28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the emergence of the latter class as the industrialists in colonial India, all militated against the fullest development of the capitalist mode of production in India with its progressive socio-economic consequences vis-a-vis the old mode of production. Unlike the Western countries where the industrial bourgeoisie came for the most part from the midst of direct producers, owners, masters and apprentices of capitalist workshops, artisan and merchant guilds, in colonial India this class mostly consisted of the comprador traders, usurers and merchants of the interior. Even when these elements became share-holders of both British and Indian industrial companies they continued their comprador functions or the semi-feudal exploitation of the peasantry. The perpetual and intimate involvement of traders and moneylenders in landownership in free India explains to a great extent the persistence of the old mode of production in the Indian countryside. Such a persistence facilitates exploitation of the peasantry and puts obstacles on the way of transition of merchant capital to industrial capital. Lenin once remarked, "It is inherent in capitalist production to strive for unlimited expansion. ... Under all the old economic systems production was everywhere resumed in the same form and on the same scale as previously, under the capitalist system, however, the resumption in the same form becomes impossible and unlimited expansion, perpetual progress, becomes the law of production.'347 Due to the circumstances narrated above, this law is yet to opeiate fully in India. (Paper prevented at the All-India Seminar on Marxism held at North Bengal University) 1 Kail Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow, Progreess, 1977, p36. 2 KarlMarx, Capital, Vol 1, Moscow, n d, pp 585-586. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid, p714. 5 Ibid, p586. 6 Ibid. 7 Karl Maix, Capital^ Vol I (edited by Donna Torr), London, George Alien and Unwin, 1946, p 821. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid, pp 822-823. 10 KarlMarx, Capital, Vol I, Moscow, pp 714-715. Emphasis added. 11 Capital, Vol I (D Torr edition), p 822. 12 Ibid. 13 V I Lenin, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", in Selected Works, Moscow, Progress, 1968, p 212. 14 Ibid, p232. 15 J F Becker, Marxian Political JLconomy; An Outline, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p 185. 16 Lenin, op cit, p 259. 17 Ibid, p233. 18 Nathaniel H LefT, "Entrepreneurship and Economic Development: The Problem Revisited", Jownal ofEconomic Literature, Vol XVII, March 1979, pp 46-64.