42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST used by Lenin and Mao. In India it is used by the CPI(M). See V I Lenin "Preliminary Draft of Thesis on the Agrarian Question", Collected Works, Vol 31, op. cit.', Mao Tse-tung, "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party", Selected Works, Vol II, Foreign Language Press, Peking 1967, pp 323-324 and the booklet sponsored by the CPI(M), A Collection on the Agrarian Question, National Book Agency (Private) Ltd, Calcutta. 22 Most of those whom we have classified as big farmers participate in the work on their farms. There is only a small category of'gentlemen farmers' in Thaiyur. 23 As Marx has shown, the capitalist mode of production presupposes a separation of the labourers from the means of production. It presupposes a property-less labourer and a property-owning capitalist; see Capital, Vol I, especially Chapter 24. We learn how an unequal distribuiion of land can fulfil the same function of separating the farmer from the means of production, that is, the land. At the same time, as Table 1 shows, the separation is by no means complete. The labourers can be allowed to own small parcels of land. Cf Karl Kautsky, Die Agrar-frage, Stuttgart 1899, pp 164-174. It is a common pattern in many labour-intensive types of capitalist agriculture. See Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Les Classes Societies dan les Societes Agraires, Sociologie et Tiers Monde, Edition Anthropos, Paris, 1969. 24 It is more a cultural impossibility than a technical one. 25 This is a unique feature which seems to be rare in other countries. Marxist treatment of the political economy of agriculture does not deal with this phenomenon. Neither Kautsky, nor Lenin, nor Mao Tse-tung had the need to discuss it in their analyses. See Kautsky, op. cit.; V I Lenin, "Capitalism in Agriculture," Collected Works, Vol 4; and Mao Tse-tung, op. cit., pp 305-334. Marxists discussing the Indian situation have not reckoned enough with this fact. Instead they have tended to almost automatically apply the analyses of the authors mentioned. These analyses need to be modified on certain points. Failure to do this can have serious political consequences. 26 Due to technical reasons we have not been able to use the same classification of farmers here as in Table 1. 27 Sometimes this cheap money is used for usury. 28 The methods by which this table has been arrived at are highly complex. Unfortunately, the available space does not allow us to account for them. The interested (or critical) reader is referred to Djurfeldt-Lindberg, op. cit., section 8.3.6. 29 This is the average ration. The 4615 bags are in reality Unequally distributed : big and middle farmers can their whole need of rice, 200 kgs per consumption unit; in the small peasant households the income in kind becomes much lower than 70 kgs per consumption unit. 30 Only a minority of all households eat rice the whole year through. When people have to buy foodgrains, they are often forced to buy ragi, because it is cheaper. 3 The remaining part is sold to the non-agrarian part of the population. 32 We have not been able to detect any difference in per acre yields between big and small farmers in Thaiyur. In India as a whole, as Gupta has shown, the per acre yields are, if anything, higher on smaller farms than on big ones. So far the ^reen revolution' has probably not changed this pattern. See S G Gupta, "Some Aspects of Indian Agriculture" (as revealed in recent studies), in A R Desai, Rural Sociology in India, Fourth revised edition, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1969, pp 291-327. 33 We here leave out what happens to the incomes of moneylenders and landlords. The circulation of that money does not belong to the simple reproduction of agricultural production. 34 Their income in kind (paddy) is included in the 4615 bags which constitute the farmers' income in kind in Table 4.