‘Ideal-types’ and the diversity of capital: A review of Sanyal Sanyal, K. (2007). Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge India

In recent years, the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation has become increasingly prominent in discussions of capitalist development in third world countries. 1 It is argued within the literature that neoliberal globalization has greatly hastened the process of dispossession of resources through large scale privatization of land, water, forests etc which can best be captured through the lens of primitive accumulation. 2 Consequently, struggles against primitive accumulation are to be recognized as legitimate struggles against capitalism and possessing great emancipatory potential. Kalyan Sanyal’s book ‘Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism’ constitutes an important addition to the debate on primitive accumulation and post-colonial Indian development. As the title suggests, Sanyal argues for nothing short of a complete rethinking of some of the essentialist/dogmatic conceptions regarding capitalism in the post-colonial world and its relationship to the ‘outside’. However, while his arguments are an important corrective to certain teleological readings of capitalism, they are nevertheless based on a reified view of capitalist social relations as being reducible to the production relation between free wage-labour and capital, which leads to his problematic and ultimately unsatisfactory distinction between ‘capital’ and the ‘non’-capitalist ‘need economy’. This view of capitalism is unsuccessful in capturing the diversity of capitalist development in actual post-colonial historical development.