Articles by Gail Omvedt

Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, Kheda District 1917-1934 by David Hardiman; Oxford University Press. Delhi, 1981; pp 309, Rs 110.
GUJARAT was the strongest bastion of the Gandhian Congress, the source of some of. its most famous peasant satyagrahas (Kheda 1918, Bardoli 1928), the homeland of Gandhi himself as well as 'iron man' Vallabhbhai Patel, the conservative opposite to Nehru, and the testing-ground for the Gan- dhian 'constructive programme'

in India Gail Omvedt The debate over the 'mode of production in Indian agriculture' grew out of a milieu where scholars steeped in classic Marxist notions of feudalism, capitalism and imperialism confronted a changing empirical reality. In retrospect, it now appears that the data base of the whole debate was scanty, though by the 1960s, important economic changes in agriculture had been initiated, and the process of destroying pre independence forms of landlordism and laying the foundations of an industrial and in- frastructural development that could supply inputs to agriculture was beginning to produce real changes. But though Indian agriculture was becoming capitalist, the debate on the mode of production centred itself on the colonial period and failed to analyse the qualitatively different processes at work in the post- colonial phase.

and Adivasis Gail Omvedt 'BOKARO Steel Has Changed the Face of the Land' proclaims the advertisement. ''Yesterday's unskilled and unemployed are today's skilled professionals. Struggling insanitary villages have become a planned city that still retains much of the rural greenery.'' But public sector bureaucrats, like private capitalists, are so eager to show their contribution to the welfare of the most downtrodden precisely because the reality is almost the opposite. What any visit to the 'Steel region'

Engels and Lenin on the integrated basis of their political, ideological and, if one may use the word, moral superiority with Stalin's authoritarianism. Secondly, Stalin's terror was certainly not limited, as the editor claims, to 'enemy classes'; it was equally directed towards 'own' and allied classes, Nobody, for instance, has questioned Khrushchev's disclosure that 98 out of the 139 members and candidate members of the central committee, elected by the 17th congress of the Bolshevik Party

August 9, 1980 on the ground of 'to each according to his (unequal) needs'. In its political aspect this means that the right to socialist dissidenee and the socialists' right to change socialist governments is recognised in principle, as well as jn practice, so that socialist 'elitism' is guarded against and political equality assured. In short, it is necessary to fight for 'egalitarian socialism', as opposed to 'inegalitarian socialism'. Contemporary 'creative Marxism' must grapple with these problems, first of all, at the theoretical level IV It remains to raise an objection to one piece of orthodoxy which, it so happens quite unnecessarily, strikes a discordant note in Amin's otherwise unorthodox and creative reconstruction of the Marxian theory of social transformations. Throughout his chapters on the capitalist mode of production, Amin adheres strictly to the century-old Orthodox Marxian notion that 'labour is the sole source of value', and mates use of the orthodox notion of Marxian 'prices of production' as 'corrected labour values' in discussing questions of 'unequal development', 'the development of underdevelopment' etc. But these notions should be rejected on at least three grounds. First, it can be shown that logically if we agree that "labour is the only source of value", we cannot 'prove' that capitalists exploit workers to extract a surplus, which is the main purpose of the Marxian version of the 'labour theory of the value' and the starting point of Amin's analysis of capitalism. On the other hand, if we adopt the somewhat unorthodox notion that "capital is not a thing or a 'factor' on the same footing as land or labour, but a coercive social power", we can successfully prove the Marxian "exploitation theorem*. Secondly, it can be shown that the unorthodox 'capital theory approach' does better than the orthodox labour value approach' to lay bare the contours of certain central problems Amin tackles in his 'reconstruction' of Marxian theory. This is certainly true of the 'unequal relations' between classes and nations established through international trade and investment under capitalism functioning as a world system. It is also true of a discussion of the question as to whether a programme of establishing 'inegalitarian socialism can be replaced by a programme of establishing 'egalitarian socialism' (in the sense referred to above). Thirdly, although it is true that the 'orthodox' but untenable labour value approach is to be found in all of Marx's writings, it is also true that the 'unorthodox' but valid capital theory approach is also to be found side by side in all of Marx's writings, though less systematically worked out than the 'orthodox approach'. (However, with the modem work of Sraffa, to which Amin refers, notably on p 150, there is no difficulty in systematising Marx's 'capital theory approach'.) Hence, there is no reason why Amin, who has creatively retrieved several of Marx's neglected insights and rejected others, should not rely on the 'capital theory, approach' rather than the labour value' approach to be found in Marx's writings, to reconstruct the Marxian theory of social transformation of world capitalism to world socialism.