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RRPXXX10.1177/04866134221123627Review of Radical Political EconomicsYadav

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Review of Radical Political Economics

Reviewing Petty Commodity

2022, Vol. 54(4) 411­–419
© 2022 Union for Radical
Political Economics
Production: Toward a Unified
Marxist Conception Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/04866134221123627
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Srishti Yadav1

Abstract
This article reviews three veins of contributions on contemporary petty commodity production
in Marxian political economy, with reference to India. Through a comparative analysis of the
works of Henry Bernstein, Kalyan Sanyal, and Barbara Harriss-White, the article maps areas of
commonality and contestation between the three theoretical constructions and makes a case
for the merits of Harriss-White’s framework over others.
JEL Classification: B510, O170

Keywords
informal sector, petty commodity production, self-employment, post-colonial capitalism

1. Introduction
The explosion of informality is a central characteristic of the economies of the global south.
While some types of informalization represent a retreat from Fordist capital-labor relations, there
is a significant section that requires theoretical elaboration (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009). As
far back as 1978, Caroline Moser has attempted to theorize informality through social relations
of production with the proposition that informality or the informal sector is nothing but petty
commodity production (PCP): the production of commodities by producers who engage in pro-
ductive labor and who exert control over the means of production (Bernstein 1988).
Within Marxian political economy, there exist multiple theorizations of contemporary PCP,
intersecting with and contradicting each other. This article compares three veins of contributions
on PCP by Henry Bernstein, Kalyan Sanyal, and Barbara Harriss-White, with reference to the
Indian context. By reviewing key articles and books by the above-mentioned scholars, I attempt
to highlight their core arguments and chart areas of agreement and disagreement.

1
Department of Economics, University of Manitoba, Canada

Date received: January 12, 2022

Date accepted: August 11, 2022

Corresponding Author:
Srishti Yadav, Department of Economics, University of Manitoba, 501, Fletcher Argue Building, Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3T 2N2, Canada.
Email: yadas719@newschool.edu
412 Review of Radical Political Economics 54(4)

2. Locating Petty Commodity Production within Informality

According to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), 93
percent of employment in the Indian economy as of 2009 is unorganized or informal. Informality
entails self-employment, employment in informal or unorganized enterprises (fewer than ten
workers or entirely family-labor based, not registered with the government, do not pay taxes, not
required to obey labor laws), or informal employment by organized sector enterprises (irregular
or casual work, may not be governed by a contract, no benefits) (Basole and Basu 2011: 63).
Nearly 70 percent of employment in non-agriculture and 99 percent of employment in agricul-
ture is in the unorganized sector (Mehrotra et al. 2012: 12–13). The organized sector accounted
for 16 percent of total employment in 2009–10, but nearly half of the employment generated by
the organized sector is informal (Mehrotra et al. 2012: 19). Informalization in the organized sec-
tor entails short-term contracts for wage workers as well as subcontracting and putting-out
arrangements with unorganized enterprises and home-workers, either directly or through con-
tractors. Such arrangements help firms reduce production costs such as costs of compliance with
labor and environmental laws (Basole and Basu 2011).
The third type of informality is the surge in self-employment. Self-employment is, according
to Harriss-White (2012), the condition of the common man in India. Self-employed workers were
56 percent of the total workforce by 2007—64 percent in agriculture and 46 percent in the non-
agricultural sectors (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 39). Own-account enterprises, that is,
which are exclusively run with the unpaid labor of the proprietor and family members, account
for 87 percent of the non-agricultural unorganized sector (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 39).
Own-account enterprises are concentrated in agriculture, manufacturing, and repair and trade;
only 11 percent are engaged in subcontracting or putting-out relations with capitalist firms
(Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 40). Own-account enterprises and nondirectory manufacturing
enterprises (which hire between one and five workers) sell the majority of their product to con-
sumers or households directly and not to contractors or firms (Basole and Basu 2011: 68). For
own-account firms, the sites of production and of reproduction often overlap—81.1 percent of
own-account manufacturing is located within the household premises of the owner-producer
(Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 67). Own-account firms are also more likely to be run by
women: Bhattacharya and Kesar (2018: 718) show that 45 percent of own-account manufactur-
ing is headed by women, as opposed to only 5 percent of establishments.
Therefore, the really interesting empirical category that demands theoretical engagement is
the self-employed worker or family engaged in PCP, independently, with no overt relations to
capital and without hiring any labor. In the next section, I summarize and compare the theoretical
contributions of Henry Bernstein, Kalyan Sanyal, and Barbara Harriss-White on this category.1

3. What Is Petty Commodity Production?

3.1 Henry Bernstein
Bernstein (1986, 1988) first developed his conception of PCP, drawing on Gibbon and Neocosmos
(1985), in relation to the question of social relations of production in agriculture. His treatment
of PCP can be understood by the single paraphrase “real-world relentless micro-capitalism.” PCP
is “constituted as a contradictory combination of the class places of capital and labor, both of
which have their own circuits (and disciplines) of reproduction” (Bernstein 2006: 457).
As capital, PCP must reproduce at its existing scale and possibly grow, that is, accumulate. As
labor, producers must maintain socially necessary standards of consumption and living. PCP is

1
For reasons of space, I restrict myself to a review of the theoretical construction of PCP and not its political
implications.
Yadav 413

shaped by the contradictions between these compulsions. It is regulated by the same immanent
laws that govern all commodity-producing enterprises under capitalism (Bernstein 1988: 262).
Capitalism, in turn, is “generalized commodity production founded upon the contradictory
relation between capital and wage laborers” (Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985 quoted in Bernstein
1988: 260). Bernstein entreats us to separate the phenomenal form of production relations from
their essence, arguing that every individual economic constituent in a capitalist economy does
not necessarily display the polar separation of capital and doubly-free labor (Bernstein 1988:
260–61). Those engaged in PCP “are unable to exist and reproduce themselves outside the cir-
cuits of commodity economy and divisions of labor generated by the capital/wage-labor relation
and its contradictions” (Bernstein 1988: 261).
Bernstein emphasizes that PCP, even when treated as nontransitory, bears within it the possi-
bility of differentiation—either up into capitalist production proper, or down into doubly-free
labor (Bernstein 1988: 264). He is careful to note that this is only a tendency and may not in fact
manifest, but that this is important to recognize in order to make sense of the emergence of capi-
talist relations when they do. The generalized tendency is differentiation; the absence of it is to
be explained through the examination of concrete conditions in different contexts.
There is no essential logic to PCP that is distinct from capitalist production. There is also no
difference between family labor-run enterprises in the global north and in the global south, except
their position in the global imperialist division of labor (Bernstein 2001: 27). Bernstein is careful
to avoid functional constructions of PCP, or an explanation based on articulation or subsumption
(Bernstein 1988: 259–60). There are no stages to capitalism, only its world historical.
The preponderance of PCP is a consequence of the inability of contemporary capitalism to
provide a generalizable living wage (Bernstein 2006: 457). The lower rungs of PCP, engaged in
survival activity, are understood by Bernstein (2004, 2006) to be part of spatially and economi-
cally fragmented “classes of labor.” But when rooted in land ownership, PCP is imbued with the
tendency to accumulate (Bernstein 2006: 457). As such, PCP is petty bourgeois and not an
exploited class (Bernstein 1988: 264–65). Bernstein (2006: 266–67, 2001: 30) highlights the
gendered and generational (class) relations of exploitation within the PCP household instead of
treating PCP as a homogenous self-exploiting whole.

3.2 Kalyan Sanyal

Kalyan Sanyal’s influential Rethinking Capitalist Development (2007) is a powerful counterposi-
tion. At the core of Sanyal’s contribution is his motivation to make sense of the economic struc-
tures of the postcolonial world without recourse to transition.
Postcolonial capital, Sanyal argues, is limited—capital extracts resources from precapitalist
sectors but is unable to generate commensurate employment to absorb surplus populations
because of the increasing capital intensity of production techniques (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya
2009: 36). As a result, postcolonial nations have large surplus populations (“wasteland”) that
exist outside of the capitalist economy proper, who have been dispossessed of their means of
labor through processes of primitive accumulation (such as land grabs, slum clearing), but are not
a reserve army because they have never had the opportunity to be hired and fired by capital
(Sanyal 2007: 54–55).
This wasteland constitutes a non-capitalist “need economy,” a “Chayanovian space outside
the circuit of capital” consisting of economic units that operate based on the logic of survival,
which is fundamentally different from the logic of the circuit of capital, that is, accumulation
(Sanyal 2007: 69; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 36).
Producers in the need economy purchase means of production from the market, combine them
with unpaid family labor, and produce commodities that are then sold on the market. The circuit
of the need economy is:
414 Review of Radical Political Economics 54(4)

M — C — C′ — M′

where M′ − M, the surplus generated, is oriented toward household consumption requirements,

so that the next cycle of production begins with M, not M′ (Sanyal 2007: 212). Even when sur-
plus is re-invested into production, the aim is to achieve better standards of consumption and
living in the future (Sanyal 2007: 213). In Chayanovian fashion, surplus is distributed not through
impersonal market exchange but along kinship and communal lines, so that producers share the
average product (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 38–39).
Much of productive activity in the need economy takes place within households, and house-
hold assets become the assets of the enterprise. Production and reproduction processes and
expenses cannot always be disentangled (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 40–41). The inter-
linked nature of productive and reproductive activities in the need economy can also explain why
a large number of own-account enterprises are headed by women. Homestead-based self-employ-
ment allows women greater flexibility (spatially and in terms of time-use) to supplement social
reproduction with income-generating work.
The need economy is not conceived as being economically necessary for capital; it is distinct
from that part of the informal economy that is tied to capital (the accumulation economy) through
outsourcing or flexible hiring (Sanyal 2007: 59; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 36). The rela-
tion between the need and accumulation spaces is not one of exploitation but of extraction—capi-
tal encroaches on the need economy to extract resources (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009:
36–37). At the same time, since the need economy serves as a refuge for those who cannot find a
place in the accumulation economy, it fulfils an important political and ideological need of capi-
tal (Sanyal 2007: 35). The function of the need economy is political, not economic; this is why
capital transfers resources via the state or nonstate actors to the need economy, in a reversal of
primitive accumulation, to help sustain it (Sanyal 2007: 60–61, 80–85).
Sanyal posits producers in the need economy as being expropriated by capital and also refur-
bished by it. Capital and non-capital are engaged in a structural, though hierarchical, unity within
the complex of global commodity markets and private property, that is, global capitalism (Sanyal
2007: 15). He eschews the concept of PCP because of its underlying implications of transition
(Sanyal 2007: 211–12). While Sanyal allows for the possibility of individual producers within
the need economy accumulating enough to transform into capitalist producers, he argues that this
cannot happen on a large scale—need spaces are continuously destroyed and re-created.

3.3 Barbara Harriss-White

Harriss-White’s conception of PCP sits somewhere in between. PCP is conceived as economic
activity in which “the household is the unit of production and consumption, a unit combining
capital and labor in gendered roles” (Harriss-White 2018: 357). Embedded in commodity pro-
duction, PCP is marked by the “dialectic of accumulation and exploitation” (Jan and Harriss-
White 2019).
What differentiates Harriss-White’s position from Bernstein’s is that Harriss-White seeks to
restore the “essential reality” of PCP. PCP persists by virtue of self-exploitation, that is, through
the deployment of underpaid and unpaid family labor (Harriss-White 2012: 121). Within the
household-enterprise, remuneration may be dependent on patriarchal social norms rather than the
market per se (Harriss-White 2014: 984). Social identities and institutions such as age, gender,
caste, ethnicity, religion, and spatial locations serve as “regulative forces” that shape processes of
production, exert control and domination, and “disguise” class formation in PCP (Harriss-White
2010: 156, 166).
Because the household is both the unit of production and reproduction, it is not possible to
strictly separate reinvestment of surplus into production and deployment of surplus toward
Yadav 415

consumption, since the latter contributes to the maintenance of labor in its productive state
(Harriss-White 2012: 130). Harriss-White (2018: 360–62) shifts focus away from the theoretical
possibility of differentiation to the empirical reality that PCP tends to expand through multiplica-
tion, often through resource transfers within households.
PCP is not reducible to disguised wage work because producers are accountable for, and have
control over, the means of labor, the production process and, by extension, their own time
(Harriss-White 2018: 361). Surplus extraction in PCP takes forms different from capitalist pro-
duction—surplus is extracted through rents, interest payments, and through markets for com-
modity exchange (Harriss-White 2010: 154). PCP is therefore “a mechanism for transferring
resources/value. . . to those consuming the product” (Harriss-White 2018: 361).
Harriss-White also takes into account the ways in which PCP is functionally useful for capital.
She differentiates between three types of integration or coexistence with capitalist production—
process-sequential, in which PCP and wage labor operate at different stages of production; pro-
cess-segregated, in which certain sectors are dominated by PCP and others by wage labor-hiring
firms; and process-integrated, in which PCP and factory production are combined at all stages of
production (Jan and Harriss-White 2019: 357). Contracting or putting-out arrangements with
PCP allow for the “offloading” of various production costs, and afford greater flexibility in the
production process (Harriss-White 2010: 154). PCP also absorbs the costs of social reproduction
of the industrial workforce (Harriss-White 2010: 154).
Because the primary form of value extraction is via absolute surplus value and not relative
surplus value, PCP is understood as the formal subsumption of labor under capital (Harriss-
White 2012: 120). However, this does not imply that formal subsumption will necessarily give
way to real subsumption—PCP may be a “stage in the differentiation of individual capitals, but
is being constantly replenished and reproduced” (Harriss-White 2012: 117).

4. Mapping Theorizations
All three theorizations map commodity-producing units that rely primarily on unpaid family
labor. The core difference between Bernstein and Harriss-White on the one hand and Sanyal on
the other is that Sanyal identifies capitalist production exclusively with the polar separation
between doubly-free wage labor and capitalists who own means of production.2 On this count, he
has been critiqued for obfuscating phenomenal form and essence (Jan 2012). Bernstein and
Harriss-White on the other hand recognize the capital-labor relation to be an abstraction that is
not necessarily descriptive of concrete production relations in capitalism (see table 1).
Bernstein’s conception of PCP, though an important reminder not to confuse form and essence,
or levels of abstraction in Marx’s analysis, lacks sufficient descriptive power. How do the twin
circuits of labor and capital intersect with or impede each other? Does PCP operate differently
from capitalist firms, particularly over time? If PCP is subject to the same market forces as capi-
talist firms, how does it compete and persist? Such questions are not posed in Bernstein’s analy-
sis; PCP does not require a distinct logic or theoretical toolkit. By retaining the core contradiction
between capital and labor, Bernstein (2021) also retains the relevance of Marx’s model of capital-
ist political economy—its central axioms, abstractions, and dynamics.
Instead of putting the theoretical cart before the horse, Harriss-White and Sanyal identify the
dynamics of PCP (multiplication, production for reproduction) based on concrete observations.
In many ways, Harriss-White builds on Bernstein’s distinction between form and essence by

2
Moreover, Sanyal’s wasteland is a product of the extractive machinations of capitalist development—it
consists of producers who have lost their means of labor through processes of primitive accumulation and
must procure them through the market; this is why the need economy does not include agricultural self-
employment. Bernstein’s and Harriss-White’s conceptions of PCP do not necessitate such a separation
between labor and the means of labor, though for Bernstein this is the core theoretical tendency.
416 Review of Radical Political Economics 54(4)

Table 1. Mapping Theorizations.

Henry Barbara Kalyan

Bernstein Harriss-White Sanyal
PCP is part of ensemble of capitalist relations   
Family as the unit of production   
PCP combines class places and circuits of capital & labor   
Self-exploitation   
Uneven distribution of class places within household   
Production for reproduction   
Differentiation is primary tendency   
PCP is the formal subsumption of labor under capital   
Exploited class   

identifying PCP as part of the complex of capitalist relations. She retains Marx’s emphasis on
forces and relations of production and circulation, but unlike Bernstein, she is interested in
unpacking what it means for a capitalist social formation to be dominated (numerically) by awk-
ward classes that do not appear like the polar separation between capital and wage labor (Harriss-
White 2018). To this end, she emphasizes the essential reality of PCP—its core of self-exploitation
and overlapping spheres of production and reproduction in the household enterprise.3
In this regard, Harriss-White’s analysis treads closer to that of Sanyal. Both privilege the cen-
trality of reproduction (and the overlap of spheres of production and reproduction) in the dynam-
ics of PCP/need economy. Both highlight the role of social and kinship relations (as opposed to
impersonal market relations) in structuring production and distribution within the PCP/need
economy household. But where Sanyal imbues the need space with a general tendency of income
sharing between its members, Harriss-White, like Bernstein, explores the disguised forms of
class within the household-enterprise.
Harriss-White (2018: 358) highlights the possibility of combinations of self-employment and
wage work within the household-enterprise, shaped by gendered divisions of labor that span
seasons, sectors, and are spatially dispersed. Though she outlines different types of co-existence
of PCP with apex capital, Harriss-White does not fall into the trap of defining PCP through the
economic need of capital, which, as Sanyal notes, may be transitory. While she pays attention to
the various ways in which PCP subsidizes capital and undercuts labor, the essence of PCP is not
bound to apex capital. But Harriss-White’s analysis, evolving as it is, does not provide a theoreti-
cal explanation for growth by multiplication, which is treated as an empirical stylized fact rather
than a theoretical tendency that stems directly from the contradictory combination of capital and
labor that constitutes PCP.
Sanyal instead locates the essence of non-capital clearly in the logic of survival or need,
though as described in section 3, he allows for a multiplicity of individual motives in the need
space. Sanyal clarifies that the logic of need is an emergent property that arises from the interac-
tion between the need and accumulation spaces (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009: 39). This has
rightly been critiqued as effectively undoing the distinction between the two spaces in Sanyal’s
analysis, and considerably weakens his analysis (Gidwani and Wainwright 2014: 44–45).
Sanyal does not address the question of how entities in the need space compete with capitalist
firms in the market economy. Despite the use of some of Chayanov’s concepts, Sanyal does not
explicitly identify self-exploitation as a means of retaining competitiveness (Gidwani and

3
This has political implications as well. Bernstein (1988) reduces the relevance of the politics of PCP to
whether it allies with that of labor or of capital; Harriss-White (2018) is willing to evaluate it on its own
terms given its importance as a source of livelihood and employment for large sections of the population in
the absence of formal employment.
Yadav 417

Wainwright 2014). Instead, he overstates the role of reversals of primitive accumulation and
welfare governmentality in the survival of the need space (Gidwani and Wainwright 2014).
Sanyal’s theorization is riddled with serious concerns (see also Bardhan 2018) but is com-
mendable nevertheless for attempting to identify an essential logic for self-employment. By con-
ceptualizing PCP as part of the complex of capitalist relations and by highlighting self-exploitation,
Harriss-White evades some of these theoretical issues. And though she seeks to restore its “essen-
tial reality,” the question of why PCP grows by multiplication has not yet been addressed: is it the
result of competitive barriers posed by apex capital, or does it have to do with the centrality of
reproduction, in which case, how does it differ from the logic of need or survival? In the opinion
of this author, closing this theoretical gap is critical for what is otherwise the most holistic
Marxian theorization of contemporary PCP.
Harriss-White also offers insightful preliminary comments on the potential relationship
between the size of capitalist production and the size of the informal sector (and PCP in particu-
lar) through the introduction of effective demand: “as long as apex capital can expand without
requiring high levels of domestic mass consumption, the relations sustaining PCP will persist”
(Harriss-White 2014: 991).
The implication is that PCP households tend to have lower purchasing powers given the
“super-self-exploitation” that characterizes their economic realities. As a result, they (as well as
workers with informal contracts) are more or less confined to the informal sector for the purchase
of consumer goods. The primary marketing channel for self-employed producers also happens to
be consumers themselves, instead of contractors or firms (Basu and Basole 2011). Apex capital
on the other hand tends to produce for capital and for workers with formal contracts who have
greater purchasing power.
Harriss-White’s argument is powerful when inverted as well—domestically-oriented capital-
ist production is limited by the size of the informal sector (and consequently limited demand for
consumer goods). Capital creates informality through its inability to provide a generalizable liv-
ing wage, through primitive accumulation, and through its attempts to extract absolute surplus
value. But profits can only be realized if commodities produced are, in fact, sold. Increasing
informalization serves as a constraint on capital’s ability to sell.
If the informal sector continues to grow, it will alter the composition of capitalist production.
The rigors of effective demand will orient capitalist production increasingly toward the produc-
tion of investment goods for other apex capital, and toward luxury consumption for a small sec-
tion of the well-to-do workers and capitalists (as well as rentiers, merchant and commercial
capitalists, and moneylenders). The informal sector will increasingly be responsible for itself, for
its own reproduction, even as it is enmeshed in extractive relationships with apex capital.

5. Conclusion
Harriss-White’s conception of PCP, though evolving, allows for a multiplicity of capitals that
exist and compete in a hierarchy of global divisions of labor and value chains, extract surplus
through an ensemble of forms of exploitation, have different modalities of distribution, and have
varying dynamic trajectories. PCP households, marked by an empirical tendency to multiply,
survive through intense self-exploitation, gendered and generational divisions of labor within the
household, and by combining the spheres of production and reproduction. Apex capital and infor-
mality are co-created and co-constrained, enabling and limiting each other’s existence.
This conception takes the core of Bernstein’s argument and develops it such that it loses its
theoretical sharpness but gains in descriptive richness. In this process, it can express several of
Sanyal’s core axioms relating to the circuit of non-capital without having to distinguish it as such.
A clearer theorization of the predominance of multiplication can contribute strongly to its explan-
atory power.
418 Review of Radical Political Economics 54(4)

Acknowledgment
I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their insightful and constructive feedback,
and to Avraham Banares and Timothy Hazen for their helpful comments on this article at the Radical
Political Economy of Development panel at ASSA 2022. All errors are my own.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article. Open access publica-
tion is enabled by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN).

ORCID iD
Srishti Yadav https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4856-8108

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