60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST duction therefore cannot be carried out by emphasising eittier the productive forces or the relations of production. For comprehending the complex totality of production we have not only to analyse the relationship between these invariant constituent elements of any mode of production along these two axes but also the relationship (correspondence or non-correspondence) of these. The works on the 'transition' from feudalism to capitalism have been criticised for emphasising the importance of the development of the productive forces in the transition to the exclusion of the relations of production. But here again he is tilting at windmills. It is a common assumption in the transition debate that the development of capitalist relations of production preceded by one to two centuries the development of a specifically capitalist labour process—the industrial organisation of production. It was the transformation of the relations of production from serfdom to wage labour— analysed by Marx as 'The Primitive Accumulation of Capital'—that led to the creation of a capitalist market and large scale production based on this market for subsistence commodities. Giving importance to the labour process leads to grave 'praxiological problems' for Partha Chatterjee. However, in the transitional non-correspondence phase of a mode ofproduction,the relationship between the relations of production and the labour process is no longer the stable function of reciprocal limitation but became the transformation of one by the effect of the others. Praxis is a complex act of intervention in a determinate mode of production. It is well to bear in mind Marx's statement th"»t history sets itself only those tasks which it can solve. While Partha Chatterjee accepts that Marx's analysis of the labour process is not 'techno-economic determinism', he seems hesitant about accepting its importance for the determination of *the specific characteristics of the capitalist state or bourgeois ideology or proletarian consciousness'. Here again certain qualifications can be made. The specificity of the organisation of production under capitalism in which capital—both object of labour and means of labour—confronts the labourers,;neans that the process of surplus appropriation is contained in the process of production. It is this which leads to the separation of the sphere of civil society and the economy in the capitalist mode of production. The point can be comprehended more ciparly if we contrast it with the labour process in feudalism where the unity of the labourers and the means of production resulted in the process of surplus appropriation being extra-economic or political in nature-which meant a more specific intervention of the political instance in the economic. Similarly the whole study of the fetishism of commodities in Capital, vol. 1 is based on the specific characteristics of the labour process under capitalism and the alienation of labour power peculiar to it. Lenin's critique of spontaneity was based on the effect of this reification of the labour process on proletarian consciousness. The revisionist tendency of the Second International as well as the reformism of the labour aristocracy was traced by him to this as well as to the transition from absolute to relative surplus value. Any way, as stated above, the analysis of a determinate mode of production cannot be confined to examining either the relations or the forces