\ SOCIAL SCIENTIST the detailed treatment to the historical experience of the dependent ex-colonies. When Marx repeatedly stresses that the rate of profit of agricultural capital would be determined outside of it, he seems to be assuming a perfect competition between industrial and agricultural capital. The reality is that the very incompatibility of the nature of means of production, product involved, and the concomitant labour process between industry and agriculture put a limit to perfect competition. If anything, capital from agriculture is a dependent capital, which survives at the mercy of industrial capital, often on doles or special market protection from the latter. Why this unequal relation between industrial and agricultural capital? There are three major reasons: (a) Land, being the major means of labour in agriculture, meets its limits to productivity too early to allow large amounts of capital to flow into it. In industry, on the other hand, the means of labour do not impose any 'natural limit* to the productivity of labour, since they themselves are produced in the process of capitalist production, they offer a scope for the ever higher organic composition of capital, (b) The self-expansion of capital depends upon the rapidity with which the cycle M-C-M is completed. Again, since this cycle is regulated by the limits imposed by the inelastic biological life span involved in agricultural production, the capital from agriculture cannot compete on equal footing with industrial capital, (c) Capital flows to the spaces where its expansion is more certain and less risky. However, this security is not offered by agriculture which is often prone to the vagaries of nature. Therefore, the possibility of higher relative surplus appropriation through the institution of better control over the labour process and detailed division of labour on the one hand, and by the concentration of capital on the other, attracts more capital to industry than agriculture. Marx's abstract understanding of capital led him to conclude that the intensive and extensive expansion of capital would cause the progressive social polarization, disintegrating petty production in agriculture into two antagonistic social camps. It is also true of the European history that the scattered artisanal production was first separated from agriculture by its formal subsumption under capital.2 Once the petty production was beaten up in the battlefield of free competition, the doors were thrown open for its real subsumption under capital. In this unequal duel petty artisans were bound to sink to the ranks of wage workers because they were fighting a lost battle. Industrial capital, once in command of political power, was interested incheap agricultural commodities, including the supply of rural labour power. In case of shortage of industrial labour the poor peasants are going to huddle into the urban industrial centres in search of better wages. However, in the situation of an abundant supply of labour, the attempt of industrial capital would be to contain the rural exodus within its rural boundaries* The most effective method would be to grant protection to their stamp size plots of land where the petty producer would continue to produce, often at saving even below the wages. This has been acknowledged by Marx (1977:806) when he admits that the smalt peasant production is encouraged because the market