The Political Economy of Stagnation: Salariat Formation, Class Location, and the Inhibition of Capital Accumulation in Assam

Abstract

This article offers a long-run political economy analysis of Assam’s structural underdevelopment through heterodox class analysis. It argues that stagnation is the endogenous product of a historically entrenched salariat—a class fraction whose material reproduction depends entirely on state patronage—formed through the articulation of precolonial corvée labor relations with the demands of British colonial administration. The article makes two theoretical contributions. First, it applies and modifies Pranab Bardhan’s dominant proprietary class framework: In Assam, the industrial capitalist and rich farmer fractions were historically absent, producing a structurally distinct configuration of uncontested salariat hegemony. Second, it draws on Poulantzas and Wright to theorize the salariat’s class location: dependent on state employment, structurally threatened by educated immigrant competition, and reproduced through the political-ideological form of ethnic mobilization. This is what generated the sons-of-the-soil movements that defined Assam’s modern political history. Read alongside Resnick and Wolff’s distinction between fundamental and subsumed class processes, the salariat appears not as a producer of surplus value but as a recipient of distributions appropriated in colonial enclave production and all-India capitalist circuits. The Economic Census 2013 records Assam’s government and public sector undertaking employment at 15.29 per 1,000 population against an all-India rate of 7.76—the structural footprint of that subsumed-class capture. JEL Classification: B51, O18, N35, J45, R11