16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
as, in some cases., to the limitations imposed by an unrefbrmed agrarian structure—notably the disincentives and inability to invest on the part of small tenants and petty landholders who make up the bulk of the cultivating population. They draw attention to the greater amplitude of fluctuations in output in the 1960's as compared to the 1950's^ and warn that sudden annual falls in output remain a contingency to be reckoned with, so that a rational food procurement and distribution policy remains a desideratum.
The third, Marxist school of thought., asks the most interesting question, in my view, but is divided in its assessment of recent developments. One group sees in these developments a strong tendency towards the capitalist transformation of the mode of production, so long constrained at low levels of techniques and productivity by precapitalist relationships in agriculture.3 The other group however, discounts the significance of these developments, stresses the fact that precapitalist relationships continue to predominate in agriculture, and therefore by implication deny that a rapid transformation of Indian agriculture in a capitalist direction, is feasible.4
The theoretically unsatisfactory nature of some of the Marxists5 analyses to date, lies firstly, in their treatment of agriculture as an isolated sector in itself, not explicitly related to the rest of the economy. As a result of their concentration on agriculture in isolation, the vital interconnections between agriculture and industry, and agriculture and the world capitalist system, is entirely lost. Yet the dynamics of agrarian development are very closely related, as will be argued later, to the development of the Indian economy as a whole, particularly to the future \of State capitalism in India. The future of State capitalism in turn is closely related to the degree of independence the State is able to maintain ws a vis international capital.
Secondly, in order to see in what sense capitalist development is or is not taking place in agriculture today, it is surely necessary to analyse the sense in which the agrarian structure at independence and earlier, was precapitalist. There may be legitimate doubt whether the precapitalist structure can be identified with Teudalism9 as is usually done, if this term is taken in its classic sense of denoting the appropriation of labour-services, kind or quit rent by a group of dominant landholders from a subject peasantry. The subject is vast and controversial:
it is not the intention to enter in any depth here into the question of the nature of the agrarian structure in the colonial period. Nevertheless, in order to understand the nature and causes of the recent developments^ their inner dynamic (and hence the possible course of future developments}, it is essential to situate them within a historical perspective.
^Looking at the new tendency towards capital investment and market-oriented production in a historical perspective, the series of inter related questions which immediately arise are : why did productive investment in land by an emerging class of capitalist farmers not occur