How to differentiate peasant classes in capital-intensive agriculture?

Abstract

This paper highlights the relevance of Marxian class analysis to understand the changing nature of agrarian classes under capital-intensive agriculture. It is a methodological exercise that builds on Patnaik's labour exploitation index (E-criterion) in three major respects to construct a new index, namely, the Modified Labour Exploitation Index (MEI), to differentiate peasant classes. First and most important, it incorporates the role of mechanisation, which, so far, has been ignored in the methodological attempts to differentiate within the peasantry. Second, it underscores the importance of non-agricultural (and non-rural) bases of simple reproduction in the countryside by incorporating hired-out labour by agricultural households to the non-agricultural sector into the classification criteria. Finally, it makes surplus labour exploited through land leasing empirically testable by using Marx's differential and absolute rent to differentiate between subsistence and commercial leasing. The new index is then empirically tested using primary data collected from rural Haryana, India. The paper argues that MEI is an effective criterion for understanding changing class dynamics, the shifting modes of the livelihood of the poor peasantry and the largely hidden accumulation processes in agrarian societies.