Peasant - worker alliance : its basis in the Indian economy

In the Fifth R. C. Dutt Lectures on Political Economy, V. M. Dandekar considers afresh the central issue raised by the major Marxist theoreticians on the true sources of capitalist accumulation. The author takes issue with earlier theorists such as Luxemburg, Preobrazhensky, Bukharin and contemporary theorists such as Robinson, Emmanuel, Bettelheim, Morishima and Mitra. Formulating his argument in terms of unequal exchange, the author reviews the phenomenon of imperial ism-the exploitation of an economically less developed country by a more developed one and also the exploitation within an economy where a more developed sector extracts the surplus from a less developed sector. Accepting that his ideas are controversial, the author presents his evidence carefully to show how the working class itself is a party to this exploitation of other workers and that the bourgeoisie has encouraged the working class movement to degenerate into pure trade minism which Lenin described as the 'bourgeois of the working class'.