This study attempts to bring "new" light to the understanding of an "old" policy issue, which is conventionally referred to as "rural development" (RD), by adopting a more historically oriented, interpretive framework of political economy. Although this study focuses on Thailand, its theoretical implications and method may bear fruit in the form of studies on Third World "underdevelopment" in general and RD in particular. The central question I am asking is this: If the purpose of RD is to benefit the poor people in the Thai countryside as its rhetoric has maintained, then how and why has it brought about the opposite outcome? My central argument is that RD is not devised to improve the well-being of the rural poor. Rather, it is a complicated form of state intervention in order to accelerate and legitimize the process of private capital accumulation by means of incorporating the rural-subsistence economy into the national and global economy for the growth of capitalism. To support this argument, I have examined two specific RD programs: (i) the Accelerated Rural Development Program and (ii) the Rural Job Creation Program. Crucial to this research is the Marxian notion of totality. The art in this method is how to select the part or parts that will reflect the whole, as in a mirror. The parts that I chose for this study are the concepts of capital accumulation and legitimation. Taking these parts, I have traced their historical and dialectical relationships to the whole, i.e., to the entire fabric of Thai society, notably in a discussion of the nature of class structure and struggle, the role of the Thai state, and the interaction of society and state with the capitalist world economy. This interaction in postwar Thai society has proved to be much more complex than any single conceptualization has yet been able to show, be it the idea of a "bureaucratic polity," the patron-client model, the iron laws of center-periphery relations, the crude dependency theory, or the abstract and static articulation of modes of production.