ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Kalyan Sanyal’s own important critique of Indian Marxism’s theoretical assumption of post-colonial economic transformation of feudal conditions of obligation into capitalist wage labour. The mainstream discourse views underdevelopment as an initial condition waiting to be transformed in the process of modernization and development. It understands the persistence of underdevelopment as the reflection of insufficiency of development. Sanyal argues that once the subsistence workers have been expropriated by primitive accumulation, they are completely at the mercy of the elements. There is no inherent reason why the expropriated must survive, and the history of early modern Europe has many examples of the dispossessed perishing in famines and epidemics. A crucial condition of that reproduction is that the victims of primitive accumulation be addressed in terms of what Michel Foucault has called “governmentality”.
