56 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
precapitalist social formation in India : the mechanism of colonial exploitation (growth of commodity production, the land revenue systems and enforcement of land transfers) speeded up differentitation within the peasantry and soon produced a semi-proletarised, pauperised mass within it, over and above the pre-existing class of servile labourers. Typically the labourers were exploited, not by capitalists investing in agriculture but by owners of land in their capacity as landed proprietors appropriating the entire surplus labour. The gains from a rapid expansion of exported commercial crops and such little technical change as occurred, moreover did not accrue in the main to the direct producers themselves but rather seem to have been quite effectively skimmed off by the trinity of State, landlord-moneylender and trader—in the form of higher land revenues, rack rents and usurious interest, and low buying prices.
The economic climate under colonialism thus seems to have favoured the extensive development of particular forms of capital in the agrarian sector as opposed to others, namely, capital in the sphere of circulation (trader's, usurer's and land-purchasing capital); while it inhibited the penetration of capital into the sphere of agricultural production. This was reflected in the continuing extremely low social productivity of labour in this sector. In short, the peasantry-was subjected to forms of exploitation typical of capital without a transition to more productive, capitalist relations of production.1 According to Marx :
Usurer's capital employs the method of exploitation characteristic of capital yet without the latter's mode of production .... It does not alter the mode of production but attaches itself firmly to it like a parasite and makes it wretched .... (it) belongs with its twin brother, merchant's capital, to the antediluvian forms of capital which long precede the capitalist mode of production.2 Similarly, •
the price of land is nothing but capitalised and therefore anticipated rent. . . the capital invested by the landowner himself in purchasing the land . . . has absolutely nothing to do with capital invested in agriculture itself ... it is a deduction from the capital which he has available for actual production3 (Emphasis added).
Needless to say, it is capital in production which is the crucial factor deciding whether we are entitled to speak of the development of capitalist production relations, and therefore of the transition to the capitalist mode of production with its associated higher level of productive forces. Marx makes it crystal clear that the 'antediluvian9 forms of capital which employ "the method of exploitation characteristic of capital" may nevertheless not involve capitalist relations of production and therefore not necessarily change the mode of production into a capitalist one.
While indigenous factory production in India expanded by taking advantage of periods of crisis for world capitalism, this failed to shift the distribution of the total work-force away from its overwhelming dependence on agriculture- around 70 per cent in both 1891 and 1951—or