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Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism
In this book, Kalyan Sanyal reviews the traditional notion of capitalism and propounds an original theory of capitalist development in the post-colonial context.
In order to substantiate his theory, concepts such as primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalist formation are discussed in detail. Analyzing critical questions from a third world perspective such as: Will the integration into the global capitalist network bring to the third world new economic opportunities? Will this capitalist network make the third world countries an easy prey for predatory multinational corporations? The end result is a discourse, drawing on Marx and Foucault, which envisages the post-colonial capitalist formation, albeit in an entirely different light, in the era of globalization.
293 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 12, 2007
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November 11, 2023Must be widely read by anybody who wishes to understand the political economy of development in the post colonial context.
February 21, 2018
Üçüncü Dünya kapitalizminin son 50 yılda yaşadığı süreçleri ve Ortodoks Marksist yaklaşımın bu süreçleri tanımlamada ve kapitalizme karşı mücadelede yetersizliğini sorgulayanların muhakkak okuması gereken bir kitap.
"... içinde bulunduğumuz sermaye çağında kalkınma söylemi, kapitalist birikimin yarattığı mülksüzleştirilmişler dünyasıyla ilişkili olarak kendini yeniden örgütlüyor; bu, önceki dönemdekinden çok daha karmaşık, çok daha etkili bir yönetimsellik biçimi artık. Amacı, sermayezedeler için gelirin yeniden paylaşımı yoluyla haklar yaratmaktan ziyade, sermayenin dışında ve onunla yan yana bir ekonomik alan yaratmak. Kalkınma dimdik ayakta; yalnızca artık sermayeyle özdeşleşmek yerine, bizatihi kendi gündemi temelinde sermayenin varlık koşullarını yaratmaya çalışıyor. Bugün girişilen iş ... 1970 ve 1980'lerdekinden çok daha incelikli ve karmaşık bir yoksulluk idaresidir." (1. Baskı, S.226)
Kitabın çevirisi de mükemmel.
"... içinde bulunduğumuz sermaye çağında kalkınma söylemi, kapitalist birikimin yarattığı mülksüzleştirilmişler dünyasıyla ilişkili olarak kendini yeniden örgütlüyor; bu, önceki dönemdekinden çok daha karmaşık, çok daha etkili bir yönetimsellik biçimi artık. Amacı, sermayezedeler için gelirin yeniden paylaşımı yoluyla haklar yaratmaktan ziyade, sermayenin dışında ve onunla yan yana bir ekonomik alan yaratmak. Kalkınma dimdik ayakta; yalnızca artık sermayeyle özdeşleşmek yerine, bizatihi kendi gündemi temelinde sermayenin varlık koşullarını yaratmaya çalışıyor. Bugün girişilen iş ... 1970 ve 1980'lerdekinden çok daha incelikli ve karmaşık bir yoksulluk idaresidir." (1. Baskı, S.226)
Kitabın çevirisi de mükemmel.
June 18, 2020
Sanyal's ambitious book is an excellent reference for graduate students looking for an equal dose of literature review and original analysis- the introductory chapter could serve easily as a cheat sheet for students preparing for comps in political economy, with particular usefulness for those interested in development studies and/or dependency theory. Sanyal seeks to generalize the analytical usefulness of what he calls "post-colonial capitalism" in helping political economists to understand better the role of the informal economy (Sanyal calls it the "need economy") in determining the nature of capital's becoming. The argument is roughly as follows: India's informal economy is not some exception to the norm of capitalist development, it is, rather, part and parcel of its emergence. Capitalist development, Sanyal argues, is a process that "necessarily produces, brings into existence, non-capitalist economic processes in its own course." Economic heterogeneity is an integral part of capitalism itself. The vast literature on the political economy of underdevelopment has failed to take this into account because it is committed to a historicist rendering of capitalism's becoming in a process of stadial supersession. He calls for a conception of post-colonial capitalism that rules out the possibility of capital superseding pre-capital; in other words, capitalist development in the periphery produces non-capital as a rule.
This criticism of historical materialism's commitment to a theory of historical stages is by no means new. It is consistent with the outlook of a motley crew of self-proclaimed leftist (and often postcolonial), more or less charlatan, academics who seek to unsettle the theoretical base on which contemporary revolutionary thought rests under the banner of combating class 'essentialism' and anachronism. Though Sanyal cannot be accused of charlatanism - he has a clear mastery of the literature, albeit mischaracterizing some of his interlocutors positions at times - he shares the target of the general post-colonial assault on what its disciplinary parameters single out as the greatest anachronism and the one most worthy of its intellectual wrath: the assumption that revolutionary thought should translate directly to revolutionary action. A clear example of this in Sanyal's book is his creative use of Gramsci's concept of the passive revolution to rethink Marx's notion of the (so-called) primitive accumulation. If, for Gramsci, the passive revolution described an exceptional, or 'non-classical', case whereby the bourgeoisie allies with pre-capitalist classes to engage in a dilatory, 'molecular' transformation of society (unlike the full-fledged assault on the state and its dominant classes in the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century), for Sanyal, the passive revolution can be better used to understand the nature of primitive accumulation in India. The process that Marx described as the complete severance of the direct producer from her means of subsistence was not possible, Sanyal argues, in India - for the period of the consolidation of the Indian national bourgeoisie was also the period of anti colonial national politics whereby the ruling class must translate its distinct social interests as the interests of all the potential constituents of the nation. Here, primitive accumulation must at least seek the survival, rather than assault, of the continued presence of pre-capitalist formations along with the modern capitalist sector whose profits it seeks to monopolize. Contrary to the political economy literature that depicts a lack of total capitalist incorporation as some kind of failure, this ability of post-colonial capitalism to ensure the survival of pre-capitalist sectors while expanding production in the modern, capitalistic sector is figured as a kind of strength in Sanyal's analysis. This is Sanyal at his most original and readable.
One point should be raised of this attempt to radically rethink capitalist development in the postcolonial context. It is the absence of class dynamics in Sanyal's reading, an omission attributable to the fact that only form of historicism to be found in his analysis is the arising of the political management of populations through the techniques that Foucault calls "governmentality." The need economy is subjected to a kind of welfarist logic whose historical moment is crucial to Sanyal's argument. Since this welfarist governmentality confines the dispossessed to the need economy, it seeks to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation by transferring a part of the surplus from the domain of capital to the need economy. It keeps this economy alive through the depoliticized face of governmentality, seeking to mitigate its incorporation into capital and thereby preclude the development of class consciousness. the reason why political society does not speak the language of class, Sanyal seems to suggest, is because it has been interpellated, through governmental policy, as population groups subject to some form of state welfare. That governmentality, however, is a product of both certain neoliberal restructuring policies from the 1970s onwards, and the space in development discourse opened by the work of Amartya Sen, who sought to direct government policy to the short-term amelioration of the conditions of the impoverished and dispossessed victims of capitalist development. In other words, class is omitted as a result of a historical moment in which governmentality emerges as the Indian state's primary tool for engaging with large population groups outside of its hegemonic domain. This may be a roundabout historicism, but it is a stadial historicism nonetheless. The transition here may not be one from pre-capitalism to capitalism, but it is one in which governmentality seems to have a socio-structural effect similar to that of the effects of capitalism that he finds inaccurate in the accounts of the dependency theorists.
Thus, in exchange for creative analysis, Sanyal forfeits any grounding in historical reality. This is a major contradiction of the book - the analysis somehow both rests on the idea that anti-colonial politics of the 20th century marked such a stark historical rupture that the Indian ruling class can 'no longer', unlike the ruling classes of 19th century Europe, disregard the direct producers severed from their means of production - leaving them to either become wage-laborers or form the reserve army of labor - and on the idea that historicism is a bane to post-colonial scholars who hope to understand the specificity of post-colonial capitalism. This is a contradiction borne out an ill-advised marriage between Foucault's governmentality and Gramsci's concept of the passive revolution, a marriage itself possible only by a divorce from the context of these ideas' publication, such that they may serve the purpose that the author deems fit. The concept of Governmentality is an extension of the insufferable academic rumination on the full extent of power and its all-pervading quality - it has no concern for the working class or for the masses subject to its tools - while the concept of the passive revolution was intended as a measure of mobilizing and extending revolutionary praxis, a way of showing how subaltern power might be better theorized and, hence, acted upon. In the absence of a class struggle, the political lesson of Sanyal's book is the inexorable forward movement of governmentality and its impenetrable apparatus, where political enemies put on a bewildering number of beneficent faces and serve, successfully, to obfuscate the nature of the struggle. Intended or not, Sanyal's book partakes in precisely such an obfuscation. It may be beyond the academic's remit to lay out the road ahead; we have been told numerous times that we are thinkers, not activists. Yet, it is incumbent precisely upon those scholars who seek to place obstacles on roads already laid out - to the many who seek to deconstruct, brick-by-brick, the pavement of historical materialism, which continues to serve as a blueprint for many - to offer an alternative. Without which, it remains difficult to distinguish the white banner of academic nuance held so tautly over the heads of 20th century leftists from a flag of surrender.
This criticism of historical materialism's commitment to a theory of historical stages is by no means new. It is consistent with the outlook of a motley crew of self-proclaimed leftist (and often postcolonial), more or less charlatan, academics who seek to unsettle the theoretical base on which contemporary revolutionary thought rests under the banner of combating class 'essentialism' and anachronism. Though Sanyal cannot be accused of charlatanism - he has a clear mastery of the literature, albeit mischaracterizing some of his interlocutors positions at times - he shares the target of the general post-colonial assault on what its disciplinary parameters single out as the greatest anachronism and the one most worthy of its intellectual wrath: the assumption that revolutionary thought should translate directly to revolutionary action. A clear example of this in Sanyal's book is his creative use of Gramsci's concept of the passive revolution to rethink Marx's notion of the (so-called) primitive accumulation. If, for Gramsci, the passive revolution described an exceptional, or 'non-classical', case whereby the bourgeoisie allies with pre-capitalist classes to engage in a dilatory, 'molecular' transformation of society (unlike the full-fledged assault on the state and its dominant classes in the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century), for Sanyal, the passive revolution can be better used to understand the nature of primitive accumulation in India. The process that Marx described as the complete severance of the direct producer from her means of subsistence was not possible, Sanyal argues, in India - for the period of the consolidation of the Indian national bourgeoisie was also the period of anti colonial national politics whereby the ruling class must translate its distinct social interests as the interests of all the potential constituents of the nation. Here, primitive accumulation must at least seek the survival, rather than assault, of the continued presence of pre-capitalist formations along with the modern capitalist sector whose profits it seeks to monopolize. Contrary to the political economy literature that depicts a lack of total capitalist incorporation as some kind of failure, this ability of post-colonial capitalism to ensure the survival of pre-capitalist sectors while expanding production in the modern, capitalistic sector is figured as a kind of strength in Sanyal's analysis. This is Sanyal at his most original and readable.
One point should be raised of this attempt to radically rethink capitalist development in the postcolonial context. It is the absence of class dynamics in Sanyal's reading, an omission attributable to the fact that only form of historicism to be found in his analysis is the arising of the political management of populations through the techniques that Foucault calls "governmentality." The need economy is subjected to a kind of welfarist logic whose historical moment is crucial to Sanyal's argument. Since this welfarist governmentality confines the dispossessed to the need economy, it seeks to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation by transferring a part of the surplus from the domain of capital to the need economy. It keeps this economy alive through the depoliticized face of governmentality, seeking to mitigate its incorporation into capital and thereby preclude the development of class consciousness. the reason why political society does not speak the language of class, Sanyal seems to suggest, is because it has been interpellated, through governmental policy, as population groups subject to some form of state welfare. That governmentality, however, is a product of both certain neoliberal restructuring policies from the 1970s onwards, and the space in development discourse opened by the work of Amartya Sen, who sought to direct government policy to the short-term amelioration of the conditions of the impoverished and dispossessed victims of capitalist development. In other words, class is omitted as a result of a historical moment in which governmentality emerges as the Indian state's primary tool for engaging with large population groups outside of its hegemonic domain. This may be a roundabout historicism, but it is a stadial historicism nonetheless. The transition here may not be one from pre-capitalism to capitalism, but it is one in which governmentality seems to have a socio-structural effect similar to that of the effects of capitalism that he finds inaccurate in the accounts of the dependency theorists.
Thus, in exchange for creative analysis, Sanyal forfeits any grounding in historical reality. This is a major contradiction of the book - the analysis somehow both rests on the idea that anti-colonial politics of the 20th century marked such a stark historical rupture that the Indian ruling class can 'no longer', unlike the ruling classes of 19th century Europe, disregard the direct producers severed from their means of production - leaving them to either become wage-laborers or form the reserve army of labor - and on the idea that historicism is a bane to post-colonial scholars who hope to understand the specificity of post-colonial capitalism. This is a contradiction borne out an ill-advised marriage between Foucault's governmentality and Gramsci's concept of the passive revolution, a marriage itself possible only by a divorce from the context of these ideas' publication, such that they may serve the purpose that the author deems fit. The concept of Governmentality is an extension of the insufferable academic rumination on the full extent of power and its all-pervading quality - it has no concern for the working class or for the masses subject to its tools - while the concept of the passive revolution was intended as a measure of mobilizing and extending revolutionary praxis, a way of showing how subaltern power might be better theorized and, hence, acted upon. In the absence of a class struggle, the political lesson of Sanyal's book is the inexorable forward movement of governmentality and its impenetrable apparatus, where political enemies put on a bewildering number of beneficent faces and serve, successfully, to obfuscate the nature of the struggle. Intended or not, Sanyal's book partakes in precisely such an obfuscation. It may be beyond the academic's remit to lay out the road ahead; we have been told numerous times that we are thinkers, not activists. Yet, it is incumbent precisely upon those scholars who seek to place obstacles on roads already laid out - to the many who seek to deconstruct, brick-by-brick, the pavement of historical materialism, which continues to serve as a blueprint for many - to offer an alternative. Without which, it remains difficult to distinguish the white banner of academic nuance held so tautly over the heads of 20th century leftists from a flag of surrender.
Want to Read
November 17, 2016From Mariana Mazzucoto's review
What economies need, today, is not only a new approach to investment, but also a New Deal in terms of reinvestment: a new compact between the public and private sectors that can lead to more inclusive growth. This should be part of a broader approach to market shaping to ensure social returns reflect the public investments that have been made including, for example, reforms to patenting (keeping them narrow and downstream) and conditions that profits generated from publicly supported innovation are reinvested back into innovation and not hoarded or used mainly for share buybacks. Indeed, it was precisely this type of healthy deal making that led to AT&T being asked to set up Bell Labs in exchange for its monopoly status.
April 17, 2024
This book is an incredible piece of work which radically re-imagines the political economy of countries in the Global South, particularly in South Asia. Sanyal argues against historically deterministic theorizations of capitalism in the Global South, such as Marxism, arguing instead that Post-Colonial capital operates through a perpetual cycle of primitive accumulation, development and primitve accumulation, which renders a large population of labour outside of the direct employment of capital as a form of surplus population. Throughout the book the way he frames this group changes in relation to the literature he is engaging with but the image of the 'post-colonial capital wasteland' is quite evocative, although maybe a tad alarmist.
This book is useful to think with in relation to books like Planet of Slums, Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India and Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. It's vivid theoretical description and empirical applicability that emerges out of it's engagement with post-structural, post-colonial and subaltern theory means it is a useful book to read in conversation with Vivek Chibber's, very poor Imo, attempt at a polemic against this type of theorizing, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. In my opinion, Sanyal's elegant theorizing and writing makes this a much more useful book (and it is easier to read and shorter too!).
It's a shame Sanyal died so soon after this book was published as I would have been interested in how his thinking development. A must read for anyone who works with development, political economy or South Asia.
This book is useful to think with in relation to books like Planet of Slums, Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India and Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. It's vivid theoretical description and empirical applicability that emerges out of it's engagement with post-structural, post-colonial and subaltern theory means it is a useful book to read in conversation with Vivek Chibber's, very poor Imo, attempt at a polemic against this type of theorizing, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. In my opinion, Sanyal's elegant theorizing and writing makes this a much more useful book (and it is easier to read and shorter too!).
It's a shame Sanyal died so soon after this book was published as I would have been interested in how his thinking development. A must read for anyone who works with development, political economy or South Asia.
June 16, 2023
Great explanation of the post-colonial developmental state and its role creating the conditions within which the two-tier world of capital - the expansion of the accumulation/formal economy and, for the creation of employment and entitlements, the promotion of the need/informal economy can be reproduced
Author convincingly demonstrates how current developmental interventions e.g. microcredit are aimed at creating a need/informal economy, as opposed to an accumulation/formal economy, then developmental organisations create, protect and monitor the former who are victims of the latter
Although the text can become dense and is academic in nature, it still remains clear and concise, making good use of Marxian economics to explain capitalist development, and clearly traces the origins of development economics and its evolution
Author convincingly demonstrates how current developmental interventions e.g. microcredit are aimed at creating a need/informal economy, as opposed to an accumulation/formal economy, then developmental organisations create, protect and monitor the former who are victims of the latter
Although the text can become dense and is academic in nature, it still remains clear and concise, making good use of Marxian economics to explain capitalist development, and clearly traces the origins of development economics and its evolution
September 14, 2014
Fantastic work whether one agrees with his claims or not. Written with such clarity too.
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