COMMUNICATION 67 of the most detailed and painstaking analysis of the available data, to Indian conditions. We would strongly urge N Ram to "react against" bourgeois economists, instead of criticising those who are trying to do so. To conclude ; an analysis of the agrarian structure, and of the main tendency of development in it, acquires interest from its relevance to concrete political programmes on land reform. So far the debate on the existence and extent of capitalist production in Indian agriculture has been ai an abstract level, and the differing political implications of the different views which have emerged, have not been discussed, explicitly. Perhaps it is time that this was done. UTSA PATNAIK 1 The generalisations put forward here have been discussed in greater detail elsewhere. In the present brief so mmary some oversimplification is inevitable. 2 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol III, (version edited by F angels), Progress Publishers, Moscow 19b6 (published in UK by Lawrence & Wishart), pp b93, 596-597. 3 ^W.,p808. 4 Ibid., p 804. 5 See P Chattopadhyay, "On the Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture", Review of Agriculture, pp 185-192, Economic and Political Weekly, December ^0, 1972 : ^If, and to the extent in which, it is generalised commodity production—in the sense of commodity production at its highest stage with labour power becoming a commodity — that appeared in India, the production relations here were capitalist, otherwise not. The fact ol imposition from outside is irrelevant in this context." 8 Karl Marx, op. cit,, p 804. 7 B Hjejie, "slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the 19th Century", Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol XV, Nos 1 and 2, 1967. 8 See D Kumar, Land and Caste in South India, Cambridge l9b5, especially chapter III. The author wishes to show that the creation of the modern class of agricultural labourers cannot be attributed to the effects of British rule. Her own estimates of the 'slave' and 'serf castes as a proportion of rural population in the late nineteenth century however indicate that only a part of the modern class ol agricultural labourers can be traced to that source. 8 S j Patel, Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan, Bombay 1952, pp 83 84. 10 One Soviet scholar, L Rudin goes to the extent of arguing that the existence of a large rural surplus population forced to accept subsistence wages, far from representing capitalist production, actually militates against the capitalist transformation of production relations in Indian agricultuie. See S Clarkson, '"In Search of a Communist Development Model ', Economic and Political Weekly, March 18, 1972, p 628, quoting Rudin's review of V G Rastyannikov and M A Maksimov, The Development of Capitalism in Modern India's Agriculture. Baudhciyan Chatterjee appears to subscribe to this argument. Our emphasis is different : it is not subsistence wages as sucn which prevented capitalist production (South Africa is a nourishing capitalist economy paying its tied African labour bare subsistence wages) —but rather the long relative stagnation in the domestic market for agricultural products, in turn reflecting the slow growth of manufacturing industry. Since the mid-50s state capitalism has expanded the domestic market; the resulting impetus to capitalist production in agriculture is, if anything, strengthened by subsistence wages, for the rural capitalist can reap super-profits. How the present