84 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Indeed, it is significant that the left parties have all along characterised the economic policies of the Indian Government as representing the capitalist path of economic development, and been demanding the pursuit of a non-capitalist path.1 Of course, the bourgeois path inexorably leads to an ever-widenirg process of concentration and centralisation, resulting in the development of monopolies in one sphere after another, ruining and swallowing up small and middle bourgeois elements. However, at no stage is the small and middle bourgeoisie eliminated as a category since it is in the very nature of the functioning of the system that while some of the existing weaker bourgeois elements disappear, new ones are all the time being born from among the middle peasants, petty traders and so forth, until all land has also been swallowed by the monopolists if such a situation could be conceived. II So far as the respective shares of the bourgeoisie, feudals and semi-feudals in the ownership and control over productive assets and gross output are concerned, our national income statistics with all their inadequacies indicate a perceptible shift from the latter to the former. There are several ways of testing the validity of this formulation empirically, namely : 1) Confining the control over the gross value of material product of the bourgeoisie (industrial, commercial, financial, banking) to the non-agricultural sector, we find an overall tendency of increase in the share of the former over that of agriculture which, at this level of abstraction, we assume to be out of the bourgeois relationship fold. 2) In the field of agriculture itself, there is evidence of the rich peasants (kulaks)—new and former feudal or semi-feudal landholders— increasing their share of total agricultural output (we are excluding forestry and fisheries, dairies, animal husbandry, poultry, etc from consideration here). Among the rich peasants there has been a constant rise in the proportion of those operating mainly or wholly with wage labour of one type or another producing for the market and utilising improved methods of lower or higher intensity, manual/bullock or semi-mechanical improved tools, or mechanised or semi-mechanised equipment and of course better seeds, fertilisers and insecticides. Thus an increasing proportion of agrarian assets and output is being drawn into the orbit of capitalist relations of production. The tendency is unmistakable though, of course, the extent of this process is a phenomenon which needs to be empirically assessed in order to find out the forms and patterns it assumes and the rate at which it is growing and the impact of forces obstructing the process and a measure of their strength. Ill What then of the equations between the various sections of the