Articles by Utsa Patnaik

The Agrarian Question and Development of Capitalism in India Utsa Patnaik This paper seeks to develop some of the important themes which Daniel Thorner initiated on the essential features of India's agrarian structure and growth problems. What has been the precise nature of the 'built-in depressor', the term coined by Thorner to denote the complex of agrarian relations which made it paying for landlords to live on extracting rent, usurious interest and trading profit out of an impoverished peasantry rather than go in for productivity-raising investment? What have been the circumstances under which the operation of the 'depressor' has ceased at least in certain cropping regimes in certain parts of the country and what have been the reasons for such cessation? In what ways has the development strategy followed under the Plans in the last three decades impinged upon and altered agrarian relations? And what is likely to be the reciprocal effects of the way agrarian relations have been affected upon the rate and structure of industrialisation? Finally, at the end of some quarter century of the growth of the capitalist tendency in rural areas, where are we today with respect to the so-called 'mode of production' controversy?

Report on a Seminar Utsa Patnaik October 17-24, 1981 THE Indian School of Social Sciences, Trivandrum, organised a seminar on "Lenin and Contemporary Imperialism" from October 12 to 14 in New Delhi. The first seminar in the series, "Marxism and Aesthetics", had been held in Kasauli in 1979, while further seminars are planned on the themes of Agrarian Revolution, The State, and the Philosophy of Science. The seminar this year was considerably larger in terms of numbers of participants, following the success of the maiden venture two years ago; and it offered an undoubtedly unique opportunity for academics to present their ideas and interact with each other, as well as with those engaged in political work on the Left.

This paper argues that the Marxist theory of class differentiation within the peasantry provides the necessary analytical tools for looking at the agrarian structure both at a point of time and in its evolution over time.

Review of Agriculture September 1972 On the Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture A Reply Utsa Patnaik PARESH CHATTOPADHYAY (March 25, 1972) has raised some theoretical criticisms of my ideas as presented in my two contributions (September 25 and December 25, 1971). Since my aim was a critique of Ashok Rudra's work rather than a positive elaboration of my own ideas, these ideas were presented in a highly compressed form. In the present note 1 do not intend to set out my positive thesis fully since the required documentation cannot possibly be compressed into a short paper. I will merely set out the incomplete skeleton of the thesis in the course of answering Paresh Chat- topadhyay's comments. (I hope he will not mind if for the sake of brevity I refer to his initials, P C, in what follows).

spend on these products and (b) that the average propensity to spend on these products is rising with the total expenditure on all products. In the case of the agricultural products, nil the contrary, the marginal propensity to spend is lower than the average propensity to spend, and hence the average propensity to spend on the agricultural products must decline as total expenditure rises. This becomes clear when we study the percentage of consumption expenditure on agricultural consumption goods in the different expenditure classes of the rural and the urban sectors of the economy during 1960-61 ( ie, the sixteenth lound of the NSS).