Abstract
State–corporate crime research has been critiqued for fetishizing events and specific institutional arrangements. In recent years, this tendency has been changing as researchers are increasingly transcending the empiricist orthodoxy by giving more attention to relations and processes behind events and institutional arrangements. This is evidenced in the UK by the work of Steve Tombs, David Whyte and Kristian Lasslett. Their complementary concepts of “state–corporate crime symbiosis” and “regimes of permission” direct the analysis of social harm at systemic relations and processes expressed through state and corporate practices constitutive of capitalism. Following from this, Kristian Lasslett's application of Marxist dialectic to the study of state crime provides a scientific vantage point for the analysis advocated by Tombs and Whyte. Drawing lessons from their works, the article attempts a Marxist dialectical analysis of the Bt cotton and its contribution to the agrarian crisis in India.
Highlights
State–corporate crime research has been critiqued for fetishizing events and specific institutional arrangements
The phenomena we describe as state–corporate crime are products of intricate processes constitutive of capitalism, i.e. economic production, distribution and consumption
The concept of state–corporate crime has too often been used to focus on extreme cases or events of state–corporate incidents, accidents or omissions
Summary
The article begins by outlining Lasslett’s, Tombs’ and Whyte’s critiques of empiricist approaches to investigation of state–corporate crime. It proceeds to discuss the Marxist dialectical method and its application to the production of social harm by state–corporate symbiosis. Before embarking on the analysis of agrarian crisis and farmer suicides in India, the article sets the historical context of the Bt cotton case in two sections entitled “The Green Revolution” and “The Gene Revolution”. These two sections explore the emergence of the socio-economic conditions that facilitated the introduction of Bt cotton. The final section looks at how these conditions, and the processes and relations hidden behind them, produced social harms – i.e. agrarian crisis, debt and suicides. It is there that the theoretical analysis, with the help of Bernstein’s and Benaji’s contributions, takes place
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