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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.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Henry Bernstein and Ali Jan, to colleagues and students at Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for the Informal Sector and Labour Studies for discussions about petty production, to Jairus Banaji for his work on merchant's and commercial capital, and to two anonymous referees of this journal. All errors are mine.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Other driving contradictions have been theorised: between the predatory logic of capitalism and the complex logics of reciprocation (O’Connor Citation1994), including not just the necessity of collective activity but also the ecological conditions of production—and the absence of restitution under capitalism (O’Connor Citation1988).
2 The latter is a view shared with bourgeois modernisation theorists and their globally influential practitioners (see the review in Hodgson Citation2001).
3 There are others. Ancillary classes—the bureaucracy and the professions—were identified by Marx as necessary to the capitalist production-circulation process, though not per se productive and therefore dependent upon the polar classes of capitalism (Marx Citation1857, Ch. 9). For Marx, the middle class is another category that he recognised both in an awkward manner and as being awkward for his model (see Aslany Citation2018). For Kalecki (Citation1972), and scholars such as Raj (Citation1973) and Jha (Citation1980), who found Kalecki's ideas relevant to a developing country like India, the concepts of intermediate capital, the intermediate classes and intermediate regimes are awkward for the Marxist mainstream.
4 This set is far from exhaustive—it also includes artisanal production, cottage industry, craft, enterprise, the family firm, handicraft, home-work, household production/sector, micro-enterprise, out-sourcing, own account enterprise, small firms/farms, small-scale production, the tiny sector and village industry (Harriss-White Citation2012).
5 The produce trades are one element of Banaji's fourfold taxonomy of merchant capitalism, discussed later.
6 Shanin's argument has been extensively criticised. Cox (Citation1979) has re-interpreted Shanin's evidence to unearth signs of incipient capitalist relations. Politics as a contingent force has been solidly condemned (Pethybridge Citation1976), while Millar (Citation1973) understands the countervailing forces privileged by Shanin as best regarded as a taxonomic model.
7 Harvey (in Mahon Citation2012) goes so far as to generalise the modern working class as awkward on grounds that it is more easily organisable politically through the neighbourhood than the factory.
8 See the references to Marx on peasants in Duggett (Citation1975).
9 All translations of the German ursprungliche. Dobb's and Sweezy's debates about whether primitive accumulation can be achieved through market exchange or are the product of forcible seizure are discussed in Adnan (Citation2015).
10 SCP means simple commodity production, for the logic of which see later in this article; also see Bernstein and Byres (Citation2001, p. 26). Debates about the middle peasantry—whether its numbers and its self-sufficiency (which can be empirically disputed) give it power to dominate peasant politics—are found in Harriss (Citation1982).
11 See the discussion of sources in Harriss-White (Citation2012).
12 See Friedmann (Citation2013) for an account that grounds some of these explanations in the changing conditions of modern world history.
13 And for production, also read trade and services.
14 Even Banaji in his recent paper on merchant's capital (Citationforthcoming, pp. 13, 22) admits that households may have ‘some degree of control over their own means of production’—such that the distinction between DWL and PCP depends on judgements about what ‘some degree’ means.
15 Marx (Citation1857).
16 These do not exhaust explanations. See Friedmann (Citation2013), summarising and commenting on Shanin, for others less relevant to South Asia.
17 Dalits are members of the lowest caste or considered outside the caste system as former ‘untouchables’. They are often also referred to as scheduled castes or, more widely as oppressed people. Adivasis are indigenous tribal peoples of South Asia.
18 As in the case of small producers’ need to protect common property resources being privatised by rural elites.
19 See Bottomore et al. (Citation1985) for a sympathetic treatment, and Hodgson (Citation2001) for an unsympathetic one.
20 Small town economies have significant seasonality in non-agricultural goods and services, reflecting that of their agrarian economic base.
21 These are (i) the Verlagssystem where the merchant capitalist is essentially a putting-out merchant; (ii) international money markets; (iii) plantation businesses (‘colonial trades’); and (iv) the produce trades. For their development, see Banaji (Citationforthcoming, pp. 9, 22).
22 For the latter, see Myrdal (Citation1968), and for their persistence and reworking, see Harriss-White (Citation2003).
23 Lenin ([Citation1899] Citation1964, Ch. 2).
24 Chandrasekhar (Citation2017). Even in 2011–12, as much as 86 per cent of workers in the private sector and 50 per cent in the public sector were in units that could be designated as unorganised based on employment size.
25 This does not mean that instances conforming to the stereotypes of PCP or MC/CC cannot be found.
26 As a result, some scholars term PCP ‘flexible’ and ‘unstable’ (O’Laughlin Citation2016, p. 400; Aga Citation2018).
27 See Cohen (Citation2013) for a critical treatment of policy vocabulary.
30 Another article would be needed to develop the modalities of state support for small commercial capital, but see Harriss-White (Citation2008) for the case of West Bengal, Sinha (Citation2017) for Punjab and Krishnamurthy (Citation2011) for Madhya Pradesh.
31 As latterly suggested by the Marxist economic theorist, Prabhat Patnaik (Citation2017).