98 SOCIAL SCIENTIST similarly run across this same gamut. The acceptance of a class-analysis automatically renders null and void the validity of any problematic which is located within the assumption of a homogeneous peasantry. We may briefly refer to the relationship between the grouping of farm economics data by acreage levels, which is a widely prevalent practice, and the grouping of cultivating households into social classes, which we have argued, depends on the resource endowment of the household relative to its production capacity and consumption needs. By 'resource endowment", evidently, we should mean the effective resource per capita ; and it is because farm size grouping takes farm area unadjusted for irrigation, cropping pattern, or size of the family, that it is a poor indicator of even land resource endowment. For example, if the productivity of irrigated land is twice that of unirrigated land (a fairly realistic assumption), then a five acre dry farm supporting a five-member household will represent only one-fifth of the per capita endowment that is enjoyed by a two-member household with a five-acre wet holding. Yet with the conventional acreage grouping of data, both households would get lumped together into the same group because both operate holdings of the same area. Secondly, farm-size grouping fails to take account of differential degrees of present investment of capital on similar physical areas. (This is analytically a similar point to that made above because the extent of irrigation, for example, is a function of past investment). When a process of technical change embodied in capitalist investment is taking place, as at present, this becomes a serious drawback. For, some better-off households within a given acreage-group would be in a position to invest and move to a qualitatively different range of production possibilities altogether, at the same time that other poor households in the same acreage group may be disinvesting owing to debt. By lumping together diametrically opposite types of households in the same groups, the analysis by acreage levels of data would succeed in obscuring effectively the real processes of capitalist investment and class differentiation. We will not recapitulate here our earlier discussion on farm size versus farm scale, but refer the reader to the 1972 article in which the radically differing results of grouping farm economics data by alternative indices, were discussed.1 The logical point being made is quite simple : agricultural production of farming households depends not only on the input ot labour per unit of area but also on the investment of capital per unit of area and the associated level of technology. The potential for investment of capital in turn is a function of the extent of surplus generated per unit of area. Whether surplus is retained by the household for potential investment, or parted with, depends entirely on the specific position within the relations [of production, namely the class position of the household which is a function of the per capita real resource endowment or the property structure. The landless labourer certainly performs surplus labour, but gets only a wage which embodies necessary labour alone (and