Abstract
Capitalist development in the last three decades in India has sharpened the class differentiation in agriculture. Increasingly, there is a sharp class division that is taking place between petty commodity producers and the capitalist farmers. The presence of a large number of petty commodity producers and informal nature of agricultural enterprise in India constantly reduces profitability, brunt of the crisis caused by this tendency is being borne by petty commodity producers. Forced by the pauperization, petty commodity producers are forced to diversify their incomes into wage activities in farm as well as non-farm activities. Indeed, all classes of farmers diversified their incomes away from agriculture, marking a structural transformation towards petty bourgeois capital on one hand and wage labour on the other. Pauperization of petty producers is also manifesting in a large number of suicides in the Indian countryside. The article provides empirical evidence for these processes at work in the Indian countryside.
Highlights
According to Agricultural Census 2011, which has been fastest decadal decline in the last half a century
Petty producers are incorporated into commodity production, lured by the prospect of improving income and consumption, despite the fact that they are ill equipped to face the risk involved in agriculture
petty commodity producers (PCPs) at the bottom have become the primary victims of predatory market forces where those taking uncalculated risk end up taking their lives
Summary
Transformation of agrarian relations, according to received theory, necessarily brings all hitherto existing forms of production such as traditional subsistence farming into commercial agriculture (Marx 1986a, 694). As noted by Kautsky in the German context, they display tremendous resilience in the face of worsening conditions of production (Kautsky 1988, 132) In his classic piece The Agrarian Question, he argued that petty producers tend to survive through overexploitation of family labour and self-starvation, even as they eventually get weakened and WRPE Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/wrpe/. The class character of PCP tends to be ambiguous They are subsumed under capitalist development, in reality they are disguised labour. The new globalization and neoliberal capitalism phase where the Third-World agricultural production is reintegrated into the global supply chains, pushing petty commodity production back into the vortex of fleecing market forces. Petty commodity production may be destroyed at some places, but can surface given the uneven capitalist transformation taking place globally (Bernstein 2010)
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