The Political Economy of Agrarian Capitalism 33 opposite directions, the former controls the conditions of production and the latter owns physical labour-power to sell. In an ideal situation independent peasant proprietor has no place between these two social oppositions. How did Marx and Lenin characterise capitalist agriculture can be epitomized as follows: 1. The private property which rests on the producers' own labour, writes Marx (1965:765-67), is a direct antithesis of the private property which engages others' labour. In other words, the former is a wage worker in the waiting. Marx (1977:807-08) justifies his position by showing that the proprietorship of 'land parcels' by its very nature excludes the development of social productive forces of labour, social forms of labour, social concentration of capital, large-scale cattle raising and the progressive application of science/These peasant holdings must vanish, continues Marx, because the peasant proprietors tend to 'block' the surplus in unproductive payments of buying land. He concludes that the free peasant cultivation is bound to disintegrate under the impulse of capitalist industrialization and competition from capital-intensive agriculture. 2. Once capitalist production outside agriculture is well established, the average profit accruing to non-agricultural capital would determine the amount of rent to be paid by the capitalist tenant farmer to his landlord. The capitalist tenant farmer would tend to part with the amount of surplus as rent which is over and above the price of production, the latter having included the average rate of profit due to capital (Marx, 1959:779-80). Ideally, therefore, in capitalist agriculture there are landlords (the rent-receivers), capitalists (the profit-receivers), and agricultural labourers (the wage-receivers). 3. The difference between the feudal rent and capitalist rent is that in the former case, the rate of rent determines the amount of profit left with the tenant, in the latter, profit, instead of rent, acquires the normal form of surplus-value, and the rate of profit determined outside agricultural production set the limits to rent (ibid). 4. For Marx (1965:766) capital is not a thing, it is a historical social relation of production. The relation of production has been emphasized because the remaining steps—exchange, distribution, and consumption—involved in the completion of the cycle of reproduction are predicated to the primacy of the production relation. 5. Lenin (1967:68), while agreeing with Marx, goes a step further and compares capitalist agriculture with industry, including the specialization involved in the detailed division of the labour process. The above abstract analysis of capitalist agriculture is open to critical evaluation on. two accounts: (a) It seems that Marx has simply superimposed the theoretical analysis of industrial capital on to agrarian capital, which really does not fit well: (b) His analysis being particularly situated in the European experience of tottering feudalism and rising capitalist industrial empire, it falls short of