India is already a capitalist country despite its colonial past
Evidence
Take, for example, India. Its colonial past is nostalgically rehashed on US television screens in copious series every few months, but the India of today has all the characteristics of a capitalist country: generalized commodity production, vigorous and escalating exchanges not only between agriculture and industry but also between Departments I and II of industry itself, and technical personnel more numerous than those of France and Germany combined. It is a very miserable kind of capitalism, and the conditions of life for over half the Indian population – roughly four hundred million people – are considerably worse than what Engels described in The Condition of the Working Class in England. But India’s steel industry did celebrate its hundredth anniversary a few years ago, and the top eight of her multinational corporations are among the fastest-growing in the world, active as they are in numerous countries, from Vietnam to Nigeria. This economic base is combined, then, with unbroken parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie since Independence in 1947, a record quite comparable to the length of Italy’s modern record of unbroken bourgeois-democratic governance, and superior to the fate of bourgeois democracy in Spain and Portugal, two of the oldest colonizing countries. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 158
Categorization
- SHARE: The specific detail that India’s top eight multinationals are among the world’s fastest-growing, active from Vietnam to Nigeria, would interest anyone tracking global capitalism’s geography.
- XREF: connects to: India is empirical counter-evidence to the Third World’s non-capitalist definition. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 388; India’s capitalist economy refutes Jameson’s First-Third World binary.
Related
- India is empirical counter-evidence to the Third World’s non-capitalist definition. (similarity 0.89)
- India’s capitalist economy refutes Jameson’s First-Third World binary. (similarity 0.87)
- Late-developing countries cannot replicate Europe’s capitalist transition because its global conditions are gone (similarity 0.79)
- India’s bourgeois democracy outlasted those in older colonizing countries. (similarity 0.79)