrialisation has alternative sources of capital to that extracted from agriculture, leaving the agrarian question unresolved, and classes of labour (of which pcp is one) to struggle over agrarian property and work (Bernstein 2006; Kumar 2017).

However, despite signs of transition, both the ‘dissolution’ and the ‘conservation’ problematics face a third context for PCP – sometimes simultaneously. For while PCP is exploited by capital, exploitation takes place through markets other than labour. Most PCP expands through the multiplication of economic units rather than through the dynamic of accumulation-concentration-centralisation. Yet since PCP combines capital and labour – ‘cut up into two persons’ – when the micro-propertied producer takes decisions and is accountable for the outcome, there remains the possibility of accumulation (Adnan 1985; Bernstein 1988). This third problematic combines autonomy and exploitation. With reference to the North American colonies, where migrant settlers (who may have been wage labourers) lacked a wage labour force, and also valued the autonomy and ‘self-respect’ – to which they had in any case no alternative – Marx acknowledged the possibility that depending on what niches and ‘spaces’ become available in the global division of labour, PCP can co-exist with and even undercut capitalist production relations, and reproduce itself by ‘self-exploitation – at the expense of capital (Adnan 1985; Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985; Jan and Harriss-White 2019).

It is this third problematic that helps us understand how petty production persists and flourishes in social formations dominated by the logic of capital, so that it has provided an enduring component of combined and uneven⁶ agrarian capitalist relations. It is now clear that the question for agrarian studies is to identify the conditions under which all three ‘problematics’ can co-exist, their contingent contexts, and how – even when PCP is being liquidated – the formation of a capitalist class is nonetheless constrained (Williams 1988). Not for nothing has it been called an ‘uneasy stratum’, and, along with peasants and with merchants’ capital, an ‘awkward class’ (Shanin 1972; Bechhofer and Elliot 1985; Harriss 1990).

Relevance to critical agrarian studies

At least four aspects of PCP are significant for the study of agriculture and agrarian economies: gender relations, the persistence of PCP, the persistence of ‘unviable’ PCP, and the implication that PCP requires an expanded concept of ‘the agrarian’.

Gender relations

The impact of gender relations on property and work in the black box of the patriarchal family, where some labour is so much ‘more equal than others’ is such that analysts have argued that these workers occupy different class places.⁷ In particular, while PCP comprises the contradictory class places of capital and labour, even in joint households, men manage property and exercise power over the work and social rights of – and returns to – younger men, and all women. Tom Brass (1986) has brought together evidence from Peru to show how the exploitive patriarchal relations of capital can circulate within households as well as between them. Fictive kin in particular may be debt-bonded and provide labour repayments at rates below the local wage – prevented from exercising choice by ‘immobilising authority’(ibid p 60) expressed as family duty or obligation.

Meanwhile women’s power at best extends over the sphere of household reproduction where they subsidise the production of labour. As a result women occupy a lower class position, exploited without being waged, even though the work burden of production and reproduction may actually include field-work, hiring and firing short-term labour at times of peak demand, being responsible for household loan repayments, the rearing and socialisation of livestock as well as of children (and apprentices), and responsibility for savings for lumpy social obligations and economic shocks (Guerin 2014; Reboul, Guerin, and Nordman 2021).⁸ Research on women’s work status and intra-household decision-making powers has proved inconclusive. Women’s wage work does not necessarily translate into control over decisions or day-to-day resources.

Livestock, not coincidentally, is invisible in much ‘vegetarian’ writing on agriculture, which also privileges for attention ‘noble’ cereals such as wheat, rice and maize, among the wide diversity of the crops that are actually produced. In official Indian data, for instance, animal husbandry features as an activity ‘allied’ to agriculture rather than essential to it. Its careful management by women needs recognition – even as animal ‘wifery’.

When men go to the mines or to war, or migrate for work above ground, the resulting feminisation of agrarian work reflects social barriers to non-farm activity for the women left behind as much as it does the necessity of female agrarian petty commodity producers to seek such work.⁹ It is quite unusual for women to progress from forms of PCP that may be transient to self-reliant enterprises with the potential to accumulate (Nanduri 2022).¹⁰

The persistence of PCP

If PCP is unviable, if PCP is transient and transitional, the scholar has to ask why it has definitely persisted for decades and even in some historical contexts for centuries. PCP is not confined to the self-exploitation of a family-like unit, sometimes assumed to be completely male. Theorised variously as maximising production rather than profit, or as a matter of super-exploitation, or even of super-efficiency (Mathur and Ramnath 2018), PCP also involves competition between PCPs on markets whose exchange relations may contribute to differentiation. In responses to market or environmental shocks and in the scrabble for shrinking assets, small households may even shatter into tinier units. Yet even if the individual unit of production-reproduction is unstable, pcp as a whole does not seem to be. PCPs struggle to maintain the conditions of their existence – their labour force and their capital – and there are no clear signs that in this they are likely always to lose.

PCP competes with labour in capitalist production, by not requiring supervisory labour other than that of the producers themselves, at least in settings where assets and equipment are not lumpy, where skills do not bar entry, where the costs of access to information, contacts and physical markets and the costs of codification/tracing are all low, and where reputation matters. But PCP also competes with larger capital’s economies of scale and market domination for spaces in which to survive and grow (Moser 1978; Williams 1976). The concept of ‘spaces’ created or left by capital is powerful, but the processes involved are the subject of contending bodies of scholarship. Space for PCP may be left by the ways in which the characteristics of land-based production may deter larger-scale capital. Investment in the land-based appropriation of biomass also faces physical and technological limits and shocks.¹¹ The time taken to realise returns in agriculture – through distribution – is longer than the production time which is in turn longer than labour time. In agriculture, capital may transfer its many risks and uncertainties, the costs of ground rent, of management and supervision, and of legal obligations, to labour (Mann and Dickinson 1978; Singh and Sapra 2007).¹² PCP space – or the limits to it – also reflect the outcomes of the dynamics of capitalism (Brass 1986), when capital is able to capture ‘scale neutral’ technology which destroys yield barriers, reduces risks and shortens production time. Conversely, by squeezing returns and undercutting capitalist production costs, PCP can cheapen basic wage goods and agricultural raw materials whose prices structure those of the rest of the economy. At the same time, the relative poverty of pcp constrains demand.

Social formations are structured through authority and power expressed in social institutions such as race and caste that do not originate in capitalism but are reworked as durable if contested regulators of economic relations. Custom does not yield quietly to contract. Just as gender, religion, ethnicity, caste, locality and language structure capital and labour, they protect PCP and create social allegiances capable of cutting across class.¹³ Social authority segments markets, so that PCP may not be a matter of choice but instead marks the absence of alternatives.¹⁴

The question whether PCP is driven by distress or by speculation / entrepreneurship is unresolved, because it may be driven by both (Vaidyanathan 1986; Chandrasekhar 1993; Hazell et al. 2010). The combined social and physical attributes of agriculture as such – its quiddity¹⁵ – can also protect PCP. Miniaturised and fragmented, land for instance is rich with social and physical meaning, making rental markets less sticky than purchases of land, which are, for the sellers, a humiliating last resort.

And, finally, the persistence of PCP has been explained as being functional for – and (deliberately or contingently) articulated with – capital, as actually reflecting the latter’s competence as an exploiting class (Moser 1978; Basok 1989). On the one hand debt relations and commercial micro-finance, PCP-specific adverse terms of trade, interlocked contracts and contract farming are seen as a means for capital to shift risk onto PCP, and extract surpluses and ultra-cheap commodities from PCP (Brass 1986; Shrimali 2021; Sinha 2020). On the other hand, PCP enables capital to escape from labour laws, from obligations for social protection and other costs of reproducing wage-labour, from exactions of tax, sometimes disguised as marketing boards, and from environmental protection regulations – struggles in which the class acts as a ‘class for itself’ but which do not necessarily lead to the immiseration and proletarianization of pc producers. In other words differentiation, decomposition (Friedmann 1986) and landlessness can co-exist with the persistence and even the numerical expansion of PCP.

Evidently, even if production relations in agrarian PCP are similar to those of PCP in other sectors of the economy, PCP is not a more or less independent mode of production characterising a social formation (Bienefeld 1975), not a totality, and very rarely a class in, or for, itself (Friedmann 1986). As a phenomenal category it is best regarded as a form with its own internal diversity existing alongside forms of capital proper. It is common to find complex agrarian production and property relations, integrating both the ownership and the management of farms, firms and families. A range of technologies and forms of social authority also co-exist.

The persistence of unviable PCP

It is a different question to ask why ‘unviable’ landed PCP persists, but the development literature has protested its unviability – in South Asia for at least a century (Royal Commission on Agriculture 1928; Chand 2008; Hazell et al. 2010). Two kinds of agricultural unviability need distinguishing – in accounting terms and in reproductive terms. From an accounting standpoint, when family labour is imputed at prevailing wage rates (if they can be found at all¹⁶), family farms and firms usually show negative returns.¹⁷ And the argument that family labour is ‘unpaid’ is used to justify petty production’s being a non-capitalist form, yet we know that it cannot reproduce itself without entering into capitalist circuits.

That PCP in agriculture can often not reproduce the productive household is not a new proposition. Teodor Shanin sees the word ‘promysly’ (non-agricultural rural activity) in nineteenth century Russia, a term persistent in rural records but ignored by scholars, as encompassing crafts, agricultural work outside the farm, timber, hunting, gathering, fishing, mining, transport, construction, wage labour in factories and ‘self-employment’¹⁸, all of which were essential to the reproduction of the pluri-active landed agrarian household (Shanin 1975). The crucial role played by livestock in reproducing agrarian PCP was and is mostly overlooked – as are remittances from labour trapped in vicious circular migration, living in liminal urban niches (Breman 2019) or working in the armed forces. Descriptions of agrarian PCP portfolios stress their combinations across sectors and spheres – increasingly, over time, weakly linked to agricultural production – their flexibility, their diverse sites, their dependence on networks and intermediaries, their shock-absorbing capacities alongside their structural instability; and they stress contemporary tendencies for the balance of income to shift towards increasingly precarious wage-work. Thus off-farm activity, which has proved resistant to agrarian class analysis, must now be normalised.¹⁹

The fact that ‘unviable’ landed PCP persists has implications for theory and practice because this persistence – this actual viability – is only possible if it is the PCP household rather than land that is the unit of production – within which resources can be shifted between activities. And the development of ecologically less destructive provisioning systems for metropolitanised societies based on miniaturised holdings that are worked part time, but whose time-bound labour demands may constrain off-farm work, is a collective political-technological project still in its foetal stages (Hazell et al. 2010).

PCP and the expanded Agrarian

Although PCP may be found in most sectors of capitalist economies, its nature encourages an expanded concept of ‘the agrarian’ because agriculture requires conditions of existence other than land, water and labour. The sphere of circulation on which it depends is also subject to a plethora of terms drawn from other contexts: market systems, agricultural markets, value chains, supply chains, upstream and downstream multipliers, competition from underneath the ground, (micro)finance and growth linkages from agriculture (Gulati, Ganguly, and Wardhan 2022; Harriss 1987; Hazell and Ramasamy 1991; Jan 2017; Kaplinsky and Morris 2001; Lahiri Dutt 2018; Krishnamurthy 2014; Mellor 1976). These need an essay to themselves. But the consequence of agrarian productionism – privileging production over distribution/circulation in official and academic discussion – means that vast numbers of PCP livelihoods are overlooked in finance, trade, services, post-harvest processing, related ancillary professions and intermediation as agencies. Theoretically awkward, combining capital and labour in ways that are both diverse and similar to those in agriculture, they are also admitted to be necessary and not necessarily unproductive. Transport and processing are seen as ‘tendrils of production in the sphere of circulation’ (Marx 1885, ch 17); storage may be discounted as hoarding, or alternatively regarded as essential to the moment of realisation and to protecting the commodity against physical deterioration. Multiple modes of extracting surplus through rent, interest, surplus value/profit and exchange (buying and selling) depend on market conditions, which range at one end from those that are approximately competitive, through common and complex structures of oligopoly hellbent on accumulation in co-existence with more or less dependent PCP which nonetheless expands by multiplication, to the other extreme of vertical integration.

In most agrarian economies, a larger range of scales of capital have operated in the post-harvest circuit than in production. Capital-biased, often both gigantic and subsidised, corporate capital and large family businesses have contradictory effects. On the one hand they displace ‘labour’ (which is often PCP, not only in production but in small trade and post-harvest processing), while on the other they create spaces and sites for self-managing, self-exploiting brokerage, agents of information, petty trade, local services and production with lower fixed and variable costs, plus incentives to escape state surveillance and force returns lower than the wage (Harriss 1982; Huws 2003). Petty activity may be process-sequenced, as when PCP supplies bulkers for supermarkets; process-segmented, as when PCP operates in clusters producing the same product, and process-integrated when competing with wage labour at every stage of identical products (Mezzadri 2008). Entire globalised value chains of PCP have even been identified – for instance throughout the trade corridors of greater Central Asia and between China and Ghana (Fehlings and Karrar 2022; Haugen 2017). Further, the new field of agrarian urbanisation is revealing not only how agrarian class structure and labour relations are reproducing themselves in the non-agrarian land-uses for which land is relinquished and sold, but also how agrarian caste and gender status and relations persist in the urban economy.²⁰

That ignoring petty production leads to analyses that are not just incomplete but wrong is illustrated by the prescriptive ‘small farmerist’ literature pioneered by Lipton (1968) and dismissed as neo-populist by Terry Byres among others (Byres 1979; 2004; Borras 2009). When small (but efficient) farmers are essentialised as the ideal type of agrarian development, when capitalism is stylised as (perfectly competitive) markets, when self-exploitation is called optimising, efficient behaviour and/or the result of poor endowments, then the adverse exchange relations and exploitative labour relations to which these things lead can be ignored (McMichael 2006).²¹ And when an inverse size-productivity relation is (ahistorically) invoked, small farmerism can then be called-in as a solution to, rather than a result of, capitalist under-development.²² Superficially progressive-looking policies for land reform, co-operatives, self-help groups or producer organisations are often defeated in practice by the hostile class-based opposition they provoke. The depressing effect of PCP on national markets for consumption goods is also out of the frame.

By contrast, admitting agrarian PCP into macro-political economy – typically on the assumption that it is a matter of dependence and distress – has stimulated the production of interesting concepts of tortuous, blocked, arrested, stunted, distorted and perverse capitalist transformations, in which PCP is structural rather than contingent.²³ In Prabhat Patnaik’s formulation of a perverse transformation for example, after a century of colonial tribute and drain, it is the incapacity of the post-colonial non-agrarian (service) economy to absorb surplus labour from agriculture that has required the petty commodity form to persist in agriculture. Patnaik (2006) sees this form as non-capitalist, as a reserve army, and yet as needing state financial support, in view of the much greater costs of the alternative (supporting millions more unemployed).

Debates

It is already evident that agrarian PCP is a concept that is as contested as it is relevant to critical agrarian studies. There is space here merely to hint at the richness of three further debates to which it is central: PCP versus peasants; exploitation versus conflict over appropriated surplus; and simple reproduction versus surplus and expansion.

PCP versus peasants

Eric Hobsbawm (1994) argued that the peasantry had died in the 1950s under the protracted attack of industrial capital, and Henry Bernstein (2000) announced the death of the peasantry by the end of the colonial period. But the death throes of the peasantry have been protracted. In part, this is the product of debates over definitions. Celebrating their internal differentiation and cultural diversity, Sidney Mintz argued that no general definition of peasants was possible (1973). Mintz was reacting to Teodor Shanin’s seminal collection in which Shanin had suggested that peasants were family-based, self-supporting, labouring smallholders with a distinctive community-based culture, whose surplus above subsistence, as and when it was produced, was appropriated by outsiders as rent, tax, interest, corvee or through adverse terms of trade (1971).²⁴ Even if hard to define, it would be hard to deny that peasants exist both as a differentiated form in history and as a mobilising category for agrarian politics in the contemporary era, despite the concept’s disrespectful resonances in many languages.

In part, the protracted death of the peasantry results from PCP and peasants’ being misguidedly homogenised and substituted for each other in unresolved theoretical debates. Both peasants and PCPs deploy uncommodified family labour, both reproduce in simple rather than in expanded forms, and both are subordinated to other classes and the extractive capacity of the state.²⁵ But by comparison with PCP, the contemporary economic salience of peasants is in advanced decay. As producers peasants can no longer retreat into subsistence; they are no longer unintegrated into land and finance markets or national and global commodity markets; their supply responses are elastic to price; they are no longer confined to primitive means of production but have adapted to commercialised, ‘scale-neutral’ technologies and to fossil energy. Karl Polanyi’s non-market modes of exchange – distribution and reciprocity in kind – play residual roles in their provisioning.²⁶ To George Dalton’s discriminating question, whether their culture, rights, obligations, kinship relations and solidarities take different forms from those marked by rural-urban locations, which would distinguish peasants from PCP, on balance the answer must be negative.²⁷ In response to Phil McMichael’s influential analysis (2006), I suggest that while peasants and ‘agrarians’ face the power of global agro-capital in political movements, it is PCP which does this in economic terms.²⁸

Exploitation versus conflict over appropriated surplus

Like capitalist enterprises, PCPs are exposed to rent, interest, the costs of raw material and the prices of commodities. There is evidence that they often experience adverse terms of exchange in these markets, but this does not necessarily resolve the question whether or not PCPs are exploited in them. Seeing labour alone as uniquely producing surplus value, Marxian theory puts labour at the heart of relations of exploitation. In this simple model all else consists of struggles over the distribution and circulation of appropriated surplus, and the only way in which PCP is exploited is by interest-bearing and merchants’ capital in the disguised wage-work of the conservation problematic, even though the petty producer may have to pay rent to landlords and borrow money from them or traders – often on terms evaluated as extortionate. The impositions experienced by labour on such markets have never been at the heart of labour politics.²⁹

Looser non-Marxist normative definitions of exploitation stress unfairness. These in turn provoke questions about whether or not a competitive market alternative can be found as a referent by means of which to judge justice in exchange, about whether or not unequal distributions of control over property and/or extra-economic domination can have distortingly co-ercive effects on markets other than labour;³⁰ and whether or not exploitation on any market is better than no market exploitation at all (a question attributed to Joan Robinson).³¹ In practice exploitation is widely used in this second sense in agrarian political economy.

Simple reproduction, social surplus and expansion

Accumulation implies class differentiation and although differentiation dominates in the dissolution problematic, the counterintuitive outcome is that while landlessness expands, so does agrarian PCP. It is not just that waves of distress fracture households and their fragmented activity. For this expansion to be possible, other ‘creative’ processes must be simultaneously at work, not only ensuring simple reproduction – even at the expense of capital – but also generating a surplus (Harriss-White 2012). We have discussed the reasons why capital may leave spaces for PCP to expand and why PCP may sometimes outcompete capital. At the level of the firm, however, the capital accrued by PCP is rarely invested in ways which satisfy definitions of expanded reproduction or accumulation,³² yet PCP expands. It is not only the logic of simple reproduction under commodified relations which trap PCP in an ‘involutionary impasse’ (Gerry in Moser 1978). It is also the limits to the supervisory capacities over micro-property worked by family labour combined with limits to capitalisation and financial obstacles to scaling up. These limits supply incentives to expand by multiplication or fissure, with key moments in the life cycle of the PCP household – such as new alliances at marriage or property division and household partition at inheritance – enabling resources to be combined with loans of money to propel and renew this expansion.

PCP, the state and politics

The existence, persistence and growth of PCP is a political process. We can see PCP-state relations in term of contemporary outcomes of PCP politics. Since states have particular histories, India’s central and regional states are taken here as an instructive case and yardstick for future comparison, for, as ‘self-employment’, PCP is still reckoned to be the commonest form of livelihood in India.³³

The state

It is not obvious that any society where capital has generated PCP on a large scale has a state project to resist the forces restraining differentiation and accumulation.

Certainly PCP has been destroyed by states in a gross way when they seize land and evict without any – or adequate – compensation. The process is more subtle when states subsidise capital-biased investments which can then outcompete and displace PCP, when they ignore underemployment which glues workers to their fragmented micro-landholdings and do nothing about adverse exchange relations and extra-economic co-ercion which threaten rates of return. Infrastructural projects and subsidies for small-scale industry involve scales of ‘small’ capital which are gigantic compared with the assets of most PCP. Ironically PCP is mostly too small to be eligible. ‘Spaces’ for PCP are threatened when the state is able to extort taxes directly, or through trading corporations and boards, or when it demonetises its currency.

States, however, have encouraged PCP through development projects targeted at small farmers and critiqued as agrarian populist in character. These included not only scale-neutral Green Revolutionary technological packages which managed to trickle down but also growth linkages and multipliers of a small-scale, labour-intensive kind theorised as appropriate for local endowments and consumption (Mellor 1976). (In practice these have been more than somewhat foiled by rural demand for metropolitan capital-intensive consumption goods.) The provision of infrastructure such as market sites with access to banks and power supplies also encourages PCP when states decide not to regulate them otherwise. The states’ projects for expanded agrarian PCP have involved skills, technology, infrastructural services and human development, but they have often been deprioritised and tend to languish in the doldrums (NCEUS 2009). States ostensibly promote PCP through their support for micro-finance and self-help groups, and when they turn a blind eye to informal finance and to the taxes they lose through unregistered transactions.³⁴ Through selective failures of enforcement (which counts as a deliberate policy) states permit cultures of fiscal and regulatory non-compliance in which PCP can thrive.³⁵

States protect PCP first when they reserve sectors such as textiles and food processing for village industries and co-operatives, but successful co-operatives (described as ‘capitalism without capitalists) are uncommon. A second dimension of state protection lies outside the work-place in schemes of social security, social insurance, health and education and cash transfers. This ‘scheme-itis’ reduces the impact of risk and uncertainty at work and of shocks of ill health in and out of work (Devereux 2001). It may strengthen economic competences just as it pre-empts political unrest. Here, eligibility is formally defined through citizenship. Research on social safety nets however reveals citizenship not as a finished state but rather as a highly uneven process of struggle for uneven and shredded packages of social provision.

Last, PCP is affected by the unintended consequences of other interventions: threatened for instance when employment guarantees provide alternative work to PCP, yet boosted if the wage floors provided by employment guarantees enable PCP to undercut wage-work more easily. PCP is threatened by enforceable regulations adding to costs while protected by thresholds below which firms are not regulable. States watch over this ‘petit-bourgeois revolution’ – the expansion of PCP – without a project for it. A starter-hypothesis might be that the aggregate incoherence of most states’ projects for PCP shape the spaces for it as much as do the (informal) tactics of capital.

The informal economy that results is much more complex than its several current bodies of theory for ‘unorganised’ firms and ‘unregistered’ livelihoods suggest (Chen and Carre 2020). A PC firm may be registered with a local municipality and have several bank accounts, but its premises are never checked for compliance with building or planning regulations, its energy supplies may be partly stolen from the tangle on top of powerlines, its price information confected, labour laws unknown or ignored or parodied in discretionary ways, its waste flouts environment laws while so does its incoming water supply and its tax behaviour is evasive, erratic and last-minute. A farm’s land is registered, its owner has a bank account and its inputs purchases are recorded but its tenure, water, labour, credit and commodity transactions will not be. Interests in enforcement or against compliance with state regulation are the stuff of politics in these convoluted political spaces (Prakash 2017).

Politics

PC producers are active but unequal partners in cross-class alliances and in the informal social-corporatist politics of civil society organisations which teem in India’s socio-economy. Despite the large literature on peasant and farmer movements, and on unusual cases of collective political organisation by the self-employed³⁶, PCP is grit in the machinery of the politics of both capital and labour. It has interests (land security and low consumer prices, for examples) which differ from input-output price relations and from returns which reduce the risks and minimise price volatilities which concern landed elites. It also has interests (like sites, taxes and access to energy) other than the terms and conditions of work and on markets other than those for labour.

PC producers have often been co-opted into peasants’ and farmers’ movements that claim to represent them (Brass 1994), and into collective associations which regulate the markets in which they are often exploited and which defend them against day-to-day threats from the state. But whenever their interests are at variance with those of larger capital, they are invariably ignored (MacEwan Scott 1986).

Guilds, trade and business associations are often not confined to local commercial capitalist elites but incorporate PCP in class coalitions (Basile 2013). Organising apprenticeships and entry, sites, market information, terms and conditions on derived markets (such as loading and unloading), collective insurance, dispute resolution, resistance to new scales of capital or seeking to regulate relations as agents to them, representation to the state in defence against interventions which neglect or threaten them, these associations are also routinely able to refuse entry for those with non-conforming social identities – even if social identity is not set in tablets of stone.³⁷ As Gavin Williams (1976) concluded for peasants in the 1970s so here and now, PC producers ‘remain committed to the institutions which are the means of their exploitation and oppression’.

In labour politics, lawyer Kamala Sankaran (2008) has revealed the contradictory ways in which PCP and even petty accumulating capital are ‘declassed’ as labour. Capitalists with family labour but fewer than five wage-workers are officially classed as labour because of their comparatively small operating size. Exploitation of PCP through subcontracting is also legally invisible. Meanwhile, PCP has no rights as labour because their market-mediated intermediaries do not count as employers. Trade unions have their work cut out fighting the state for the regulation of wage-workers: the work conditions of PCP are low priority. This legal declassing has prevented all but a few trades like beedi-making (local cigarettes) in conditions of barely disguised wage-labour from being formally recognised for purposes of wage-setting and social security benefits.

While the ILO argued for PCP to be mobilised ‘for itself’ in tripartite organisations (state, employers and PCP) it had no option but to shift responsibility to local states to implement the recommendation, which has failed as a political project. It is unusual to find PCP organising and acting in its own interests. From 1972 India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) has organised 1.5 m women vendors, hawkers, artisans, small farmers and home-based producers. In a politics of ‘four securities’ (work, income, food and social) it has developed a complex legal entity (which is further affiliated with NGOs, co-ops and credit groups). This is operating with a politics of bargaining with the state and of moving from subsidising self-employment through profit to cross-subsidising a set of activities/sectors that now numbers about 90 types. But this achievement has mobilised under 1% of the female workforce and its unique scope and scale has been shaped in part through its international networks and funding (SEWA nd).

PCP has no political party of its own and no distinctive politics.³⁸ The scholar of critical agrarian studies faces questions such as these: if obstacles to accumulation by PCP were destroyed or if PCP were destroyed by new scales of invading capital, how would the mass unemployment that would result affect economies and politics already in crisis?

Is PCP then to be encouraged? How? Is it to be transcended by collective arrangements such as co-ops and producer organisations capable of technological advancement? In view of past general failure and rare exceptions, how would this politics be generalised and how could hostility to it be fought?

In sum

This review has indicated the scope of PCP as a subfield of great interest and global relevance, one which transcends the silos of academic disciplines. While many scholars conflate it with peasant production – mainly because both deploy labour in its uncommodified (family) form – PCP is analytically distinct: not only because it is inextricable from circuits of capital but also because it transcends agricultural production and is found throughout the economy. Its role varies with conditions that are able to differentiate and destroy it, or conserve it in its formal subsumption to capital and/or create and renew spaces for it to persist in more or less autonomous forms. PCP has been analytically marginalised by both Marxists and other versions of critical agrarian scholarship, yet it is a persistent outcome of capitalist transformations. Taking the form of small farmerism as a tabula rasa for development however, it remains a powerful and persistent strain of agricultural development economics and policy.

It has been argued here that against the odds of state, politics and integration into neo-liberal economies, PCP expands numerically as a form of contemporary capital. The economic costs of destroying it are such that it must be protected. Instead, it faces incoherent state interventions. The stakes for PCP are very high.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Jun Borras who encouraged this essay into life, to Ben Cousins for his editorial responses and to Shapan Adnan, Ali Jan and Mekhala Krishnamurthy for their comments on a draft. Errors and omissions are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Harriss-White

Barbara Harriss-White is Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Oxford University. A political economist of South Asia, since 1969 her work has been grounded in field studies of long-term agrarian change, agricultural markets, small town development, informal and criminal economy, dimensions of deprivation relating to market exchange including caste and gender, policy processes and latterly the economy as a waste-producing system.

Notes

1 See Dalton et al. (1972), Kahn (1982), Bernstein (1986), Gibbon and Neocosmos (1985), Jan and Harriss-White (2019).

2 The household, comprising everyone who eats from a given kitchen or hearth, may include domestic labour, migrant workers, apprentices, lodgers, visitors and fictive kin who may or may not be related through kinship (Brass 1986).

3 Micro, small and medium enterprises known usually by the acronym.

4 As in footnote 1 plus Bernstein (2003, 2007), Bernstein and Byres (2001), Brass (1986), Bryceson (2000), Fan et al. (2013), Friedmann (1978), Mezzadri and Fan (2013, 2018), Tairako (2019), Titumir (forthcoming), Yadav (2022).

5 Especially in the era, now gone, when socialist development was regarded as an imminent practical possibility.

6 A much-used phrase, due to Trotsky (1967).

7 Gibbon and Neocosmos (1985), Brass (1986), Da Corta and Venkateshwarlu (1999). In new home economics the different social values of male and female labour in stylised households are theorised, and imputed, from gendered differences in wages on labour markets ‘outside’ the household. From this spring debates about the identification of gendered wages, the extent to which gendered wages reflect gendered productivities or the non-market influence of patriarchal oppression (Ellis 1993).

8 Guerin (2014); Reboul, Guerin, and Nordman (2021) have revealed the intermediation of women in the household juggling of loans and the long-term reciprocal gifting which may be interpreted as saving for dowry and the expenses of marriage alliances, such that she regards credit management as part of the female reproductive burden.

9 Lenin (1913) used statistics from Germany and Austria to argue that women outnumbered men as workers on micro property.

10 In fact the internal dynamics of agrarian households will repay further research. The relation between work, status, decision-making capacity and day-to-day management of materials and technology is not direct (see Harriss-White and Janakarajan 2004).

11 Notably denied in the literature on the future digital revolution in ‘small-scale’ agriculture

12 See Bernstein (2003) for detailed references.

13 But they do not supersede class analysis – despite the fashionable nature of this identity-based approach in post-colonial studies.

14 See Gayer and Jaffrelot (2012) for details of the constrained choices of Muslims in India’s public and private sectors and self-employment.

15 Any glance at the business pages of newspapers demonstrates that commodities – and here an entire sector, agriculture – not only have physical characteristics and linguistic labels making them unique, but also social meanings and on occasion charismatic character. In Harriss-White (2003), an argument is made that this ‘thinginess’ – quiddity – can and does affect market structure and behaviour. Along with structures of institutions, it gives capital its specific character. See Gandhi et al. (2021) for many case studies.

16 In many cases wages may not exist as referents or practical alternatives. Female family labour is often priced at male rates, as in Sumatra in 1984 when rice labour on family farms was priced at lumber-jacking rates.

17 This is not counting angels on the head of a pin. Policies for support prices for agricultural commodities often impute family labour at market prices [see debates about minimum support prices in India (Singh, Harriss-White, and Singh 2021)].

18 Note that self-employment is not mutually exclusive with other elements of the list.

19 See typologies in Jan (2017), Amirali (2017), Aslany (2020).

20 Balakrishnan (2019), Gururani (2020) – and its inverse: extended urbanisation and its relevance to the agrarian question (Ghosh and Meer 2020).

21 To give them due credit, small farmerists now recognise external threats such as price volatility, access barriers to patented IPRs and economies of scale in digital technology which threaten small farmers (Hazell et al. 2010).

22 Williams (1976); and see the tightly argued discussion in Sen (1981).

23 See discussion in Jan (2017) and John Harriss’ review (Harriss 2021).

24 Who and what the outsiders were exercised the founding fathers. See for instance Latin Americanists Redfield (1953) on the city as appropriator and Wolf (1955) on peasant societies as part societies, defensive against, yet subordinated to, external forces which destroy them.

25 Williams (1976) makes a powerful summary of the ways in which through cheaper inputs, food and consumer goods, PCP subsidises the wages of capitalist labour. Bernstein (1977) develops an analysis of the means whereby the colonial state in Africa operated to subordinate peasantries. They included taxes, marketing boards, the forced cash-cropping of raw materials for exxport and the control of corvee labour.

26 A conclusion already reached by Franklin (1965).

27 Dalton was concerned to distinguish peasants from tribal social forms (Dalton et al. 1972; Dalton 1974). See also Ellis (1993), Bernstein (2003).

28 See Jansen (2015), for a critique.

29 It has been counter-argued that under generalised commodity production, any commodity can substitute for labour in the production of value but even if mediated through non-labour commodity exchange, the impact of such ‘expanded’ exploitation is on persons and PCP embodies labour as well as capital: Cohen (1979), Roemer (1985).

30 Discussed in Sen (1981), Roemer (1985). Although there is no theoretical reason why property by itself should lead to inequality in exchange, Ben Crow’s analysis of class specific prices on daily Bangladesh rice markets showed this to be the case (Crow 2001). Also see Gerry (1974) in Moser (1978) and Harriss-White (2008) for widespread corroboration of capacities of capitalist to buy under value and sell over value when engaged in transactions with PCP.

31 In the absence of social security, lack of wage work means lack of income and thus poverty. In turn poverty and lack of collateral often means ineligibility for credit to smooth income.

32 Typically it is consumed by labour rather than invested in capital assets. Investments in labour however increasingly include higher education and professional training. Sons (and daughters) are now being educated and afterwards are often tempted by skilled wage-work to leave the small family firm. Options then facing the family firm are bankruptcy, reconfiguration through agencies attached to corporates, reconfiguration through partnerships, or the substitution of family labour by wage labour. The latter removes discretionary behaviour such as credit dealings and price negotiations hitherto entrusted to family members. In altering the modus operandi, such firms do not necessarily accumulate.

33 Even claimed to account for 62% GDP (Self-Employed Women’s Association nd).

34 Solid evidence from Bangladesh shows that micro finance may also lead to dispossession through indebtedness (Misra 2021) and not only of land but also of domestic utensils commodified as collateral (Shapan Adnan, Personal communication, 2022).

35 In these perverse relations, tax evasion can be seen as a subsidy to evaders at the high end of PCP.

36 Such as India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA nd)

37 For small Igbo firms in Nigeria, Kate Meagher (2010) has shown not only the fluidity of social identities but also how identity networks contributed to the rise and slide of two clusters.

38 While peasants as a revolutionary force is the subject of much scholarship in JPS (Bernstein and Byres 2001), discussion of PCP and revolutionary politics may be found in CPI(M) 2004. Although Indian Maoists have carried out the only nuanced analysis of PCP as a form (CPI [Maoist] 2004), to my knowledge, their deductions about its reliability as allies of revolutionary movements have no historical evidence in India to support them.