(Posted to FB by Jairus Banaji)
As industrial conglomerates like Reliance diversify into retail (through
Reliance Retail and JioMart), or like Adani into the wholesaling &
storage of foodgrains (Adani Agri Logistics), and India’s e-commerce
begins to attract retail giants from abroad, one of their first moves
will be to establish supply chains that can ensure price domination over
farm households. This means scrapping the minimum support prices that
have become the key focus of the resistance and mass mobilisations
organized by the Punjab farmers and different farmers’ unions. After the
concerted resistance that India saw to the Citizens Amendment Act, this
comes as an even more remarkable challenge to Modi, to his government
and through them to the ever-narrowing circle of big industrial capital.
But where is the framework for getting some sense of what this struggle
signifies in terms of capitalism? In a recent book I’ve argued that
Chayanov’s notion of the vertical concentration of capital is a good
description of the more pervasive ways in which capital establishes its
domination over agriculture. Chayanov was reacting to the orthodox
Marxist analyses of the agrarian question for which it was the emergence
of a capitalist class within the mass of the peasantry that chiefly
signified the victory of capitalism. Against this model of a
disintegrating peasantry that splits up into capitalist farmers and
landless laborers (‘horizontal concentration’) he contraposed the way in
which large commercial firms establish their domination over a dispersed
mass of peasant households. “Trading capitalism”, he wrote, sometimes in
the form of very large-scale commercial undertakings draws masses of
scattered peasant farms into its sphere of influence and, having bound
these small-scale commodity producers to the market, economically
subordinates them to its influence”.
In moving into retail big industrial capital integrates the functions of
commercial capital and works precisely on the lines indicated by
Chayanov. Eventually these “new ways in which capitalism penetrates
agriculture” “convert the farmers into a labor force working with other
people’s means of production. They convert agriculture…into an economic
system concentrated in a series of the largest undertakings”.
Dispossession is a major anxiety underlying the present struggle of the
farmers, but this is not dispossession of one group or class of peasants
by another so much as the subordination of millions of farm households
and of family labor to large-scale capitalist undertakings that embody
the “return of merchant capitalism” but here in India (unlike Walmart in
the US) as part of a diversification strategy mooted by the most
powerful (and favored) industrial groups in the country.
Modi is firmly committed to those groups and their “farm to fork” models
of agribusiness.
(Photo shows Chayanov in 1910, when he was 22)
Image may contain: 1 person, hat
<https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10158817139790489&set=a.352264660488&__cft__[0]=AZVV2mQ6Ho-pH72GM_7O4bb26a-z32q8uAt2Xght6zyzwSq-XxA-AIogwQ9fNAGLWvKGCDH-EhZaB8qJr8xxduP9BJszkuqQ9D_bIQiDQJyAcv9z-DD5yq5Leu7gGSr2Rt-NAE4SIjD8d_AA1KVA8nKBW_aTzhiomgqlV0f4E7RoVQ&__tn__=EH-R>
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