 Well, let me begin by explaining a little bit about how I came to write this book. I had been active in the left movement in Pakistan since 1998. And whenever one would meet with other intellectuals, progressive intellectuals, they would often say, well, you know, you're doing all this wonderful activity amongst trade unions and workers and peasants and so on. But there is no analysis of, you know, what are the different classes in Pakistan, what are their quantities, you know, what is the mode of production of this economy. There seems to be absolutely nothing with respect to any of this work. So, you know, the first step seems to us to be to make an analysis of what exists in society, you know, such as Lenin did with his famous book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and many others have done subsequently in their societies. And there isn't a single one in the context of Pakistan. So one felt a very strong, you know, it felt that there was a very strong dearth in the literature on this, on the subject. And indeed, when I looked around, I went for my doctorate, and I looked around, I saw that while there were certainly many studies that were undertaken in certain areas. For instance, Sagheer Ahmed had done a bit of work and Hamzal, we had done a bit of work, and others had done some work, etcetera. But the problem with these studies was that either they were very specific to certain areas, they could be looking at the Landi Kurangi, you know, sort of working class area in Karachi or whatever, or they could be looking at one or two villages, etcetera. Or they were very specific in relation to the time frame that they were looking at. And so a more holistic sort of analysis of the class structure of Pakistan really hasn't been attempted, or hadn't been attempted when I began this book. And so I felt that, you know, I could arguably address that gap in the literature. Now, of course, addressing that gap meant that one had to reinvent the wheel, or rather to really begin at square one, because kusthaii nahi. So that led me into a process of, well, to examine the contemporary class structure of Pakistan. Let's also look at what existed historically. Let's look at what existed before the creation of Pakistan, and then, of course, before the British colonial rule as well. And I think that process of looking at what was already available, you know, rereading what had been written on the subject in particular, the fantastic debate published here in India on the, you know, the famous debate, the mode of production debate here in India. Looking at that literature and other literature, what I came to realize was that the majority of studies were basically looking at whether or not the transition from feudalism to capitalism had occurred, and to what extent it had occurred. And it is the same, more or less, in Pakistan as well. If you look at the literature that is available in Pakistan, specifically within the field of agrarian studies, like Mahmood Hassan Khan, or Akbar Azad, et cetera, you will see that the debate is pretty, mirrors the debate in India. The problem that I had with most of these studies was that, of course, the framework within which that was, this whole debate was occurring was whatever exists before capitalism must be feudalism. That was more or less taken for granted, it seemed to me. And when I began to study the literature on the subject, especially studying some of what Marx had written and others had written angles, et cetera, I discovered that they had a very different view of Indian history, of history, of the history of South Asia. And so I began to research that view. I read Crader and many other people, and I came to an understanding that there was something in that literature and in that basic theory, which we had ignored and that we needed to review. So let me first also tell you what this book is not, because whenever one talks about the class structure of Pakistan, the impression that any layman I think would have is that this could be a sociological study about various ethical mores that people have, how they interact, et cetera. It could be a cultural study. It could be a political study about the structure of the state, about the form of politics, et cetera. It's none of those things. It's really very much firmly within the context of the mode of production debate. And it's really a political economy book rather than a book on culture or on politics or even on history or on sociology. It's none of those aspects. So if one approaches the book with expecting to find those sorts of answers, I think one would be disappointed, because that's not what the book is about. As my friend today was remarking and others have also remarked, kis me to nambari bozhat hain. So it is partially based on a statistical analysis and a political economy analysis. But the first two chapters I think arguably are most applicable also to an Indian audience. The second two chapters are much more empirical and look specifically at Pakistan. And the first two chapters are building the framework within which I proceed to examine Pakistan. So I think in that context, since the first two chapters are looking at pre-colonial history and colonial history, they are open to greater interest within India as well. So what's the main idea behind the book? The main idea behind the book is that we as Marxists seem to be working with, oh, and I also want to say something about the methodology before I go into the book as well, which is that, of course, one has read quite a bit of the literature that has come out in the last two, three decades, which is post-modernist or post-structuralist. So challenges, basic assumptions about class, about base and superstructure, about this whole debate about economic determinism and agency, and so on and so forth. And let me be a bit, some would say orthodox, some would say unorthodox, but let me be very blunt and say that the methodology of this particular study is basically what one would call unreconstructed classical Marxism, which is what I myself personally adhere to, and I'm convinced of. So how should one put it, strongly reject some of the new recent work that has come out which, in the way of challenging economic determinism and challenging what would be considered mechanical, mechanistic Marxism goes all the way to the other extreme and I think throws out the baby with the bathwater and takes out the real sort of meat and bones out of doing social sciences, and doing social sciences, where I would emphasize the science aspect of it. So I like to consider this to be a work of orthodox Marxism, in terms of its methodology. I don't think that's very problematic, because I think the actual methodology of Marxism is quite nuanced and quite complex, and one needs to understand it in its dialectical interconnection. So having said that, the basic idea that one is challenging, I'm challenging in this book, is this concept of the unilinear development of history, which is essentially that all societies, more or less, develop through the same five periods or modes of production history. Whether that's India, whether that's China, whether that's Vietnam, Turkey, or whether it's Latin America, or whatever, they must have each experienced the same five or six, if you want, modes of production, the primitive communist mode of production, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and then on to socialism. And when one actually examines Marx himself, he is very clear, and says very openly and explicitly, that this particular sort of schema is something that I have taken by examining European history. It is not something that I would like people to apply to world history or to other societies as a ready-made sort of schema that can be applied to any society. And one discovers then that that's arguably what many of us have been doing, which is that whatever is not capitalism, it seems to me, having read the literature, must be feudalism. So I went back into that debate and tried to unearth how that came to be, given that Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, nearly all the Rosa Luxemburg, nearly all the early Marxists that we call from that classical period, none of them adhere to the view that India or China are feudal societies. So how did it come to pass that this massive intellectual transformation within the Marxist movement occurred? I'll tell you, it occurs in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It occurs within the Soviet Union itself and debates within the Soviet Union and then makes its way and makes its presence felt throughout the Marxist movement in the world. So let's just consider you've got all these diverse societies, each of which have very, very diverse and different material conditions. And yet we are led to believe that all of them have passed through the exact same modes of production in history. It sounds even at that level to be improbable, even just at that level, where you have such diversity in terms of, well, you certainly don't have a lot of diversity in terms of the universalization of capitalism. But is it true that the slave mode of production was a universal mode of production? Would it be true that the feudal mode of production is a universal mode of production? Let's look at origins of the family, for instance, and look at how Engels speaks about the transition from slave society to feudal society. When he talks about that particular transition, we see that there's a lot of historical contingency there. There are very specific events that he speaks about. For instance, the conquest of Rome by the Barbarians, the actual constitution of the German Barbarians themselves, their own sort of mode of production, their own sort of the way in which their armies are organized, and how that merges into the colonized system of the Romans and a mixture of the two forms feudalism. Well, if that is the way feudalism evolves in the context of Europe, where it is so specifically tied to this synthesis between the constitution of the Mark, the German-Germanic Barbarian community, the Romans used to call them Barbarians, et cetera, and the system that existed in Rome, if that is how feudalism emerged, then it seems to me that those historical contingencies certainly do not exist in our context. And then we see so many different problems with respect to the periodization that we often try and construct for our own history. All right, so if feudalism was overthrown after the Permanent Settlement Act and with the coming of the British colonialists, when did we make the transition from slave society to feudal society? Now, in European history, that's a very straightforward point in time. That's a very straightforward nodal position. And that is, of course, the fall of Rome, the eventual collapse of the Roman Empire. But in Indian history, in South Asian history, in Chinese history, in Turkish history, where would we put that point? When we look at the literature, we see that everybody is sort of all over the place with it. Some people are saying it begins in the second century. Some people are saying it begins with the Mughals. Some people are saying it begins with the Gupta. Some people are saying it begins with the Islamic, the Delhi Sultanate, et cetera, all that period. This is all over the place. So there's no consensus in the field with respect to where that transition occurs. And there's no consensus, really, because there isn't that nodal point, a very well-accepted nodal point for European historians. Everybody will sort of consider the fall of Rome to be a very key transition in European history. Where is that nodal point in our history? We're not too sure. So what is it that really sort of clenches the matter as far as my thesis is concerned? Is a central point that Marx and Engels drove home, which is that if you look at the forms of property, which, of course, Marx and Engels considered to be juridical expressions of relations of production, if you look at the forms of property that exist and the consequent form of the surplus, which is always going to be connected very deeply and integrally to the relations of production and the forms of property, the very manner in which the relations of production of a society are constituted are going to determine the forms of surplus that are going to come out, whether that's going to be in the form of use value with respect to slavery, where you directly appropriated the labor of the slave as use value, whether it's going to be in the form of Corvi rent, as was the case, for instance, in the feudal mode of production where the serfs would work on Sundays, on the commons, and on the rest of the days on the land of the feudal lord, where they performed Corvi labor for the feudal lord, et cetera, forced labor, unfree labor, or whether it's going to be in some other form. The surplus value, as is the case in a mode of production which is dominated by private property, et cetera. So when we examine these different things with respect to, let's say, Mughal India, first thing we discover is there's no private property in land. Yes, of course, there's private possession of land, but possession is not necessarily property. There is certainly some exchange of land as well, but that is more incidental rather than being something more permanent. The form of surplus is certainly totally different from the kind that exists in European history. It is in the form of land revenue rather than in the form of Corvi labor. There is Corvi labor, Beghar, as we call it in Pakistan, but that's not the main form of surplus as the system itself is driven. And consequently, there are also many differences in the forms of the state, how the ruling class itself is structured in relation to the working classes. And of course, how can we forget that the whole system, at least in the context of India and also in the context of Egypt, is structured on the caste system. So given all of these really, really important factors, how is it that these vastly different, in my opinion, ways of organizing social life can be fitted into one category? The only way that can be theoretically or intellectually accomplished is if we widen that category to such an extent that it can include features of European history as well as features of Indian history. And that's exactly what's happened, I feel, within Marxist studies with respect to the term that we call feudalism. We have universalized feudalism not because feudalism itself was a universal system, but by an intellectual play of hands, let's say, or by redefining it, let's say, by widening that category to include features that exist in China, to include features that exist in India, to include features that exist in Turkey, to include features that exist in Arabia, exist and also exist in Europe. Now what happens in social science is when we widen the term, of course, it loses explanatory power. That's not the way the term sort of scientifically really, that's not what it means. And of course, you widen any term, you widen the term capitalism, you can include all of history into it. If you widen it sufficiently such as to include different modes of surplus appropriation, every mode of production can be some mode of surplus appropriation, you can include all of them. And what happens as a result, you, of course, by widening those categories lose explanatory power. So that's problematic in my view. So let's examine in just a little bit of detail some of the features of the Asiatic mode of production. And as Marx and Engels have identified them and others after them have also identified them and how they differ from European feudalism or don't differ. Well, the first one, the four in particular that I'd like you to think of, the first one is that this is a natural economy. What does that mean? It's an old political economy term. Irfan Habib, of course, writes about this and refutes this in his book that India was not a natural economy, says, because there is evidence of currency exchange. But that's a complete misunderstanding, as I've written in the book, demonstrated in the book, of what Marx and Engels and classical political economy, in fact, meant by the term natural economy. What they meant by the term natural economy was an economy in which the division of labor is not formed by exchange, by market exchange. Rather, it is formed by mechanisms other than demand and supply and exchange. Now, that, of course, is the case, definitely, with respect to India, with respect to South Asia, because we know that the division of labor is not driven by the market in pre-colonial India. It is driven by, of course, the caste system. It is driven by traditions. It is justified by an ideological system that we call religion, or we call tradition, or we call culture, et cetera. But it's not market driven. That's a given. It isn't determined by the market that this person is going to be a mochi, and this person is going to be a lohaar, and this person is going to be a sonhar, and this person is going to be a narayan. That is not driven by the market that is driven by tradition and by kinship association, and so on, so forth. It may be impacted by certain market conditions, but that's not the main driving force. That condition, though, is true not only for India, but also for European feudalism and also for slave society. So that is something that is true for all pre-capitalist modes of production, not just the Asiatic mode of production, not just the feudal or the slave mode of production. So that's something that is common to all pre-capitalist modes of production. The second very important point is private property in land. Now here, of course, there's been a lot of scholarship. I was just reading another book, I forget the name of the author right now, but on the early history of India. And there is scholarship available which says, for instance, that there is private property of land. But what I find problematic in some of that scholarship is that we seem to be, in that scholarship, I would put forward the position that it seems to me to be the case that we are not making a strong distinction between possession and property. Property implies a degree of juridical and social stamp of approval. It implies something much more firm than what exists, in my opinion, in the context of pre-Colonial India. When we look at European feudal property, for instance, we see that the lord of the manor lives, has a castle. That castle is most of the time situated right in the center of his fief, of his manor, of his fields, et cetera, which are all around. It's at the center of that. The families that have been living on those castles, et cetera, have been living there for generations. There is not necessarily in agriculture, there is a gentleman of leisure or a knight, et cetera. So he's not participating in reorganizing the mode of production itself, a feature that's common to many pre-capitalist modes of production. But certainly he is not only in possession of the land, but in ownership of the land, which, of course, is also given to that person through a royal edict, et cetera, et cetera. And a third of the land in Europe, of course, is owned directly by the Catholic Church itself, in addition to the tithes and other things that they collect. And Engels, of course, and Marx both, call that the center of European feudalism, particularly because they own a third of European agricultural land. And what do we have here, let's say, in Mughal India? I didn't go into ancient Indian history. But in my book, I only look at Mughal India, which is the sort of system directly preceding the British system. One could go further back in history. What do we see here? That every three or four years, the king does, in fact, not just scan, but does, in fact, reshuffle the Jagirdars across India. So you can have a Jagirdar come in from Bengal, and he could be sitting in Punjab, and you can have a Jagirdar from Punjab, and they could be sitting in UP, et cetera, et cetera. And every three, four years, the kingdom shuffles those Jagirdars around. What is a Jagirdar? A Jagirdar is a Mansabdar, Allah is a Mansabdar, basically, a general of the army. That is its primary purpose. The Jagirdar never lives on the land. Never. Historically, what we call absentee landlordism, we may call it absentee landlordism, because we feel that the landlords of India or Pakistan are doing something that they ought not to be doing. They ought to be living on the land. But that is something that's historically been there. The Jagirdars have always lived in the cities with their troops. They have only derived a certain amount of surplus, a surplus which was commensurate. The Jagirdar was always made commensurate with the number of their troops, especially during Akbar's period, commensurate to their troops. So if I have 500 Shah-Sawar's and 2,000 soldiers, et cetera, then I will be given the Jagirdar of a certain size for its maintenance, and for the maintenance of my family and the rest of it. So a very different system once again, we can see. And the third thing is the state and public works. Now, in those historians that are opposed to the idea of a mode of production or oriental despotism, I've written a great lens about this and said, well, look at the fact that the state in certain parts of our history has been incredibly centralized. Let's say Akbar's period was a very centralized period. But throughout most of Indian history, we've seen that the state has been very decentralized in the sense that also in the sense that they've not just been one state, but there's not just been one state, but there have been so many different states. The periods in which there, in fact, has been a centralized all India state has been rare rather than the exception rather than the rule. So given that, should we consider the theory of oriental despotism, as it was called in classical political economy? Should we consider that theory? We can scrap the name because it's become a very loaded term today. But in terms of its concept, can we accept that as a concept? Well, I think I've also written about this. And I feel that there is something there that is worth considering. What is that worth considering? What Marx and Engels, I think, were driving at was the fact that when we look at the formation of ancient states anywhere in the world, we see that the communities that existed in primitive communism, when there was no property of any sort, also had a certain division of labor. In the sense that there were people who were leaders in times of war. There were people who were leaders in times of peace. There were people who did certain types of work and other people who did other types of work. The division between the genders, of course, had already begun to come about, et cetera. There was not a class division of labor yet, but there certainly were people who acted in the name of the tribe, would engage with other tribes, negotiate with other tribes, and would represent those tribes, et cetera. They were, in that time, more or less subservient to the tribes. These tribes were, relatively speaking, much more democratic, precisely for the reason that property had not emerged. And these tribal leaders had no property through which they could control surplus as such. So what they relied upon to represent the tribe were their personal characteristics, strength in battle, experience, wisdom, foresight, whatever, earning the respect of those ancient tribes and therefore, acting as leaders of those tribes. Slowly, those public angles says in origins of the family, he says, slowly these public officials who were acting in the name of the tribe or public servants turned into public masters. And they began to then control the flock. They began to control the land. They began to control the water or whatever it may be. And in addition to the work that the tribe itself had given to these representatives, they appropriated other roles to themselves and became more and more powerful and immersed into a ruling class. Now, what angles and marks are trying to push forward, in my view, is that in the formation of states in India, Pakistan, and other parts of the world, in addition to the tasks that we see, European tribal representatives performing, which would be common to many tribes, i.e., being a war leader, being a leader in peace, educating within the tribe, educating outside of the tribe, et cetera, et cetera. In addition to those roles, there is one more very important role that these primitive communist communities must have played, had to have played, which would have been a key ingredient in the formation of the state. And that is organizing large bodies of collective labor in order to channelize or in order to build artificial irrigation. Given that precipitation in our part of the world, 80% of it occurs within one month. Now, 80% of your rainfall occurs within one month. It's not spread out evenly over the year, as is the case in London, which is always sort of grey, where it rains every third day and every fourth day. Here, it rains in one season, and then it's dry throughout. That's the case. There must be some method, mechanism, through which these tribes are able to utilize rainwater and water generally in a more efficient economical way, such that it's used throughout the year or used better. Now, to build artificial irrigation, these tribes must have organized collective labor to do that. Some people must have organized that collective labor, must have been the organizers of that collective labor. And the organizers of that collective labor, in turn, also became part of one of the works that, amongst many other public functions that tribal leaders were doing, this was one of an additional thing that they were doing in the context of Asia. And that also plays a key role in the development of the state. That, I think, as I like to say, that is the rational kernel to use a Marxist expression in the husk or whatever. That, I think, in my view, would form a key factor in trying to understand and decipher the Asiatic state. Now, I don't do that, actually, in this particular book, because I tried to stay with the economy, and I didn't want to venture into understanding the state, because that would have taken me into a completely different direction. And I have to write an entire book on that. Maybe I can do that in the future. But I think that's very important. And last but not least, the fourth point is the form of surplus value, which, of course, is the tribute. Sameer Amin and many others have even written about the mode of production in India as the tributary mode of production. India-Pakistan is a tributary mode of production. And many others have as well. Now, that's just another name for the Asiatic mode of production, because the term Asiatic itself strikes us as being from a different era, and indeed, it is. In fact, there's a debate where Lenin also says that I'd rather use the term patriarchal mode of production rather than Asiatic during the debates with respect to the colonial question. When he says very explicitly, I don't want to use the term Asiatic anymore, because it might strike the people of Asia as being somewhat patronizing, et cetera, et cetera. So what is the form of surplus? The form of surplus is the tribute. What is the tribute? About 50% of the produce of a village or a set of villages goes to the Jagirdar. About 10% goes to the Zamidar, the local representative of the state, et cetera. And then, of course, the rest of it is very, very, of course, big generalization. It all depends on the productivity of land and regions and crops, et cetera, et cetera. And other sort of things. But broadly speaking, that is a rough breakup during the Mughal period. And that's not my statistic, that's Irfan, Habib, and others, et cetera. And the rest of it, of course, is divided by tradition, not by market forces or whatever. But by tradition, k, this caste will receive this mass, this brothery will receive this mass, this caste will receive this mass, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the case in Pakistan and India. It's common to Pakistan and India. I don't know about Bangladesh, but certainly Pakistan and India is common. It's probably common to Bangladesh as well. So those are the four things that characterize or differentiate, rather, the mode of production in, let's say, Europe from the mode of production here. What were they again? Natural economy. There's no division of labor based on the exchange. Secondly, private property. There's very different forms of property here and very different forms of property there. State and public works. In other words, there is a difference. There is some difference here that the need for collective labor forms an integral role in the formation of the state. And we need to study how that happens. I'm not saying Marx and Engels got it right. I'm just saying that they did get this aspect right. That's a key ingredient in the formation of the state. And we need to keep that in the picture to understand how the state was formed. And lastly, the form of surplus is so different. As I said, over there, you have the Kofi economy where the surf basically performs labor on the land of the landlord for five days or six days. And then works in the common. And whatever the produce on the commons belongs to the surf, that is what Marx called necessary labor, the amount of labor that is necessary for the reproduction of the working class. And all surplus labor is performed on the land of the landlord. So the division between necessary and surplus labor, which Marx draws in capital, is actually very neatly drawn in the context of European feudalism. If you just look at the division between the time of work spent on the commons versus the time of work spent on the land of the lord, none of that exists in the context of India. In fact, the system that we call, there are a few exceptions, there are some historians who do believe that un-free labor as it exists in India can be considered serfdom. But again, they're doing the same thing. They're widening the category of serfdom and making it as something it was not originally defined as. You can do that. But then we're talking at odds with each other. We're talking about two different things. Marx and Engels themselves write in a particular letter and in several other passages as well, in capital and other places, that they really consider these modes of production as being identical with these labor relations that I'm describing. In other words, they consider slavery to be identical with what they call the ancient mode of production. That is the basis of the ancient mode. They consider serfdom to be identical with feudalism. That is for them the definition of feudalism. Where serfdom does not exist, they will not say feudalism exists. They consider wage labor to be the definition of capitalism, where wage labor does not exist or is still coming around. They will say capitalism doesn't exist or is still coming around respectively. But that is really, and they very clearly state that wage labor is the flip side of capital. Capital is wage labor, you're looking at it either from the activity of labor or you're looking at it. And in fact, in German ideology, they use this expression. In fact, they say, if I recall the quotation exactly, they say something to the extent that the division of labor and forms of property are identical expressions. The first expresses the same phenomena in terms of the activity of labor, that is division of labor. And the second expresses the same phenomena in terms of the products of labor. In other words, private property or property forms of property. So we see therefore that the sort of connect that they make, the very strong connect that they make between modes of production and these labor relations. They would never consider a society without serfdom. They never considered a society without serfdom as being a feudal society, a society without wage labor as being a capitalist society. Give or take a bit, where of course there are, there may be certain influences. Like for example, they considered the American South to be capitalist despite the existence of chattel slavery only because it would have already been integrated into the international capitalist economy, et cetera, et cetera. That was the contingency. But if chattel slavery on its own existed without that interaction with the world, market, et cetera, they would not have considered it to be part of capitalism. So and even there, they very explicitly state that this is a transition. So that's the second point that I want to make. Now there's been, if we consider, if we accept the thesis that pre-colonial India is not, let's say, feudal, but something else. If you don't like the term Asiatic mode of production, use tributary mode of production, Indian mode of production, whatever. And by the way, I'm also not suggesting that China is necessarily now the Asiatic mode of production. Marx may have got that wrong, or Turkey, or whatever. We'd have to study that. But what I am suggesting is certainly, the strong thesis here, I'd say, is certainly that our own society, South Asia, I find it problematic to categorize it as feudalism. Now let's examine the next phase of history where the transition to capitalism occurs. How does this occur? Well, we see that, of course, there are three main features that I would identify within that. We see that the transition occurs mainly, though not exclusively, through foreign domination. Yes, there is some literature suggesting that there is trade and mercantile proto-capitalism developing, and the course of Bombay and other places, et cetera. And that certainly is true. And even on the other side, the Bengal Coast, et cetera, and that's certainly true. But as proto-capitalism, and everybody accepts that, it's what exists before capitalism proper. And there's a lot of speculation about whether it could have led to capitalism, et cetera, et cetera, amongst historians, et cetera. And again, I would suggest that that is speculation. And it could go either way. It could take another 1,000 years before capitalism emerges. It could take 100 years. Nobody can say anything about that, because, of course, that's the class struggle, and that's not deterministic in that shape or form. There are many events that determine that. And we've seen, for instance, even in European history, you see the reversal of class struggles. You see the reformation, and then you see the counter reformation. And for 100, 150 years, you see the reversal of all the gains, progressive gains, that the reformation brings about, et cetera, et cetera. So you see many periods. And of course, we see the Soviet Union. We see the emergence of the Soviet Union. We see its collapse, which again militates against any linear interpretation of history, that history is just a straight line moving forward. No, we see history moves back and forward. It depends on the class struggle. It's not moving in a straight line at all. It's moving all over the place. It's a much more complex phenomena. And so the emergence of a mode of production is not as straightforward as the calculation of a simple equation or something like that. All right, so what were some of the main features? Number one, foreign domination. So you see that the British conquer South Asia, and they, of course, introduce into South Asia the mode of production on a vast scale that we call capitalism. First and foremost by introducing private property in lands with a permanent settlement act, beginning in 1793 and traveling all over South Asia, in Punjab, in Pakistan, in the 1860s, et cetera, et cetera. And that brings with it its own features, money taxes, the money economy, the indebtedness of the peasantry, the sale of land, a new judicial system to educate in these property cases and disputes, et cetera, et cetera. In the context of the Punjab, acts like the Land Elimination Act, where certain cars are not allowed to buy land, et cetera, et cetera. All sorts of other complexities and so on, so forth. And many different ways in which this transition is occurring in the Madras region and the Bombay presidency. It's occurring in one way. In Bengal, it's occurring in another way. In Punjab, after 1857, there's what's called the most of India, the aristocratic reaction. But in the Punjab, it's tempered, et cetera, et cetera. So there's all these complex things that are occurring, but nonetheless the transition is coming from the top down, is coming really from the colonial state. What does that imply? Well, two things, really. Number one, that capitalism really here is being planted on top of, literally on top of, another mode of production, which I use the classical Marxist term, the Asiatic mode of production. So we see the introduction of private property, the introduction of the commodity production, money taxes and the rest of it that come with that, although money taxes exist before as well. At the same time, we do not see the emergence of wage labor for a really, really, really long time. Even till today in agriculture, we see that wage labor is the exception rather than the rule. I'm talking about Pakistan. I don't know about India. We see that it's moving towards wage labor, but it's not wage labor yet. It's sharecropping and other forms of labor relations. And we still see the presence of, of course, the caste system, especially in Pakistan in rural areas. We see that very strongly. This person is from this Baradri, this family is from this Baradri, et cetera, et cetera. We cannot marry the two Baradris. You do this work, you do that kind of work. You live over there in those hamlets over there. And we live over here in these hamlets over here. All of that is present still. And yet you're dealing with private property land. You're dealing with commodity production. You're in cashcropping. You're selling in the market. So what is this system? How do we define it? How do we describe it? Well, two things I'd say on that. Number one is the idea that capitalism is developing in a distinct sphere. There's a feudal economy and a capitalist economy is unsustainable in this context. You can't say, OK, 50% of India's feudal relations are feudal and 40% are non-fuedal and 10% are this. You can't say that at all. Why? Because there's no capitalist sector as such that developing the whole of the economy is undergoing unmetamorphisms in the capitalist sector. So what does this all of this imply? Well, some people, some writers, Marxist writers, like Sameer Amin Agar and Bajki and others, have written that this should be categorized as a separate and distinct mode of production itself. Hence the term did the colonial mode of production. My take on that is, and the criticism of that from within the literature has been, well, if you call it a separate mode of production, then it must have a specific type of labor relation. And what is that? And they were unable to identify that. So in the 1980s and the late 1980s, it sort of went out of vogue because of that specific criticism. And I think that's correct. But I think there's something that they contributed to, Alvi and others, which is quite key, which is we may not accept this as a separate mode of production, but we can accept it as what I call a transitional form. In other words, that pre-capitalist modes of production can move from that mode of production to a capitalist mode of production through several different routes. Indeed, Lenin writes that there can be 1,000 different routes through which it can make that transition. So we can actually, in fact, talk about different types of transitions that occur. And Lenin talks about two types. He talks about the Republican path, or we can call it a path as well. He talks about the Republican path and the Junker's path. He says, and of course, Barrington Moore Jr. takes that up. He talks about how in Western Europe, specifically in France and in Britain and in the United States of America, capitalism takes roots at the bottom and then overthrows feudalism through a popular revolution. Whereas in most of continental Europe, Germany especially, when the revolutions occur and after 1789 when Napoleon starts to marches across Europe, these European states are forced to modernize their armies and to modernize their states. And in order to modernize their armies and states, they introduce new modes of production and new ways of production into their economies, hence bringing about a transition towards capitalism from the top down. And that, of course, Barrington Moore takes that further and says, the economies that made a top down transition were most susceptible to fascism than the economies that made a Republican transition. So we see already that this idea, this concept of a transitory form is available in the literature. At least in the context of classical Marxism, there is sort of this big division between these two parts. It's there in Lenin's famous book, Development of Capitalism in Russia. What I contribute in that regard is to suggest that there may be at least one big third alternative to these two, which shares certain features with these two but is also distinct from them. What are the features it shares? It shares certain features with the Junkers path in so far as it is a transition from above. It is a state bringing about a capitalist transition rather than capitalism coming from the villages and from the towns and from the grass roots up or something. That is common to the Junkers path. But what is uncommon with respect to the Junkers path is the fact that this is via a foreign conquest. This is a conquest that this is occurring. And that means there's built into that the siphoning of enormous surplus, a state which is driven, created, structured for the colonial elite, for the conquering colonial elite, et cetera, et cetera, with all its consequent issues and problems. So with that framework in mind, I then proceed in chapter three and chapter four to examine the very specific class structure of Pakistan looking statistically at the sort of looking at the government data about the presence of industrial workers versus the presence of agricultural proletariat, sharecroppers, peasant proprietors, landlords, rich peasants, et cetera, et cetera. All of that data is over here. I won't go through that because, well, it might be a bit boring, number one. And it's also quite detailed. But of course, I think maybe the data will be useful. There are many problems with that data as well. The biggest problem being that all of that data, most of that data is government data. And there are big problems with government data, which is big biases and poor data collecting techniques and the rest of it. But it is the only data at that scale which can be used. There's no other data which is available on that level. So one has to use that with whatever the limitations of that data are. Now the big thing that I discover in that data, which I want to share with you, is in fact the lack of development of wage labor, both in the cities as well as in the countryside. In Pakistan, again, I'm speaking very specifically about Pakistan in these chapters, that the industrial proletariat is really conspicuous by its absence. Pakistan's cities are really cities dominated by the petty bourgeois, dominated by small proprietors. And Pakistan's countryside is dominated by sharecroppers. And sharecropping here, again, is a bit of a misnomer in marketing, because it's not pure sharecropping either. It's mixed in with the caste system. So it's not capitalist sharecropping in the conventional sense that the term suggests. It's mixed in with the caste system. So what I am suggesting here is that those transitional forms continue to exist. And with respect to the petty bourgeois as well, I would suggest that this is the kind of petty bourgeois. There are different types of petty bourgeois. There is a petty bourgeois that is generated by capitalism itself, such as, let's say, middle ranking sort of outsourced capitalist enterprises. But there is a petty bourgeois, a middle strata, small proprietors, merchants, et cetera, that have existed even from the time of slave society. It's a different type of, it's a pre-capitalist petty bourgeois. So for example, when we talk about Rome, we see that there are many, there's a whole merchant class there. We talk about India, there's a whole merchant. It's a pre-capitalist. We talk about Arabia, there's a whole class of people which, Hazrat Mohammad, of course, sort of writes against and says, you know, they sort of take too much interest, et cetera, et cetera. So there is petty bourgeois, and there's petty bourgeois, what I'm trying to say. And there's petty bourgeois in which pre-capitalist modes of production can continue to exist and even thrive in small manufacturing. So for instance, if I can have a small manufacturing unit in which I set people of my biradri to work who are connected to me via biradri, I haven't sort of hired them off the market as such, like I would do with sort of traditional open market wage labor. They're connected to me by kinship, et cetera. They're working under me. I am both their employer. I have the putting out system with them. I may be giving them a place to stay. And I have a kinship association with them which ties them to me in ways in which you would not expect proletarians to be tied to their bosses. So finally, what does all of this imply? I think what all of this implies is something that I read, again in the mode of production debate with respect to India, that the continuing existence of things such as honor killings, which you were talking about, of cultural traditions such as, well, the whole caste system, as we see it, the oppression with respect to women and minorities, the culture that we may have with respect to working people, and just a general culture with respect to music, or theater, or art, or cinema, or film, or the whole politics, of course, how can one forget? The whole thing is still so informed by, driven by, attitudes, cultural norms that one would typically associate not with capitalism, but with systems that exist before capitalism, not because they have a degree of relative autonomy from the mode of production. It is not the case that these forms of this super structure of, to be blunt, this Asiatic super structure doesn't continue to exist merely because it has somehow become relatively autonomous from its economic base and is still existing, even though the economic base has become purely capitalist. But what I am arguing in fact, is that it is still rooted very much in the economic basis of our societies and derives its strength from there. And that's what we have missed out when we consider that this is merely a superstructural phenomenon. We have to fight it at the level of the super structure, but it's not merely a superstructural phenomenon. It is very much part of the political economy of Pakistan and India even today. And by understanding that, understanding that what we see in the super structure is emerging from the political economy and the class structure of our societies, we can then begin to, as Marxists and as revolutionaries, begin to address it and begin to sort of revolutionize it through a strategy that attacks or that transforms it both at the superstructural level as well as at the level of its political economy. Understands it for that and is therefore able to address it in that, through that understanding. For the transformation of society, one requires an understanding that deals with these phenomena, both at the superstructural level as well as at the level of political economy. I believe that if we understand that the superstructural phenomena is rooted in the economic basis, then we can address it as such from both sides. We can understand it as such from both sides. We can address it at the level of the economy. We can address it at the level of the super structure. We can address it at the level of the super structure by understanding how it has emerged from the economy and so on. And for the construction of a socialist society, which is what I stand for and we all stand for, I hope that this understanding can be of use to all of us.