30 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
of 'consent* and 'coercion*. Modern civil society, i.e., an elective democracy, is based upon the consent of its citizens. But this is a doctored consensus, which has to accommodate the pre-emptive claim of private property on the ground floor. This assertion of property rights, as Adam Smith clearly saw, was often to the prejudice of the material entitlements of those with no property except their own labour-power.5
The property right has to be safeguarded against any dilution by the demands of the working classes. This was, in the formative years of the market society, achieved through an oppressive series of enactments, the use of State agencies (such as the police) to check any possible assertion of worker militancy, and the denial of the franchise to the working classes.6
These overt trappings of a coercive political order are obviously beyond the pale, as far as contemporary liberal theory is concerned. Yet they do surface with remarkable regularity in the less developed parts of the capitalist world. For countries like India, which on the attainment of political sovereignty, adopted most of the institutions and processes of a modern liberal society—such as universal adult suffrage, free trade unionism, and a multipolar press—coercion has taken more subtle forms. This coercive intent is apparent today in the manner in which a forced consensus is being put together on a structural adjustment programme supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The very basis of this consensus—the well-wom argument that there is no alternative—bespeaks an authoritarian logic.
To further understand how a market society transits from consensus to coercion, it may be useful to differentiate between money and material entitlements.7 In a simplified two-class model of an economy, there would be only two kinds of money entitlements—profits and wages. At any given set of prices, the prevailing levels of profits and wages would confer on the capitalists and workmen, a certain quantum of material entitlements.
To carry this simplified model further, one could take a two-sector economy, consisting of agriculture and industry, and a given set of intcr-sectoral commodity transactions.8 Needless to say, these transactions would be taking place at a given set of prices, and a correlative set of money entitlements for workers and capitalists in both sectors.
If the system were to suffer an extraneous shock—say on account of adverse weather conditions that cut into agricultural output—then peasant proprietors in the agricultural sector would seek to keep their money entitlements constant by bidding up the price of agricultural commodities. This would lead to a pressure on the price of food in the industrial sector, for which workers would presumably seek compensating wage increases. If industrial capitalists were to in turn, adjust prices to keep their money profits constant, then there would be an overall increase in the cost of living. Were peasant proprietors to