In his 2007 book, 'Rethinking Capitalist Development', Kalyan Sanyal wrote-
Primitive accumulation of Capital means theft or forcible acquisition of valuable resources. In Singur, West Bengal, the allegation was that the ruling 'Left Front' administration had forcibly acquired land for the Tatas who wished to build a cheap 'Nano' car for the masses. Mamta Bannerjee, who had valiantly fought the Communists for decades, was able to mobilize public opinion and thus win elections from 2011 onward. She returned the land to the peasants and gave some compensation to affected people. Sadly, a Tribunal decided the State Government of Bengal owed a large sum of money to the Tatas. Whether it will be actually paid is a different matter. Cultivation has resumed in Singur though some of the land which was built upon is now a useless 'wasteland'.
The irony here is that Kalyan Sanyal, who had moved to the Left and given up on Ron Jones style international trade theory, published a book featuring 'primitive accumulation' just at a time when it was a Communist Chief Minister who was grabbing land from the peasantry. Capitalism had to run away when 'petit bourgeois' Mamta launched a campaign against the land acquisition pushed through by 'Comrade Buddha'- the Marxist Chief Minister.
What is the relationship between capital and its others (“pre-capitalist” and “non-capitalist”)?
They are on a continuum.
What is the relationship between capitalism and development?
It spurs development.
These are vast questions to which there are no tidy logical or empirical resolutions.
Nonsense! I just answered both questions.
Yet we cannot understand the world’s present condition – particularly the violence of poverty and dispossession – without precise, thorough, and radical analyses of these questions.
Fuck off! Poor people with low productivity who keep having babies perpetuate poverty. The same point can be made about weak and cowardly people. They will keep losing territory and resources to those who are less weak and less cowardly even if their strength comes from superior technology or financial power.
Kalyan Sanyal’s magnum opus, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism (2013 [2007]), is
utter shit. It was written after the cretin returned to Left Front Bengal. Bangladesh rose above West Bengal at least partly because, Kaushik Basu, says, Pakistan scrapped the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 in 1958. India kept adding clauses to that stupid law, while Bangladesh under Gen. Ershad was cautiously privatizing and turning a blind eye to women getting work in factories. West Bengal, of course, had labour militancy and chased Capital out of the State.
a particularly generative book with which to explore these questions. It offers an ambitious set of explanations, in lucid prose, to the puzzling persistence of need in a world of plenty and of (ostensibly) non-capitalist social relations in a capitalist world.
The explanation was that stupid cunts do stupid shit which keeps their people as poor as fuck.
Sanyal was a development economist (PhD 1973, University of Rochester) and Professor of Economics at the University of Calcutta until his death on 18 February 2012.
In other words, he was an eye-witness to West Bengal's relative decline.
Rethinking Capitalist Development, his final book, provides a powerful critique of his own discipline as well as the “post-development school”, which has offered a popular critique of this discipline since the 1990s.
Countries which went in for Capitalist Development didn't 're-think' it. They were too busy living large.
For that reason alone the book deserves our attention; but it has other strengths too. Our aim here is to offer a reading that complements the growing literature on the implications of Sanyal’s work (see, for instance, John and Deshpande 2008; Chatterjee 2011; Mezzadra 2011) by offering a critical assessment of Rethinking Capitalist Development’s core insights. We begin by recapitulating the book’s five most novel quali-ties and important strengths.
Sanyal’s Conception of Capitalism
was wrong.
The first essential novelty concerns Sanyal’s conception of capitalism. He claims that what we typically think of as capitalism is actually comprised of both capitalist and non-capitalist elements.
No. We think of Capitalism as a 'pure form'. A country where everything is run by private enterprise is Capitalist.
Sanyal’s term for this differentiated unity is “the capital – non-capital complex”.
Our term for Sanyal is the stupid cunt-idiotic shithead complex.
He first introduces this concept via his critique of Gibson-Graham (2006):Gibson-Graham problematises the economy by unsettling the ‘hegemony of capitalism’; but in her analysis, the concept of hegemony itself escapes problematisation.
As does the concept of problematisation. The thing is a waste of time.
The flip side of this simple vision of hegemony as suppression is that when the monolith [capitalist economy] is unsettled, the ‘others’ that emerge automatically acquire a radical face.
Ayatollahs are very radical. The read Karl Marx not the Holy Quran.
But if we allow hegemony to take a complex form, can we see the opposition character of those ‘others’ uncritically? Shouldn’t we explore the possibility that they exist as an integral part of a complex hegemonic order?
Shouldn't we run away from West Bengal the way we had to run away from East Bengal?
We signal in passing our agreement with Sanyal’s critique of Gibson-Graham
two 'economic geographers'
. He continues: Although I find Gibson-Graham’s counter-construction highly interest-ing, it is these questions that provoke me to attempt a different problem-atisation of the confl ation of market and capitalism. Instead of arguing that the presence of multiple forms of production in a market economy challenges capitalism’s hegemony,
That's not a market economy. It's a fucking mixed economy you morons! It is obvious that if you have a Public sector and a Voluntary Sector and a Traditional Sector, then the Market's 'hegemony' will be contested.
I want to further problematise the very concept of capitalism by asking: Isn’t it possible to see capitalism as necessarily a complex of capitalist and non-capitalist production residing in the commodity space?
I want to problematize the very concept of Sanyal & Co by asking if it isn't possible to see them as necessarily a complex of coprophagic unicorns cavorting in the rectum of Hegemony's configuration space?
In other words, can’t we see capitalist development as [a] process that necessarily produces, brings into existence, non-capitalist economic processes …? (pp 6-7, italics as in original).
Nope. No necessity is involved. Big Public Sectors evolved out of Total Wars and higher Income Elasticity for certain 'Club' and 'Public' goods. But first corruption and nepotism and plain stupidity and incompetence had to fall. Only then would the Government be trusted not to just squander tax money.
Sanyal sharpens the distinction between his position and Gibson-Graham’s a few lines later: Gibson-Graham wants to shrink and emaciate capitalism to rehabilitate economic difference;
Did they succeed? No. They were stupid and useless.
I, on the other hand, seek to produce a vision of capitalism
as a beautify naked woman making sweet love to another beautiful naked woman? No. They aren't twins. That would be yucky.
that is malleable and protean, [and] see economic differ-ence as an integral part of that capitalism and explore how capital successfully lives in that world of difference .
I suppose, if you lived under the Left Front in Calcutta you might want some nice visions of malleable and nubile Lesbos scissoring each other incessantly.
This argument is a version of a more general theoretical trend in recent Marxist literature, one that seeks to specify an “inside”/“outside” cleavage within capitalism.
Why bother?
The varied con-ceptions of such an “outside” are polymorphous: it is, among others, “communism”, “socialism”, the “gift economy”, the “moral economy”, “History 2s”, “worker-owned enterprises”, the “commons”, and, latterly, the “need economy”.
Don't forget the Santa Claus economy or the Magic Money tree economy.
The concern everywhere is to identify the nature of the “outsideness” vis-à-vis capitalism:
This was done long ago by Coase in his theory of the firm. Externalities can be internalized within the firm. That's why it can't be 'decomposed' into a set of market transactions. Well, I suppose it can but then you lose economies of scope and scale. You get lower productivity and return on Capital. This happens a lot in India because of paternalistic laws and a heavy compliance burden on Corporations.
Where does difference reside?
In some obsolete shite spouted by useless academics.
Is it to be found in the sinews of “civil society”, in the agonistic workings of “democracy”, in the contradictions of “economy ”, in the generative improvisations of “practice”, in the dissident rhythms of the “everyday”, in the distant reaches of uncolonised “experience”, in the vital capacities of “labour”, in the constitu-ent power of the “multitude”, in the paradoxical workings of “reason”, in the wanton excess of “energy”, in the rhizomatic interplay of “life”, in “buried” and “disqualified” knowledges or, perhaps, in the creative surge of “imagination”?
In other words, the answer to the question 'why did the Left fail?' is 'because we didn't try the ideas of even stupider Leftist academics.'
Here is how Sanyal provides a warrant for the need for a theory of capital’s inside/outside: “The search for an alter-native to capitalism seems to be over”.
It turned out, the alternative was what Chairman Xi was doing- i.e. use the market but ensure 'residuary control rights' remain vested in the ruling party. Maybe, Trump will achieve something similar.
But sub-sequently, he asks: what if the ostensibly universal phenomena perceived to be capitalism – a social system anchored by the market principle and the institution of private property, with history, so it proclaims, firmly on its side – has not extinguished or absorbed pre- ( and thereby non-) capitalist forms of production by primitive accumulation, as in the standard transition narrative?
In other words, what if the Marxist narrative is pure fiction? Capitalists didn't steal land or labour power. They paid cash to use both more productively.
What if, in fact, it continuously renews (and thereby operates alongside) non-capitalist forms of production?
British agriculture features serfs who grow turnips to feed themselves on strips of land provided to them by the Lord of the Manor.
In short, what if capitalist production generates economic heterogeneity as part and parcel of what we name “capitalism”?
But it doesn't do so. True, we may want to pretend that serfs in England are starving or dying of the bubonic plague while the Lords and the Bishops live in palaces surrounded by every luxury. But why stop there? Why not say the Lords are all Draculas who suck the blood of the serfs?
In taking up these questions, Sanyal’s ambition is nothing shy of a theory of postcolonial capitalism.
Which, in South Korea or Taiwan is just capitalism. India is different. It is a 'Socialist' country. That's why we can still speak of feudalism and Dynastic rule.
The second novelty of Sanyal’s argument comes in chapter 2, “Ship of Fools”, where he argues that the way that capital lives with difference by not being capital, but by only ever becoming capital.
That's why you can continue to rail at Capitalism even where there is no Capitalism. Thus, if you are in the middle of the Sahara desert you can say 'Capitalism is denying me a nice swimming pool.'
His central claim is that the Marxist tradition has fallen into the trap of thinking of capitalism in terms of Marx’s Hegelian conception of becoming and being, where the hinge-point from the former to the latter is the separation of the means of production from labour.
The Marxist tradition is doing well in Xi's China. He has shown that it is the Party which controls everything. Capitalists are only tolerated if they help increase the power of the Party.
We find three crucial sub-points in his argument. First, Sanyal argues that Marx’s careful distinction between the being and becoming of capital
i.e. the notion that first you must have an industrial proletariat before it can seize power. But Afghanistan had no industrial proletariat when the Khalqis seized power. That didn't end well. Muslim Afghans are pious and very very good at fighting.
has been lost in conventional readings of primitive accumulation, and that as a consequence the tradition has consistently erred in treating capital as “self-subsistent”.
Even where it doesn't exist. This is cool because you can blame it for everything even where it is wholly absent.
Sanyal writes:Marxist development theorists … have missed th[e] ex-post nature of [Marx’s] concept of primitive accumulation: that it is the immanent history of self-subsistent capitalist mode of production which can be grasped only after capital has fully become, as distinct from the actual process of transition.
Penguins are transitioning into becoming a proletariat. They are oppressed by invisible Capitalists who steal all their fish.
… What [Marxist development theorists] fail to see is that if capitalist production, to ensure its self-reproduction, has to depend on its outside, then, as Marx emphatically puts it in Grundrisse, it is not self-subsistent capital but only capital in arising.
It did seem possible, at that time, that Germany could choose another path to industrialization. The State could imitate what Capitalists in England had done and reinvest the profits.
Capitalist production is self-subsistent only when its entire requirement of wage goods and capital goods is produced within the domain of capital , as is the case in Marx’s descript ion of the capitalist mode o f production in Capital (p 49)
Engels worked for his family company in Manchester. Marx was aware that
.Second, against Marx’s account in Capital, according to Sanyal, primitive accumulation and the development of capitalism have not created a world in which capital is “self-subsistent” and more-or-less everyone is a member of one of the two fundamental classes. Rather, it has produced a “waste-land” of would-be proletariats who cannot actually sell their labour power as a commodity, but also lack the means of labour to become producers.
They may get absorbed in the unofficial sector- i.e. sweatshops run by politically connected gangsters.
In Sany al’s biting prose Bereft of any direct access to means of labour, the dispossessed are left only with labour power, but their exclusion from the space of com-modity production does not allow them to turn their labour power into a commodity. They are condemned to the world of t he excluded, the redundant, the dispensable, having nothing to lose, not even the chains of wage-slavery. Primitive accumulation of capital thus produces a vast wasteland inhabited by people whose lives as producers have been subverted and destroyed by the thrust of the process of expan-sion of capital, but for whom the doors of the world of capital remain forever closed (p 53).
In other words, if a Socialist government chases away all the Capitalists, then it is Capitalism's fault that there is no Capitalism with the result that workers are worse off.
Third, the direct implication of Sanyal’s reasoning is that any theoretical framework that continues to posit a distinction between “pre-capitalism” and “capitalism” today is mistaken:
Thus it is a mistake to think that serfdom doesn't still exist in England even though there are no serfs.
If there is a possible tra nsition …, it is from pre -capitalism to the capi-tal –non-capital complex.
Even if all the Capitalists have run away or never existed in the first place. The advantage of this approach is that you can say the planet Jupiter has a capital-non-capital complex. We should show solidarity with the proletariat of that great planet.
The conceptualisation of post-colonial capital in term s of this complex amounts to saying that transition in the histori-cist sense has already occurred and what we have is capitalism with an inherent heterogeneity.
even on the planet Jupiter. Did you know, it was once colonized by the imaginary Capitalists of Neptune?
Capitalist development in this scenario means not a structural shift from non-capita to capital, but the development of the entire capital – non-capital complex (p 40).
Such as that which must exist on Jupiter.
This then raises the question: what constitutes “the development of the entire capital – non-capital complex”?
That which constitutes capitalism on Jupiter.
What exactly is the relationship between capital and development in Sanyal’s schema? Here we arrive at the third novelty of his argument.
The Essential Economic Function of Development
Development means economic growth. It is the thing itself, not a function of the thing.
Sanyal argues that the essential economic function of development today is to “reverse” the consequences of primitive accumulation by
returning all the land in America to descendants of the First Nations?
repairing the would-be producers who inhabit the wasteland with their necessary means of labour:
Santa Claus should set up nice factories so people will have jobs.
Development is posited as a systematic and sustained process of elimination of poverty by enabling the poor to get access to … necessities.
Santa Claus should supply them.
The goal of dev elopment is to engage the dispossessed and excluded in production ac tivities by uniting them with the means of labour, that is, by allowing them to have access to productive resources.
Also, death should be abolished so that people have access to immortality.
And it is h re that a reversal of primitive accumulation occurs whereby resources are made to flow from the domain of capital to the wasteland to institute a need economy (p 65, our italics).
Capitalists should stop thinking of profit. They should set up factories for free. No. They won't go bankrupt. Santa Claus will give them plenty of money from the magical money tree.
Against those Marxists who claim that development’s eco-nomic function is to extend primitive accumulation and/or deepen capitalist relations (thus facilitating the expropriation of surplus value, either immediately or in the future), Sanyal contends that, by reversing primitive accumulation, development produces and reproduces the capital – non-capital complex.
i.e. instead of taking resources from people, giving them lots of factories in which they can work will make them very happy. Also, if death is abolished, people won't keep dropping dead.
Developme nt’s Novel Politic al EffectsIt follows that development has distinct and novel political effects. Why must development (qua reversal of primitive accu-mulation) occur at all, if not to facilitate capital accumulation? Sanyal answers: because this is how the postcolonial state governs the excluded of the wasteland.
Postcolonial state has magical money tree. It can set up lots of nice factories. Also, it may very kindly abolish death. I'm not getting any younger you know.
To make this argument, Sanyal turns to Michel Foucault. The postcolonial state governs as it does, he claims, as an effect of a new global “governmentality”:
Death is occurring due to 'Death-ality'. Post colonial State should transition to a Deathality-Immortality complex. Foucault died only because Post Colonial France did not reform 'Death-ality'.
If by development we mean planning for accumulation, then there is no denying it is an anachronism
Why plan when a magical money tree exists?
…. But it hardly means that develop-ment is dead. Far from it. The accumulation-centric vision … is fast fading away but is yielding place to an entirely new imaginary of de-velopment, one that is rooted in governmentality rather than in the project of planned primitive accumulation (p 191).
Governmentality has magic powers. It should abolish death.
Here, Sanyal appears to say that the postcolonial state is operated by development discourse rather than being the operator of it. Hence his emphasis on this “new … imaginary of development … rooted in governmentality.”
i.e. wishful thinking. Why are so many economists obsessed with economizing on the use of scarce resources? Magic money trees are rooted in governmentality. This is the 'imaginary' we should embrace while starving to death.
A bit later, Sanyal crystallises its essence:[The] goal [of development today] is to constitute an economic space outside and alongside capital, for its castaways…. Development is alive and kicking; only instead of identifying itself with capital, it now seeks to create the conditions of existence of the latter [i e capital] on the basis of an agenda of its own. What it is engaged in is the management of poverty…
i.e. buying votes with hand-outs. But this means letting Adani & Ambani produce stuff they can sell at a profit. Otherwise there is no tax revenue.
).The postcolonial state is therefore the congealment of a governmentality defined by poverty-management that operates by repairing the consequences of primitive accumulation. This means that the centre of development activity is, geo-graphically speaking, the urban and peri-urban slum, and, economically speaking, the informal sector (pp 192-207).
No. The centre of development activity is infrastructure investment. We had hoped the World Bank for finance this. The 'andolanjivis' chased it away. So we now rely on Ambanis and Adanis.
Theorising the ‘Need Economy’ The final original and essential argument comes when Sanyal returns to Marx’s economic thought in chapter 5 to theorise “need economy”.
Marx said 'to each according to his contribution' till scarcity itself ends. People only do a bit of work as a hobby or way to pass the time. They give away what they produce to anybody who wants or needs it.
Here Sanyal fleshes out the conceptual distinction between need and accumulation (see pp 208-15). Sanyal begins by defi ning need economy as “an ensemble of economic activities undertaken for the purpose of meeting needs, as distinct from … systematic accumulation”
So subsistence farming is okay. Trying to make a profit and save up for a rainy day is not okay.
(p 209; restated in the terms of classical political economy: Sanyal aligns need with use-value and accumulation with exchange-value).
Markets are places where exchanges occur. They are very evil.
For Sanyal, need economy is “a non-capitalist economic space that is integral to the post-colonial capitalist formation” (p 209).
i.e. subsistence farmers are needed because....urm... Government has to subsidize them since, as the population rises, they eat more than they produce.
This space is defi ned by the fact that “producers are estranged from the means of production as a result of primitive accumulation … [and] un-able to sell their only possession, their labour power” (p 209).
Very true. Bill Gates accumulated a lot of money. This caused farmers in Vidharbha to become unable to work for Microsoft.
From these premises, Sanyal reformulates Marx’s general formula for capital from Capital (Chapter 4), M C M’, as M C C’ M’ (M’ – M, M). According to Sanyal, in the circuit of the need economy,the producer purchases materials with his initial stock of money; he then adds value to them, sells the produced commodity, and uses the pro-ceeds to replenish the initial stock and to purc hase commodities for consumption (which is equal to the value added in the activity) (p 210).
This is a steady-state economy. There is no economic growth or technological innovation.
Abstractly speaking, this statement could also describe the circuit of capital (Marx’s M C M’). Yet Sanyal fi rmly rejects the notion that Marx’s general formula for capital describes the need economy (he must do so, or else there is no essential dif-ference between need and accumulation). How then are they distinguished?
One is nice. The other is nasty.
Sanyal emphasises two points. The first concerns labour power. Sanyal posits that “com-modities purchased by the informal producers, C, consist only of the means of labour, and it is transformed with C’ with the producer’s own labour (or family labour) and then sold for money” (p 211).
Subsistence farmers may sell what they grow for money and use the money to buy food.
The second concerns money, which Sanyal calls “a more fundamental difference between the two circuits” (p 211). R emember that Sanyal’s re formulation of Mar x’s general formula starts and ends with money, and passes through the commodity form – just like Marx’s. Yet he argues that in the need economy, “in the second round the circuit is exactly the same as in the fi rst: M C C’ M’ M C C’ M’ ” (p 212). In other words, there is no expansion; the need economy is a stable system.
Unless there is Malthusian population growth. Then there is famine- unless Uncle Sam sends PL480 food.
Why? Because in the need economy, Sanyal contends: the purpose of production is consumption for the satisfaction of need, although production and consumption are both mediated by money. … I call the realm of capitalist production the accumulation-economy and that of informal production the need economy. In the first, pro-duction is for accumulation,
e.g. when US farmers produce a lot more food than they 'need'. This also means that subsistence farmers in India could be rescued from starvation by LBJ sending food aid.
and in the second, it is for meeting need. They are two distinct economies, two systems, each with an internal logic of its own (p 212, our italics).
Why work more than you need to in order to have just enough food to survive? The answer is that you will live longer if you accumulate assets which enable you to survive bad times.
Those familiar with the agrarian change literature may recognise this bifurcation as a reiteration of the long-standing distinction between (a) production for household reproduc-tion (aka subsistence production or traditional sector) and (b) production for market exchange (aka petty capitalist pro-duction or modern sector). Sanyal, however, insists that his need economy is not the same as subsistence production:[A]lthough they appear similar, the need economy i s not what is com-monly understood a s a subsistent-economy, an economy with no surplus. While the accumulation-economy must have a surplus , need satisfaction as a goal of production does not rule out the existence of surplus in the need economy.
There may be a bumper harvest. The government may be able to store some grain for use when the harvest fails. But Mathusian involution (i.e. more and more people farming the same quantity of land) perpetuates poverty. The Bangladeshi approach was to encourage rural girls to enter big factory dormitories so as to boost exports. It is the classic development strategy used by all poor countries which industrialized and rose in affluence. Sadly, professors in Calcutta read too much Foucault or Deleuze and retreated into a fantasy land of 'governmentality' and 'bio-politics' based on Magical Money Trees.
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