State–Corporate Crime and the Case of Bt Cotton: On the Production of Social Harm and Dialectical Process

State–corporate crime research has been critiqued for fetishizing events and
specific institutional arrangements. In recent years, this tendency has been changing as researchers are increasingly transcending the empiricist orthodoxy by giving more attention to relations and processes behind events and institutional arrangements. This is evidenced in the UK by the work of Steve Tombs, David Whyte and Kristian Lasslett. Their complementary concepts of “state–corporate crime symbiosis” and “regimes of permission” direct the analysis of social harm at systemic relations and processes expressed
through state and corporate practices constitutive of capitalism. Following from this, Kristian Lasslett’s application of Marxist dialectic to the study of state crime provides a scientific vantage point for the analysis advocated by Tombs and Whyte. Drawing lessons from their works, the article attempts a Marxist dialectical analysis of the Bt cotton and its contribution to the agrarian crisis in India.