Primative Accumulation Under Dirigiste and Laissez Faire Regimes

University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 5-2010 Capitalism in Post-Colonial India: Primative Accumulation Under Dirigiste and Laissez Faire Regimes Rajesh Bhattacharya University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Economics Commons Recommended Citation Bhattacharya, Rajesh, "Capitalism in Post-Colonial India: Primative Accumulation Under Dirigiste and Laissez Faire Regimes" (2010). Open Access Dissertations. 252. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/252 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CAPITALISM IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION UNDER DIRIGISTE AND LAISSEZ FAIRE REGIMES A Dissertation Presented by RAJESH BHATTACHARYA Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY MAY 2010 ECONOMICS © Copyright by Rajesh Bhattacharya 2010 All Rights Reserved CAPITALISM IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION UNDER DIRIGISTE AND LAISSEZ FAIRE REGIMES A Dissertation Presented by RAJESH BHATTACHARYA Approved as to style and content by: _________________________________________ Stephen A. Resnick, Co-Chair _________________________________________ Richard D. Wolff, Co-Chair _________________________________________ Augustin Lao-Montes, Member ____________________________________________ Gerald Epstein, Department Chair, Department of Economics DEDICATION To those active in the most ancient and enduring struggle of mankind—against dispossession ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis is a product of ideas, most, if not all of which, have already been written, talked about or hinted at in academic writings that I have read, public debates that I have listened to and inspired but informal conversations of which I have been fortunate to be a part. I didn’t choose those texts, debates and conversations; rather, the social context got me interested in it in a way that made me specifically engage with them. In this sense, this thesis, like any work, is co-written by all those whom I have read, listened to and argued with. Before I acknowledge specific people, I must assert the collective authorship of this work. I was motivated to write this thesis because of a perceived absence—in the discourses that are a part of the social context I am concerned with—of a particular perspective that grounds this thesis. This perspective—which stresses overdetermination, contingency and inescapable contradictions at the epistemological level and class understood in terms of performance, appropriation and distribution of surplus labor at the discursive level—I owe to the works of Professors Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff. I am immensely grateful to them for their intellectual guidance and for being considerate and helpful at every single stage of this dissertation. I consider myself fortunate to have the pleasures of conversing with them and exchanging my half-baked ideas with them, to which they always responded with utmost seriousness and genuine encouragement. Without their sympathetic understanding of the difficult circumstances under which I wrote this thesis, this dissertation would simply not have materialized. Professor Augustin Lao-Montes brought to my dissertation a breadth of perspectives, to which I have hardly been able to do justice in this dissertation, but which have opened up v avenues of creative extension of this thesis in future. The notion of a radical constitutive “outside” of capital and the political implications of the contradictions that inhere in capital’s relation with its “outside” was impressed on me during my graduate education at Calcutta University by Professors Ajit Chaudhury, Kalyan Sanyal, Arup Mallik, Pranab Basu and Anjan Cahakrabarty. That unique perspective is the source of much of the creative energy behind this work. I am grateful to Pranab Basu and Kalyan Sanyal for listening to and responding to my numerous and often wayward intellectual digressions during the writing of the thesis. Their comments and suggestions often helped me get back on track. I am deeply indebted to Professor Sharmila Banerjee of Calcutta University, who, like a true well-wisher, helped me get through some difficult circumstances during the writing of this thesis. A remarkable group of friends at Calcutta University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst helped me develop the ideas for the thesis. I owe these friends the security and the excitement of belonging to a community. I must mention Snehashish Bhattacharya, Ian Seda, Amit Basole, Charalampos Konstantanidis and Bengi Akbulut, among many others, who kept me intellectually and emotionally alive. EGSO at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, ensured an intellectually and more importantly, politically stimulating atmosphere and guaranteed weekends (in addition to unplanned weekdays) of fun. This remarkable community, i.e. EGSO, made an otherwise solitary process of writing a thesis an absolutely pleasurable exercise. I am grateful to Jogamaya Devi College for granting me leave to complete my studies abroad—a rare favor which I deeply appreciate. I must thank my colleagues at the college—Nilanjana Ghosh, Ashok Boral, Abhijit Chakraborty, Indrani Mukherjee, Lekha vi Mukherjee and Ruma Basu—for their support and continuous exhortation to finish writing the thesis. Finally, I must thank my wife, Amrita, for being a patient companion through the tensed and uncertain days of working through the fog of ideas, the moments of desperation and lassitude and the final days of feverish writing. I am deeply indebted to her for her compassion. vii ABSTRACT CAPITALISM IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION UNDER DIRIGISTE AND LAISSEZ FAIRE REGIMES MAY 2010 RAJESH BHATTACHARYA, B.Sc., PRESIDENCY COLLEGE M.A., CALCUTTA UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professors Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff In this dissertation, I try to understand processes of dispossession and exclusion within a class-focused Marxian framework grounded in the epistemological position of overdetermination. The Marxian concept of primitive accumulation has become increasingly prominent in contemporary discussions on these issues. The dominant reading of “primitive accumulation” in the Marxian tradition is historicist, and consequently the notion itself remains outside the field of Marxian political economy. The contemporary literature has de-historicized the concept, but at the same time missed Marx’s unique class-perspective. Based on a non-historicist reading of Marx, I argue that primitive accumulation—i.e. separation of direct producers from means of production in non-capitalist class processes—is constitutive of capitalism and not a historical process confined to the period of transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism. I understand primitive accumulation as one aspect of a more complex (contradictory) relation between capitalist and non-capitalist class structure which is subject to uneven development and which admit no teleological universalization of any one class structure. Thus, this viii dissertation claims to present a notion of primitive accumulation theoretically grounded in the Marxian political economy. In particular, the dissertation problematizes the dominance of capital over a heterogeneous social formation and understands primitive accumulation as a process which simultaneously supports and undermines such dominance. At a more concrete level, I apply this new understanding of primitive accumulation to a social formation— consisting of “ancient” and capitalist enterprises—and consider a particular conjuncture where capitalist accumulation is accompanied by emergence and even expansion of a “surplus population” primarily located in the “ancient” economy. Using these theoretical arguments, I offer an account of postcolonial capitalism in India, distinguishing between two different regimes—1) the dirigiste planning regime and 2) the laissez-faire regime. I argue that both regimes had to grapple with the problem of surplus population, as the capitalist expansion under both regimes involved primitive accumulation. I show how small peasant agriculture, traditional non-capitalist industry and informal “ancient” enterprises (both rural and urban) have acted as “sinks” for surplus population throughout the period of postcolonial capitalist development in India. Keywords: primitive accumulation, surplus population, postcolonial capitalism ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................... xiv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1 2. PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION AND THE “OUTSIDE” OF CAPITAL: A CRITIQUE OF CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY READINGS ...........................11 Introduction ............................................................................................................11

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