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Jairus Banaji's Mode of Production:

Eviscerating Marxism, Essentialising
Capitalism
a
Tom Brass
a
Formerly of Social and Political Sciences Faculty, Cambridge
University, UK

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Essentialising Capitalism, Journal of Contemporary Asia, DOI:10.1080/00472336.2012.706429

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 Journal of Contemporary Asia
iFirst article pp. 1–10, 2012

REVIEW ARTICLE

Jairus Banaji’s Mode of Production:

Eviscerating Marxism, Essentialising
Capitalism
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TOM BRASS
Formerly of Social and Political Sciences Faculty, Cambridge University, UK

Long ago in what now seems like a galaxy far, far away, an academic debate took
place about the mode of production in so-called Third World countries, how this was
changing, why and what were the remaining obstacles to economic development.
The political object was to discover whether or not capitalism had established itself,
so as to identify in turn the conditions favouring or hindering an eventual transition
to socialism. During the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of this debate was on production
relations in Indian agriculture, and the extent to which the rural workforce
corresponded to a proletariat (McEachern, 1976; Patnaik, 1990; Rudra et al., 1978;
Thorner, 1982).
Of the two main schools of thought, each of which was located broadly on the left
of the political spectrum, the prevailing one argued that, as workers were separated
neither from their means of labour (land) nor from landlord control, the mode of
production was still pre-capitalist. Adherents of this view, the semi-feudal thesis,
maintained that as the agrarian sector in India was not yet capitalist, the transition
would accordingly be to capitalism. Those belonging to the minority view held that,
the presence of unfree labour notwithstanding, capitalism was already present, and
thus any transition would have to be to socialism.
Half a century on, that debate continues to resonate, albeit in a specific way: these
days the dispute concerns not whether a capitalist transition has occurred in India
(palpably, it has), but rather who said what at the time. This is the background to the
book reviewed here, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and
Exploitation (Leiden: Brill, 2010), by Jairus Banaji, one of the participants in the
debate. The 11 essays included in the volume cover a variety of topics, extending
from discussions about materialist historiography, transitions to/from capitalism
and feudalism, the presence/absence of unfree labour, agrarian history and late

Correspondence Address: Tom Brass, Formerly of Social and Political Sciences Faculty, Cambridge
University, UK. Email: tfnbrass@btinternet.com

ISSN 0047-2336 Print/1752-7554 Online/12/000001-10 Ó 2012 Journal of Contemporary Asia

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2012.706429
 2 T. Brass

antiquity, to a case study of the peasantry in the Deccan Districts during the late
nineteenth century.
Although these essays span a 30-year period, from the 1970s to 2009, there is a
noticeable dearth of articles by him from before the turn of the millennium. The
missing essays are of particular interest, however, since they reveal not only mistaken
positions held earlier but also how these misunderstandings continue to structure his
views (Brass, 2003). For this reason, mention will be made of their arguments where
and when relevant to those contained in the book.

Mene, Mene . . .
Problems are evident right from the start, in the form of a vainglorious Foreword by
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Marcel van der Linden (pp. xi-xv). Equally jarring in tone is the dedication by Banaji
(p. v); not to someone close to him (mentor, parent, spouse, children), as is usual on
these occasions, but rather to E. V. Preobrazhensky.1 Because it is a ‘‘highly
sophisticated and original approach,’’ the ‘‘learned work’’ of Banaji is categorised by
van der Linden as being of ‘‘enduring value’’ and, as such, ‘‘provide[s] direction for
research.’’2 Banaji is credited with having countered the semi-feudal thesis, and
pointing out that ‘‘Marx’s Capital can only be understood profoundly if one takes
the Hegelian background of the work seriously.’’ Indeed, as presented effusively by
van der Linden, there seems to be no historical context or field of human knowledge
to which Banaji has not made a significant, innovative and (thus) an enduring
contribution.
Contrary to what he claims is the case, therefore, Banaji has on many occasions
changed his mind about theory, always after – not before – others criticised the views
he confidently maintained were Marxist. Over the years his views have changed
substantially in a way that belies his current claims and status as a ‘‘highly
sophisticated and original’’ Marxist. One cannot be theoretically unsound and
simultaneously a path-breaking theoretician. Having lambasted A. G. Frank’s
interpretation of the mode of production in Latin America for decades past, Banaji
now confesses that ‘‘I’ve become much more sympathetic to the general perspectives
that Frank argued in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America.’’3
Nor is it the case, as Banaji asserts, that he has never subscribed to the
characterisation of India as ‘‘feudal.’’4 During the mode of production debate,
Banaji originally commended the semi-feudal thesis as the analytical way forward
(see his contribution to Rudra et al., 1978). It was only when another contributor to
that debate – Paresh Chattopadhyay – pointed out the errors of his analysis that he
changed his mind, and came out against the view he had initially advocated. Banaji
did exactly the same over the ‘‘colonial’’ mode of production, which he initially
espoused, only changing his mind – again – when the mistaken theory he was so
enthusiastic about was criticised by others subsequently.
Neither is it the case that ideas he claims as original to him are, in fact, new. Hence
the assertion by Banaji (2001: 5) that ‘‘I break with the widespread orthodoxy that
wage labour has been of only marginal importance’’ in late antiquity overlooks not
just that the majority of historians of ancient society recognised its prevalence but
also – and more importantly – that some did so in order to downgrade the
significance and thus the oppressiveness of slavery.5
 Jairus Banaji’s Mode of Production 3

Nor is it the case, as Banaji (pp. 9, 45ff.) infers, that – unlike him – Marxists have
yet to discover that the slaveholding plantation system was a capitalist enterprise,
since precisely this point has been made for a long time now by many Marxists.
Equally unoriginal is the invocation by Banaji in a recent interview (Leonard, 2010)
of a Sendero/Naxalite link as a result of their common adherence to the semi-feudal
thesis, exactly the same argument having been made elsewhere two decades ago.6
These claims, advanced either by Banaji himself or on his behalf, emphasise the
importance of caution when examining the arguments he makes.

Money Makes the World Go Round?

Banaji’s views are simply put. A desire to interpret modes of production largely in
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terms of ‘‘the expansion of monetary economy’’ (p. 7) leads epistemologically to a

familiar relay-in-statement: money signals the historical ubiquity not only of
economic growth and wage-labour (albeit everywhere ‘‘disguised’’) but also of
capitalism itself. Inexorably, the latter becomes systemically eternal, and thus
ahistorical; for Banaji (p. 360), therefore, ‘‘a combination of modes of production’’ is
to be replaced with an ‘‘articulation of forms of capitalism.’’ Along the way,
feudalism more or less vanishes (pp. 26, 41-2), as does the distinction between free
and unfree labour (pp. 131-54), and capitalism is effectively declared ever-present; it
is found in Egypt during late antiquity, in thirteenth-century Sung China, and in
seventeenth-century Mughal India (pp. 29, 37-8, 155ff., 358). Structural or systemic
inconsistencies are labelled ‘‘complexity,’’ ‘‘peculiarities’’ or specific ‘‘configura-
tions,’’ so much so that at times history is reduced to an ensemble of disconnected
components left floating in theoretical space.
Any attempt to elaborate a theory of modes of production runs the risk of what
Foster-Carter (1978: 74) once characterised as an approach whereby ‘‘each Andean
valley has its own mode of production, and individuals may change them two or
three times a week like underwear.’’ Unfortunately, this book is no exception to that
rule. Throughout the period covered by these essays, Banaji has taken up and then
discarded a number of different modes, a dizzying theoretical turnover which has yet
to abate, since he adds here yet another one: the tributary mode of production.
Having initially endorsed the semi-feudal thesis and the ‘‘colonial’’ mode of
production, neither of which are Marxist concepts, Banaji (p. 68, n. 81) discarded
both in turn (see also Banaji, 1972, and his contribution to Rudra et al., 1978: 418, n.
24). However, the legacy of each carried over into all subsequent claims made by
him. Thus what he now terms ‘‘disguised’’ wage-labour, or smallholders who
continued to operate their own labour process, but no longer as independent units of
production, was a characteristic specific to the colonial workforce.7 Rural house-
holds in nineteenth-century India are perceived by Banaji as a unitary form, or
peasant-as-cultivator, a concept also shared by the semi-feudal thesis. Another
legacy, common to semi-feudalism and the ‘‘colonial’’ mode of production, is the
view of the colonial state as the main exploiter of the Indian peasant.
Despite the fact that the ‘‘peasant mode of production’’ is a populist, not a
Marxist concept, elsewhere Banaji (1976: 1601) mistakenly assumes that ‘‘[i]t is not at
all incompatible with Marxist theory to posit a specifically peasant mode of
production or ‘peasant economy’.’’8 Equally unconvincing is his claim that no
 4 T. Brass

difference exists between neo-populist and Leninist views about the peasantry.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Banaji dismisses the peasant differentiation categories
used by Lenin to indicate the fact of class formation in rural Russia and applied by
other Marxists to present-day India.9
To this ever-changing list Banaji (pp. 15-40) now adds another mode of
production: the tributary, which he asserts ‘‘now looks to me like the best contender
for a Marxist characterisation of Asiatic regimes.’’ It is defined as one in which the
state controls everything: the ruling class, all means of production and all surplus
labour. In formulating the tributary mode, Banaji not only invokes Bahro (1978) but
also appears to base much of his criticism of Marx on the ideas contained in
Wittfogel (1963: 369ff.). What is interesting is that Bahro and Wittfogel were keen to
label the Soviet system as a form of ‘‘Oriental despotism’’ – embodying the Cold War
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shibboleth of a ‘‘totalitarian state’’ – so as to condemn both Marxism and socialism

tout court (Wittfogel, 1963: 239). How long, one wonders, before this latest mode
goes the way of the previous ones (semi-feudal, colonial) that Banaji embraced and
then set aside.
As significant are the reasons for adopting the concept of a tributary mode, and
the way it is characterised. Banaji regards tributary economies as dynamic because of
money circulation, describing the Mughal regime as a ‘‘formidable achievement’’ on
account of its ‘‘peace, order, and new market opportunities’’ (pp. 37-8). Like late
antiquity, therefore, Mughal India was in Banaji’s view a place of sweetness and
light, the kind of tension-free socio-economic ‘‘harmony’’ one finds described in
analyses by neo-classical historiography, not in a Marxist text. As such, it not only
discounts negative aspects of the Mughal system (famines, crop-failures, oppressive
administration, peasant uprisings) but fits rather too neatly into prevailing
nationalist discourse about the ‘‘rise of the east, decline of the west,’’ whereby the
present-day economic dynamism of India and China is projected backwards into
history (¼ eternal capitalism).10

Had Marx Lived . . .

There is no Marxist or Marxism that escapes Banaji’s censure, the epithet ‘‘bad
theory’’ cropping up time and again throughout the book (a favourite term of
disapprobation being the accusation of ‘‘formalism’’). Among those castigated in
this manner are not just Isaac Ilyich Rubin, Lenin and Kautsky, but also Marx
himself. It is in a sense unsurprising, therefore, that such condemnation is then seen
by Banaji as a licence to reinterpret what they (and others) really meant. Although
the distinction between relations of production and relations of exploitation is
central to his own interpretation (pp. 2, 4-5, 9), therefore, Banaji (1972: 2498)
nevertheless accepts that he ‘‘do[es] not, of course, claim that the distance was always
marked in the work of Marx himself.’’11
Playing fast and loose with Marxist theory extends also to the concept ‘‘primitive
accumulation,’’ which according to Banaji (pp. 43-44) ‘‘is no longer the best way to
frame the early history of capitalism.’’ However, it pops back into life subsequently
(p. 261), when he states ‘‘I shall argue that at least some of this was ‘primitive
accumulation’,’’ only to vanish once again later in the book (pp. 272-3): ‘‘‘primitive
accumulation’ of capital . . . is not necessarily the best perspective to adopt’’ when
 Jairus Banaji’s Mode of Production 5

writing the history of capitalism. Like modes of production themselves, ‘‘primitive

accumulation’’ seems to be an issue about which Banaji continues to change his mind.
He goes further, and not only accuses Marx of not ‘‘producing a specifically
materialist history’’ (p. 46) but also maintains that ‘‘there is no specifically Marxist
historiography of capitalism’’ (p. 272). As in the case of modes of production not
found in Marx’s analysis, but nevertheless inserted into his own framework by
Banaji, the latter assures us (p. 42) that ‘‘[h]ad Marx lived to complete the new
version of [the third volume of Capital], we would no doubt have an even more
powerful demonstration of what [exploitation] meant.’’
The difficulty with this kind of endlessly counter-factual approach is obvious.
Hence the point made by Marx (1976: 948ff.) in the Resultate concerning formal
subsumption of labour refers specifically to what happens to apparently pre-
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capitalist forms (smallholding, slavery, debt bondage, sharecropping) under

capitalism, once this has become established. However, this is projected backwards
into history by Banaji, who then argues that wherever/whenever such relations are
encountered, they are ‘‘disguised’’ hired workers, and – consequently – there too is
found capitalism.
By contrast, he commends and/or endorses the work of many non-Marxist and
anti-Marxist authors, including neo-classical economic historians, such as Steinfield,
Fogel, Engermann, Bauer and Kula.12 Castigating Marx and other Marxists for
‘‘formalism,’’ therefore, Banaji in effect dismisses what they thought and wrote,
putting in their place his own views based on the assumption (p. 272), that ‘‘whole
swathes of the history of capitalism are ignored by Marxists.’’ The latter turn out to
have little or nothing to do with Marxism.

Marginalism is Not Marxism

Nowhere is the extent of Banaji’s break with Marxism more on show than in his
insistence that no difference has existed – or can exist – between free and unfree
labour (pp. 131ff.).13 All working arrangements are for Banaji nothing more than
variants of ‘‘disguised’’ wage-labour, conceptualised by him as ‘‘contract’’ to which
he adds the label ‘‘free.’’ For a marginalist economic historian, such as Steinfeld
(2001), whose legalistic definition of contract Banaji endorses, freedom of contract
means quite simply the ability of workers to enter working arrangements: that they
are subsequently unable to withdraw from them without the consent of their
employer does not affect his meaning. Banaji thereby unwittingly imbibes from neo-
classical economic theory the view that a work arrangement is defined simply by the
act of recruitment (‘‘entry into’’).
This contrasts with Marxist theory, for which a work arrangement is defined by a
process: the reproduction of the relational form (‘‘entry into’’ þ ‘‘exit from’’), as
embodied in the ability of a worker personally to commodify and recommodify his/
her own labour-power. Pace van der Linden, it is simply not the case that Banaji’s
interpretation is based on the view that ‘‘Marx’s Capital can only be understood
profoundly if one takes the Hegelian background of the work seriously.’’ Had it
been, Banaji would have discovered the crucial role Hegel played in Marxist
teleology: namely, the conceptualisation by Adam Smith of labour as value, by
Hegel of labour as property, and by Marx of labour-power as commodity that can be
 6 T. Brass

bought/sold. A distinction between workers who are free and those who are unfree
informs the historical process of becoming, being, remaining, and acting as a
proletariat, itself the result of class struggle between capital and labour.
In the course of such conflict, agency metamorphoses from that conducted by the
(Hegelian) subject-in-general to that by (Marxist) subjects-of-a-particular-class. This
in turn gives rise to the bonding by employers of landless workers – regardless of
whether they are permanent, seasonal, casual, locals or migrants. The latter
corresponds to ‘‘deproletarianisation,’’ a process whereby labour-power is either
decommodified or recommodified by someone other than its owner. Even when
dispossessed of land, therefore, erstwhile smallholders – not just in India but also
elsewhere in the global capitalist system – nevertheless still retain access to another
form of personal property: their labour-power. It is precisely this kind of ownership,
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exercised by workers over their labour-power, that an employer has to deprive them
of so as to exert in turn full control over a modern production process.14
Deproletarianisation is, as I have long been arguing (Brass, 1999; Brass, 2011), a
result of the intensification of class struggle, itself the effect of increased
globalisation.15 In these circumstances, capital is forced to impose ever more
effective methods of control over its workforce, a situation which inevitably gives rise
to more oppressive employment conditions, amongst which is the resort to unfree
labour. In terms of class struggle, therefore, unfree labour comes into its own most
effectively in what Trotsky conceptualised as the third historical stage of the
accumulation process, described by him as ‘‘civil war against the proletariat,’’ rather
than in any pre- or non-capitalist stage.16

Conclusion
Of the many current attempts to redefine Marxism, this book is in terms of theory
(and politics) by far the most problematic, departing from Marx to the degree that it
ceases to be recognisable as having a framework informed by his concepts. From the
essays contained in the volume one would have difficulty in guessing that Banaji
originally subscribed to the semi-feudal thesis and the concept of a ‘‘colonial’’ mode
of production, both of which he abandoned only after he was criticised by other
participants in the 1970s debate. As easy to miss is the fact that his interpretation of
Marxism not only diverges substantially from that of Marx and Lenin, but also is
sympathetic to (and informed by) a conceptual apparatus opposed to Marxist theory.
Many elements in his analysis (the state, the free/unfree labour distinction, peasant
household) are drawn not from Marxism but from non- and anti-Marxist
frameworks (neo-classical economic historiography, populism, Cold War notions
of the state). Marxism, Banaji would have us believe, is really nothing more than a
species of marginalist economic theory, and Lenin is nothing more than an unwitting
follower of Chayanovian neo-populism. The obvious question posed is how much
Marxist theory can one abandon and still be regarded in all seriousness as a Marxist?
As I have noted, among the more important Marxist concepts Banaji discards is
the distinction between free and unfree production relations, an ironic absence given
its centrality to an understanding of economic development in India. How can
workers fight to become a proletariat in the full sense of the term, if that is what they
already are and always have been? Given the socio-economically heterogeneous
 Jairus Banaji’s Mode of Production 7

workforce (tenants, sharecroppers, artisans, lumpenproletarians) subsumed by

Banaji under the historically ever-present category of ‘‘disguised’’ wage-labour,
how can struggle undertaken by relationally distinct components ever become that of
a proletariat (class-in-itself) to realise itself as such (class-for-itself)?
Since capitalism is perceived by him as an eternal systemic form, the ‘‘disguised’’
wage-labour framework recognises neither unfree labour nor primitive accumula-
tion. By abolishing the free/unfree distinction, and maintaining instead that all rural
workers – in late antiquity no less than in present-day capitalist India – are simply
hired labourers who are contractually free, this view breaks with Marxism and is
indistinguishable from neo-classical economic historiography. In short, it reproduces
the claim made by cliometricians that capital and labour are ever-present,
historically non-specific and thus ‘‘natural’’ economic categories that cannot be
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transcended.
Part of the problem lies outside Banaji, since the academic rise of post-modernism
and neo-liberalism and the consequent shift in political discourse have led to a
decline in knowledge about Marxist theory, many having abandoned it for the
cultural turn and/or neo-classical economics. What seems to have been forgotten by
a number of those who still consider themselves leftists is that Marxist political
economy is centrally about class formation and class struggle, and the empower-
ment/emancipation linked specifically to this process. No longer being able to
understand what the conceptual apparatus of Marxism is or ought to be, therefore, it
is hardly surprising that currently there is an inability on the part of many leftists
critically to assess claims to be a Marxist analysis when these appear.

Notes
1
Dedicating his book to a Russian Bolshevik seems to be an attempt by Banaji to claim a shared
theoretical and political lineage with an eminent Marxist, a claim undermined by the palpably non-
Marxist analysis which follows. Sidling up to the famous in this manner is akin to the late nineteenth-
century practice on the part of British imperialist authors who dedicated their volumes to ‘‘our dear
Queen,’’ a practice replicated subsequently and memorably by one Indian academic (Vidyarthi, 1964)
who dedicated his tome to ‘‘our saintly Governor and Chancellor.’’
2
As will emerge in the course of this review, these claims made on Banaji’s behalf are not merely
inaccurate but the exact opposite of what is actually the case. It is surprising that van der Linden
appears to have missed this.
3
The rider he then adds – ‘‘The weakness of Frank’s approach was that he didn’t have the tools to argue
the point in a more sophisticated theoretical way’’ – is not merely patronising but, given Banaji’s own
problems with theory, wholly inappropriate. See www.counterfire.org4Features4Book Reviews, 15
April 2011.
4
Denying that he has ever characterised India as ‘‘feudal,’’ Banaji asserts – see comments by him posted
on 15 April 2011 at www.counterfire.org4Features4Book Reviews – that the argument in his book
has only altered in one particular respect (‘‘Where I have changed my position quite substantially is in
rejecting the same characterisation (‘feudal’) for Latin America’’). This is an astonishing claim, one that
could only be accepted by those who are either unaware of or ignore what he has actually written in the
past about the mode of production.
5
Historians understood clearly that wage-labour was common in ancient society (Brass, 2005: 122-3).
6
Much cited and anthologised, my article (Brass, 1991) argued that Naxalites in India were the same as
the Sendero movement in Peru because each subscribed to the semi-feudal thesis, all points made in the
interview by Banaji. He even cites the same ethnographic source (Duyker, 1987) used in that article,
and deploys the same arguments: the Maoist belief in the existence of a pristine peasantry, the similarity
beween Sendero and the CPI/ML, the parallel between the nationalism of Maoism and the reassertion
 8 T. Brass

of indigenous tribal/peasant ‘‘otherness.’’ Banaji makes no reference to this earlier article, an odd
omission since he was on the editorial advisory board of the journal in which it appeared.
7
The reproduction of such units was governed by capital, and the price the producer in the ‘‘colonial’’
mode received for the enforced sale of his/her crop was deemed ‘‘a concealed wage,’’ as ‘‘disguised’’
wage-labour worked mainly on its own land and not that of – or for – others.
8
Defending the neo-populist Chayanov (1966) against Marxist critiques, Banaji (1976: 1601) adds to the
confusion by first denying that the Chayanovian concept ‘‘equilibrium’’ derives from neo-classical
economics, and then accepting that Chayanov did indeed use ‘‘marginalist notions.’’ In much the same
vein, having endorsed the ‘‘peasant mode of production,’’ Banaji (pp. 94-5, 217) then criticises
Wickham (2005) for using the same concept.
9
About India, therefore, Banaji (1990) has observed that ‘‘[s]tratification terminology (rich/middle/poor)
is the least helpful way of trying to make sense of this shifting and ambiguous reality.’’
10
That Mughal India was anything but sweetness and light is clear from many sources, among them
Moreland (1929) and Habib (1963: 330-3, 337-51). Banaji’s revisionist interpretation (economic
dynamism ¼ market opportunities, peace, order) appears to be consistent with a much wider pattern of
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nationalist appropriation. This took off during the 1980s, when the Subaltern Studies series attempted
to replace a historical materialist approach as applied to grassroots mobilisations in Asia and elsewhere
with a ‘new’ populist post-modern one. A hitherto dominant Marxist conceptual framework – based on
class formation/struggle, modernity, working class internationalism and a socialist transition – was
replaced with nationalism and a concept of an undifferentiated peasant as an ‘‘authentic’’ but unheard
South Asian voice. In a similar vein, the attempt by Banaji to relocate an ‘‘authentic’’ capitalism outside
its historic birthplace replicates this shift (along the lines of ‘‘we always had a propensity to economic
dynamism, in the past no less than in the present’’). It is difficult not to see both these Third-Worldist/
nationalist appropriations as fitting into the prevailing triumphalism of the ‘‘decline of the west, the rise
of the east’’ variety, an ideological accompaniment to the outsourcing of capitalist production from
metropolitan contexts (Europe, the USA) to the Asian components (China, India) of the so-called
BRIC countries. A celebration of non-Western ideological or economic power, neither approach has
anything to do with Marxist theory, let alone a socialist outcome.
11
Marx (1969a: 391-2; 1969b: 328; 1972: 301-2, 310, 352, 495) uses the term ‘‘exploitation’’ to describe a
quantitative relation between capital and labour (the rate of exploitation), not – as argued by Banaji – a
qualitative relational difference (slave-not-sharecropper, worker-not-peasant). The latter meaning was
elaborated much rather by the anthropologist Pierre-Philippe Rey, who conducted fieldwork in Africa
during the 1960s (Dupré and Rey, 1980; Rey, 1975). Marx’s emphasis is on the amount of surplus
extracted within the context of a given production relation, as distinct from the different institutional
forms involved. Hence exploitation can increase or decrease without the production relation itself
changing – that is to say, regardless of whether the latter consists of free or unfree labour-power.
12
This shortcoming is itself compounded by the fact that Banaji falls into the most common of
epistemological traps, the failure to question the methods/theory of secondary sources cited. We are left
wondering what assumptions structure these analyses, what kinds of concepts they use, and why. Thus,
for example, the work of Richard Pipes is referenced approvingly (pp. 19, 32-4, 37), notwithstanding the
fact that he is a vehemently anti-Marxist historian.
13
It does not follow from saying that free wage-labour is not the sine qua non of the capitalist mode of
production (p. 11) – these days an uncontroversial proposition, having been advanced over the years
by, among others, Maurice Dobb, Ernest Mandel, Sidney Mintz, Daniel Guérin, Alex Lichtenstein and
this reviewer – that consequently there is no difference between free and unfree labour-power.
14
Marx (1973: 463) states quite clearly that free labour is in terms of consciousness of labour-power as the
property of the self an improvement over the way this relation is perceived by unfree workers. It is
therefore a myth that capitalists everywhere and at all times want labour-power to be free. They do,
initially, it is true, so that they can have access to workers, one of the reasons why the bourgeoisie are
opposed to a landlord class which imposes unfree relations on its own tenants, thereby denying
capitalists access to this potential workforce. However, once the latter have become separated from the
means of production, are transformed into a proletariat, and begin to organise as such against
employers with the object of improving pay/conditions, the situation changes. This is especially the case
when owners of the means of production come under pressure from two sources as capitalism spreads:
on the one hand from workers struggling against cut-backs to pay/conditions, and on the other from
rival enterprises that have managed to cut labour costs.
 Jairus Banaji’s Mode of Production 9
15
Having dismissed the importance of the industrial reserve army, it comes as no surprise that Banaji
(2000: 9) has also proclaimed confidently that ‘‘[t]he biggest myth of globalisation is to believe that a
race to the bottom is somehow inherent in the logic of capital.’’ A few of us knew better then, and
almost all know better now.
16
Writing in 1932, Trotsky (1975: 268) argued that it is necessary to

distinguish three historical stages: the dawn of capitalist development, when the bourgeoisie
required revolutionary methods to solve its tasks; the period of bloom and maturity of the
capitalist régime, when the bourgeoisie endowed its domination with orderly, pacific,
conservative, democratic forms; finally the decline of capitalism, when the bourgeoisie is forced
to resort to methods of civil war against the proletariat to protect its right of exploitation.

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