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From reproduction to production

Claude Meillassoux

Version of record first published: 28 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Claude Meillassoux (1972): From reproduction to production, Economy and Society, 1:1, 93-105

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 From reproduction to production
A Marxist approach t o economic anthropology*
Claude Meillassoux

Abstract

The concepts of liberal economics, derived from the analysis of capitalist

societies, are both inadequate and inappropriate for the analysis of pre-
capitalist societies. Marx's analysis of primitive societies focused largely
on the historical succession of modes of production rather than on their
inner workings. What is needed is an analysis of the type which Marx
made of capitalism.
The present analysis starts from Marx's distinction between land as
subject of labour and land as instrument of production. Where the latter
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is the case (as in self-sustaining agricultural communities), the society

is dominated by the production and reproduction of the material
conditions of existence, of the community's members and of the
structural organisation ; the relations of production and the organisation
of the community are based upon control of the means of reproduction
(subsistence and women) rather than the means of production.
The article concludes with a brief discussion of the way in which
capitalism utilises agricultural communities to provide, in part, for the
reproduction of labour-power in the modern wage-labour economy.

Liberal economics was an historical and political attempt by the rising

bourgeoisie to demonstrate that economics is ruled by 'natural' and
'universal' laws to which even the princes had to comply. T h e demon-
stration was supported by a fairly accurate criticism of the feudal
economy, which prevented the free circulation of goods, money and
labour to the detriment of general prosperity, and by an abstract and
more disputable description of what would happen in a state of free
circulation and competition.
Capitalism has dwelt since on the same doctrinal assumption, that is,
that it is a natural and universal system and therefore immutable. This
bias supports the same original purpose: to give to the bourgeoisie
apparent scientific ground for its political domination. T o accept this
premise is to accept (willingly or not) the ideology of the domination of
the capitalist class?

U This article will appear in Development and Under-Development (edited

by Henry Bernstein and Brian Van Arkadie) to be published by George
Allen & Unwin later this year.
D
 94 Claude Meillassoux

Such an ideological choice has serious implications in the field of

economic theory in general, and for economic anthropology in particular.
The first question which arises when studying economic anthropology
concerns the nature of the economies observed. Liberal economists
have an answer ready: according to their postulate of the universality
of capitalistic laws, they are, necessarily, forms, if underdeveloped
forms, of ~apitalism.~ Accordingly, the same concepts and theories used
to analyse present capitalism are used to analyse any other economic
formations. Any kind of assets (tools, land, manure, etc.) are 'capital'
(Hill, 1970) ; any transfers of goods including stealing and giving, are
'exchanges' (Sahlins, 1965) if not 'trade' ; any old man benefiting from
collective work is converted into an entrepreneur and calculator of
marginal returns (Firth, 1967) ;any kind of returns are 'interests' whose
rate are sometimes computed as being 100% (Boas, 1897; Mauss, 1950) ;
such institutions as the potlatch are described in terms of wild stock-
market speculation (Boas, 1897), etc.
An immediate methodological implication of the universalist assump-
tion is that the liberal economist deprives himself of the tools which
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would allow the recognition of different economic systems. Indeed all

these systems are most often bundled under the label of 'primitive' or
'traditional' economies and dealt with indiscriminately. Societies at
different stages of evolution, hunters and agriculturists, self-sustaining
communities or trading ones, are treated as being basically identical,
sometimes to be submitted to general laws, sometimes to supply various
heterogeneous features which are assembled as if belonging to the same
structural pattern (Sahlins, 1968). It is unfortunate that such a fine
anthropologist as Raymond Firth, who contributed so much to the
knowledge of Pacific Islands economics and who elaborated such relevant
concepts as 'spheres of circulation', for instance, should get hopelessly
entangled in such a feeble theoretical framework. In spite of some
insights into the inadequacies of the liberal approach, Firth does not
reject the postulate according to which choice is made for maximum
return-as in the case of his 'mobiliser of collective effort' (1967: 6)-
which means the acceptance of the postulate of the famous homo
economicus. It means, in turn, the recognition of two basic premises of
liberal economics: the universal state of scarcity and the necessity of
men to choose between different possible alternatives. But, as it has
been shown repeatedly by Marx, Oscar Lange (1958) and others, homo
economicus is a product of history. He is an ideal picture of the bourgeois
entrepreneur and, as such, embodies certain sociological assumptions,
one of them being that he is dealing with objects rather than with
people-an idea which is however discussed by Firth (1967: g)-and
another being that he is free from all sorts of pre-established social
dependency, a situation which was the result of the bourgeois industrial
revolution. A second assumption implicit in the notion of the homo
economicus, is that choices are possible and free. This delusion stems
 From reproduction t o production 95

from the fact that in a contractual society such as ours, men, except
within the narrow range of their family, choose, to a certain point, their
partners in work or business. But in a kinship or feudal society, where
rank and status are determined by birth, the choice of possible social
relationships is extremely Iimited and a shift of allegiance is the exception
and not the rule. Men are in a state of social, personal dependen~y.~
The choice of an activity is first and above all conditioned by the
imperative necessity to produce food, and if one finds a few specialists
in agricultural communities, one hardly ever finds institutionalised
specialisation. When this occurs it is bound to be again restricted
through some sort of 'prestation' system or caste system. In a market
economy, where people use an all-purpose money which can be con-
verted into any available merchandise, the consumer has a large range
of choice. In a self-sustaining community, choice is limited to the few
items produced, with little means to convert them into different goods.
At any rate, the notion of choice, already disputable in our own economy,
loses any kind of operative value when it comes to a choice between
eating or not eating, living or starving.
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The postulate of choice, which is in line with the postulate of the

homo economicus, shifts the problems of economic activity to the level
of psychology: the principle of explanation of the economic phenomenon
is to be found in the behaviour of individuals and boils down to a
problem of consumers' attitudes. For this reason, as 0. Lange (1958)
noted, liberal economists have always shifted emphasis from production,
where men are submitted to material restraint, to consumption, where
they enjoyed relative freedom.
In like fashion, a11 liberal economic anthropology is centred on
problems of distribution and never on those of production. This can be
seen in particular-and this is not an accident-in most contributions to
Themes in Economic Anthropology (Firth, 1967: 4) although Firth
recognises, honestly but vaguely, that it might be the wrong approach.
It is fair to say however that Firth is not quite satisfied with the crude
psychology of the liberal approach and considers as a daring hypothesis
the possible influence of social situation on behaviour instead of the
reverse :
The existing structure of their social relations and the ideas and
expectations which they have of this must affect very deeply the
nature of transaction in which they engage. (Firth, 1967 : 3)
Indeed, these transactions being the expressions of social relations and
structure, lay bare the real problem: where does the 'existing structure'
spring from and how do people elaborate their 'ideas and expectations'?
If Firth is obviously ill at ease with this unsatisfactory theoretical
framework, he resigns himself to it for the reason that he does not see
any way out. He rejects a Marxist approach on the ground that labour-
value does not apply to primitive society (Firth, 1967: 21). This criticism
 96 Claude Meillassoux

is typical of the metaphysical way of thinking of the liberal economists.

Since for them, all notions and concepts are universal, they cannot
imagine that there is an historical and scientific approach through which
concepts have a specific historical application. Labour-value becomes
an operative concept only when labour is a commodity, sold along with
other commodities, on the market. In a non-market economy, labour-
power, although the potential basis of value, finds no way of actualisa-
tion. If Firth had read Marx more thoroughly, he would have known
that in societies whose production is for the satisfaction of use, goods,
when exchanged, acquire an 'accidental value' which cannot be reduced
to their labour- content."^, when tackling the problem of value, Firth's
analysis is immediately arrested as he fails to make the elementary
distinction, that Aristotle discovered centuries ago, between use-value
and exchange-value, and this for the simple reason that capitalism
ignores use-value.
The socio-historical school of Polanyi (1957, 1968) has the merit of
advancing one important step through the recognition of the existence
of qualitatively different schemes of circulation. Polanyi and his students
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have been able to define different structural patterns related to specific

modes of circulation and to discriminate between what seem alike to
the liberal economists. They showed that where these patterns co-
exist, they express different forms of social relationships which are not
necessarily compatible with one another. Polanyi's indebtedness to the
historical method of Marx is obvious, but in contrast to the latter,
his analysis is again entirely restricted to the phenomenon of
circulation, without ever entering the sphere of production. For this
reason, while, for example, he detects two economic sectors in the
Dahomean economy of the past, he is unable to discover their origin
nor their organic relationship (Polanyi, 1966).

Marx's approach to the study of pre-capitalist formations is mainly

centred around the demonstration of the historicity of capitalism. His
foremost purpose is to show that capitalism is a product of history, that
it was preceded by other types of economic formations and that it is
bound to give way, in turn, to a different one. But while Capital is a
thorough investigation into the mechanisms and laws of capitalist
development, Marx's approach to pre-capitalist formations is a relatively
superficial one.5 Let us emphasise that this contribution is, among
Marx's works, the least elaborated and probably the least 'Marxist'.
Marx was trying to build up a typology of the various pre-capitalist
formations through the notion of landed property, i.e. not through an
economic concept but a legal one, as was customary in nineteenth
century bourgeois science. The choice of this criterion sprang from the
observation of capitalist society and his typology went. no further than
 From reproduction t o production 97

a vague indication of the "degree" of property rights reached by these

previous formations. Marx abandoned this typology in his later works.
His view of the family in the Grundrisse is also a bit too simple: often
he refers to it as to a 'natural' and given state of affairs, following
again the bourgeois thought of his time. Nowhere is he concerned to
study the material background of kinship bonds. Engels, much later,
investigated this field with the anthropological material at hand and
although he perceived remarkably well the fundamental phenomena,
the sequences of historical development that he constructed need
reviewing.
It was not Marx's intention to analyse the pre-capitalist formations
from within, but rather to discover their distinctive features and their
succession. In doing this, his method was to take the basic institutions
and features of capitalism as it existed at his time and to try to trace
their past evolution. In some cases he discovered that primitive econo-
mies simply lacked such institutions as private property in land; in
other cases he found they possessed different characteristics. Now, if the
non-existence of a definite institution is interesting from the point of
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view of the historical demonstration of its emergence, it gives no clue

to the actual foundations of the pre-capitalist formation under study.
For instance, private ownership of the means of production is an
essential feature of capitalism, since it articulates the relations of
production, but absence of landed property is a negative concept,
therefore unable to reveal the basic relations of production. On the
other hand, the concept of use-value as opposed to exchange-value,
and the notion of personal dependency as opposed to free-labour, for
instance, are analytical tools introduced by Marx which are able to
throw some light on the real nature of the economy. Therefore the
main contribution of Marx and Engels to the study of pre-capitalist
formations was to demonstrate their specificity and to stress the
necessity of discovering the appropriate concepts needed for the analysis
of their functioning. But besides some indications of these concepts,
which allowed the elaboration of a sketchy and rather loose typology,
Marx did not try, as he did for capitalism, to find out the law of the
inner functioning of pre-capitalist formations. Furthermore, except for
the passage from feudalism to capitalism, Marx did not give any clue
as to the transformation of the anterior formations; finally, his study
of the contemporary period is almost entirely focused on the develop-
ment of capitalist countries and he pays little attention to the impact
of this development on the colonised areas, or to the role played by
the exploitation of the colonised countries in the growth and prosperity
of capitalism.
Many Marxist anthropologists, unfortunately, seem to have followed
Marx in the weakest area of his analysis; the endless reconstruction of
a succession of hypothetical pre-capitalist formations (CERM, 1970;
Rech'erches Internationales, 1967). But none go in to the analysis of
 98 Claude Meillassoux

each specific mode of production, the secret of their functioning and

how they evolve. They are content to debate whether a particular area
is to be classified as belonging to the 'asiatic' or to the 'germanic'
modes of production, without any investigation in depth and mostly
without doing their own fieldwork.6 The task of Marxism is elsewhere.
It is to investigate along the lines drawn by Marx in his most mature
work, Capital, and not to dwell for ever on the draft of the Grzmdrisse,
in spite of a constant tendency of Marxicologists to divert our attention
to this early and unsatisfactory work.

I11
Anthropological material available for such an undertaking is scanty.
Though we find in the current anthropological literature information
on technology or, at best, on exchange, we have hardly any information
on the social organisation of production: who is working with whom
and for whom? Where does the product of the labourer go? Who
controls the product? How does the economic system reproduce
itself? . . .
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Recognition of various economic formations comes generally from

the observation of different 'ways of living', such as hunting, cultivating,
cattle herding, etc., which must not be confused with modes of produc-
tion, though they may coincide with the latter. Such recognition is the
empirical approach to the distinction between economic formations
and, as a first step, is helpful. Marx went further when he tried to
define different modes of production through an enquiry into the
relationships of production at each level of the productive forces.
Economic formations can be, and usually are, a combination of
several modes of production, one being dominant, i.e. governing the
basic relations of the society at large (Terray, 1969). For instance in an
agricultural society also practising hunting, the hunters remain, within
the village, dependent on their elders, even if, in the bush, leadership
is not associated with age. In a like fashion, kinship is a minor mode of
relationship in capitalist society where contractual relations are dominant.
Our own investigation does not lead to the conclusion that there is
a single element whose evolution could be used to characterise different
stages of economic development: the means of social control have
varied through time and they have not always rested on the control
of the means of production.
What characterises 'natural economy', i.e. economies based mainly
on the natural products of the land (animal or vegetable), is the mode
of exploitation of the land.
I n Capital, Marx detects two possible functions of land: one as a
'subject of labour', the other as an 'instrument of labour'.' At a low
stage of development of the productive forces, when human energy
is the only form of energy available and when toolmaking requires
 From reproduction to production 99

comparatively little labour investment, the use of land as subject of

labour amounts solely to the extraction of the necessities of life from
it, as it is the case with hunting or collecting. At a higher stage of the
development of productive forces, as in agriculture, man, with the
expectation of a later return, invests his labour into the land, which
becomes therefore an instrument of l a b o ~ r . ~
I attempted to show in a previous paper the implications of this
basic difference for the economic, social, political and even ideological
structure of hunting and agricultural formations (Meillassoux, 1967).~
I t is sufficient for present purposes to say that the use of land as a
subject of labour fosters a type of 'instantaneous' production whose
output is immediately available, allowing a process of sharing which
takes place at the end of each enterprise. The hunters, once they share
the common product, are free from any further reciprocal obligations
or allegiance. The process gives no ground for the emergence of a
social hierarchy or of a centralised power, or even the extended family
organisation. The basic social unit is an equalitarian but unstable
band with little concern for biological or social reproduction.
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Now, the use of land as an instrument of labour (always in the case

of non-development of social means of production) introduces radical
change into the entire social, political and ideological structures.
Unlike the hunting band, the agricultural team is linked together, at
least until the time of cropping, in order for every member to benefit
from their joint labour. Furthermore, the vital problem of feeding the
cultivator during the non-productive period of labour-between
clearing the ground and harvest-time--cannot be solved unless enough
of the previous crop is available for this purpose. The members of one
agricultural party are consequently linked not only to one another
during the non-productive period of work, but also to the working
party that produced the food during the previous cycle. Time and
continuity become essential features of the economic and social organisa-
tion. If we observe the composition of these successive working parties,
we find that they change with time: the older members retire or die,
younger ones come in. At all times the workers of one cycle are indebted
for seeds and food to the workers of the previous one and this cyclical
renewal of the relations of production theoretically never ends. As
time goes on, it amounts to a change of generation. But at any moment,
one man, the oldest one of the group, owes his subsistence to none of
the living members of his community but only to the dead ancestors,
while all the other members of his community are indebted to h i .
Hence, the elder is logically appointed to receive and manage the
product of his junior partners to whom, in turn, he will advance seeds
and food until the next crop. One can easily find here the material and
temporal bases of the emergence of the 'family' as a productive and
cohesive unit and of 'kinship' as an ideology: priority of the relations
between people over the relations to things; lifetime duration of
 100 Claude Meillassoux

personalised social bonds: concern for reproduction; notions of

seniority and of anteriority ; respect for age; cult of the ancestors;
fecundity cult, etc. All these features find their roots in the social con-
ditions of agricultural production and underlying this, in the use of
land as an instrument of labour.
At this stage of primary development of the domestic community
the relations of production are established between 'those who come
before' and 'those who come after', i.e. between the senior member
of the group and the junior ones. The senior one being he who owes
nothing to any living individual, he who is the representative and the
summation of the dead foster or 'feeding' ancestors. These relations
of production are materialised through a redistributive system of
circulation, close to Polanyi's description (1957: VIII). This is not a
system of exchange, properly speaking, since the products are never
offered for each other and therefore not subjected to the appraisal of
their respective value. It is rather a continuously renewed cycle of
advance and restitution of subsistence.
At this stage, social control of the community over its member is
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realised through control over subsistence. No one can leave the group
and start an agricultural cycle for himself without access to food during
the non-productive period. The only way out is either to get oneself
adopted by another foster-father, and enter his distributive circuit, or,
better, revert to hunting and collecting as a means of primitive accumula-
tion during the initial cycle of agricultural production.10
Control over subsistence is not control of the means of production
but of the means of physiological reproduction, used to reproduce the
life of the human producer.
The accumulation of the product as advance food is a basic require-
ment for the functioning of the agricultural community. It is achieved
by an accumulation of labour in the land which increases the productive
capacity of the group.ll
Concern for reproduction becomes paramount-not only reproduction
of subsistence but also reproduction of the productive unit itself
allowing the producers to benefit in the future from their past labour.
Now the reproduction of the unit, both biologically and structurally,
is assured through the control of women considered as the physiological
agent of production of the producer. In an early paper (Meillassoux,
1960) I attempted to describe the process through which this control
grew out of the control over subsistence. The control of women and
matrimonial policy generate a new pattern of circulation between
communities and not only within them. Many 'aberrant' phenomena
in the so-called 'exchange' system of these societies can be explained
when considered in this light, as are the notions of gift, value, reci-
procity and dowry, as well as the social properties of goods and wealth,
which are qualitatively different from 'merchandise' or 'capital'
(Meillassoux, 1960 and 1964).
 From reproduction t o production 101

The matrimonial policy of the agricultural community encourages

kinship to develop as the model-pattern of all social relationships. But
kinship in itself, left to the sole function of reproduction, is unable to
ensure the harmonious reproduction and balanced composition neces-
sary for the productive unit. Differential fecundity, accidents of birth
or death prevent the agricultural communities from maintaining the
necessary balance between sexes and ages, between producers and
non-producers. Kinship, therefore, cannot rely on 'blood'. It is bound
to gain the strength of an ideology, both to maintain the cohesiveness
of the community and also to allow the introduction of allogeneous
elements into it. Studies of Guro communities (Meillassoux, I 964 :
Ch. V), show that in spite of the accidents of biological reproduction
all the productive units were keeping a fairly constant ratio of productive
and non-productive members and this was done through the reshuffling
of the children between the classificatory fathers of the community
and/or through the adoption of foreigners. Fatherhood comes to be
confused with feeding and giving dowries. Although these activities
are exercised primarily for the benefit of the actual kin-group, they
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are easily extended to foreigners once they agree in exchange to fulfd

the duties of a dependant: to work for the protective elder.
A radical transformation of this type of economic formation comes
about when the above relations of production, which exist between
individuals (the elder and his junior dependants), become relations
between socially defined groupings, i.e. between evolving social classes.
The ideology of kinship has a major function in this transformation.
Through historical accidents, usually due to contacts with foreign
formations, a group takes for all its members the quality of 'senior' in
relation to other groups considered collectively as minor. All the
economic and social prerogatives of the elder are transferred to the
dominant class, usually an aristocratic lineage (Meillassoux, 1960).
Prestations due to the elder become tributes due to the lord who may
also gain control over the matrimonial policy of the community, and
eventually over the means of production-land.

Studies of past or disappearing formations are often considered as

gratuitous and useless. Yet, besides the fact that they contribute to a
better basic knowledge of humanity, the examination of the end, or of
the built-in finality of an economic system, is, in itself, a basic require-
ment to judge its capacity for change in a different context. If the
above analysis is right, the agricultural self-sustaining formations
described here (which constitute a major part of the under-developed
countries) rely less on the control of the means of material production
than on the means of human reproduction: subsistence and women.
Their end is reproduction of life as a precondition to production. Their
E
 102 Claude Meillassoux

primary concern is to 'grow and multiply' in the biblical sense. They

represent comprehensive, integrated, economic, social and demo-
graphic systems ensuring the vital needs of all the members-productive
and non-productive--of the community. A change towards a material
productive end, the shift from production for self-sustenance and self-
perpetuation to production for an external market, must necessarily
bring a radical transformation, if not the social destruction of the
communities, as indeed we witness the process nowadays. The attempts
to superimpose productive and mercantile institutions, such as the
cooperative, on the lineage or village community, is bound to fail or
to transform the society into an eventual class system. A real concern
for development should consider dissolution of those communities and
their replacement by newly organised units.
Paradoxically, the capitalist exploiters, who are often better Marxists
than Marxian theoreticians, are aware of the potentiality of this con-
tradictory situation. The agricultural self-sustaining communities,
because of their comprehensiveness and their raison d'etre are able to
fulfil functions that capitalism prefers not to assume in the under-
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developed countries : the functions of social security. The cheap cost

of labour in these countries comes from the super-exploitation, not
only of the labour from the wage-earner himself but also of the labour
of his kin-group. This is clearly stated by the users of this colonial
labour :
It is clearly to the advantage of the mines that native labourers
should be encouraged to return to their homes after the
completion of the ordinary period of service. The maintenance
of the system under which the mines are able to obtain unskilled
labour at a rate less than ordinarily paid in industry depends
upon this, for otherwise the subsidiary means of subsistence
would disappear and the labourer would tend to become a
permanent resident upon the Witwatersrand, with increased
requirements . . . (From a report of the Mine Native Wages
Commission, quoted by Shapera, 1947 : 204)
Another official report from Uganda (1954) explains that:
It is policy whenever practicable to leave the care of the
destitutes and the disabled in the hands of the tribal clan and
family organisation which have traditionally accepted this
reponsibility. (Quoted by Mukherjee, 1956: 198)
Such a deliberate policy explains the considerable migrations between
the capitalist sector and the rural one which are paradoxically the key
to the famous 'conservatism' of the 'primitive' people, as Shapera
(1947) and Gluckman (1960) noted early on. While liberal economists
and sociologists find, as usual, nothing but psychological or demo-
graphic explanations of these phenomena, economic investigation shows
 From reproduction t o production 103

clearly that, once people are compelled to undertake wage-earning

activities in order to pay taxes and gain some cash, if the capitalist
system does not provide adequately for old-age pensions, sick-leave
and unemployment compensations, they have to rely on another
comprehensive socio-economic organisation to fulfil these vital needs.
Consequently, preservation of the relations with the village and the
familial community is an absolute requirement for the wage-earners,
and so is the maintenance of the traditional mode of production as the
only one capable of ensuring survival.l2 In this light, it is clear that
demographic expansion, which is the logical means to face the social
security requirement, comes as a response to the colonial pressure.
It is convenient for the capitalist economist to be blind to these
phenomena and to explain away underdevelopment by attributing it
to the sexual incontinence of the natives or to their devious mentality.
Failure to perceive the real situation leads them also to such con-
tradictory conclusions as that underdeveloped countries are 'dual
economies' consisting of two different and non-communicating sectors
and that the primitive sector is slowly blending into the capitalist one.
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The 'dual' theory is intended to conceal the exploitation of the rural

community, integrated, as we saw above, as an organic component of
capitalist production to feed the temporarily unproductive workers of
the capitalist sector and supply them with the resources necessary to
their survival. Because of this process of absorption within the capitalist
economy, the agricultural communities, maintained as reserves of cheap
labour, are being both undermined and perpetuated at the same time,
undergoing a prolongated crisis and not a smooth transition
to capitalism.13

Marxist studies of pre-capitalist formations are only beginning and

need a considerable development in the field to collect the type of
information which cannot be found in an ideologically biased anthro-
pology and undertake research on such topics as the relations of
production, the social organisation of labour, the process of reproduction
and the changes undergone by these formations through their own
development or through contacts with other economic systems, parti-
cularly under the impact of capitalism. For this purpose, anthropology
must develop into an historical science, make better use of the valuable
material now collected by British historians in particular, brand as
unscientific the attempts to restrict research to assumed timeless
structures and open the way, by so doing, to the understanding of
present history.
 Claude Meillassoux

Notes
I. For a critical appraisal of the ideological bias of liberal economic, see
Bettelheim (1948: 66), Lange (1958), Mattelart (1969), Amin (1g70), etc.
2. According to Herskovits, who expounded at length this liberal approach,
differences between economic systems are 'of degree and not of nature'.
They belong therefore to a 'continuum' (Herskovits, 195I ; Firth, 1967: 6).
3. More consideration should be given to the distinction between status and
contract societies made by early social scientists such as Maine, Morgan or
Toennies, in order to understand the qualitative change undertaken by our
present society in relation to the feudal one.
4. For an historical approach to this problem, see my introductory essay in
The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (I 97 I).
5. Hobsbawrn has made a very sharp appraisal of Marx's contribution to
the study of pre-capitalist formations in the Grundrisse (Hobsbawm, 1964).
6. Marxist field-workers belong to the younger generation of francophone
anthropologists, such as E. Terray (1969), E. and G. Pollet (1968), C.
Coquery (1969), J. L. Amselle, J. P. Olivier de Sardan (1969), G. Dupre and
P. P. Rey (1969), M. Piault, etc.
7. Marx, Capital, I: pp. 178-180:
The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin
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state in which it supplies man with necessaries or the means of subsis-

tence ready to hand, exists independently of him and is the universal
subject of human labour. . . . An instrument of labour is a thing, or a
complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and
the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his
activity. . . . The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but when used
as such in agriculture, implies a whole series of other instruments and
a comparatively high development of labour. . . . In a wider sense we
may include among the instruments of labour . . . all such objects as
are necessary for carrying on the labour process; . . . Once more we
find the earth to be a universal instrument of this sort, for it furnishes
a locus standi to the labourer and a field of employment for his activity.
8. Besides these two modes of production there is an undeveloped form of
agriculture in which roaming bands come back periodically to a given spot
and collect wild crops; unfortunately I have not been able to find yet a
proper description of the social organisation of this type of production.
9. T o be published in English in French Perspectives in African Studies,
Oxford University Press, for the International African Institute (1972).
10. Most founders of villages or clans are said to have been hunters. Hunting
is indeed the organic means of economic and social segmentation of the
agricultural community.
11. T h e increase of the productivity of land is gained through a decrease in
the productivity of labour. In the mind of the liberal economist, a lowering
of productivity of labour is absolute economic regression. Sahlins (1968) on
this basis discovers that hunters are consequently better off than agricul-
turists, although the latter have gained a capacity for demographic expansion,
for a lengthening of the span of life and for feeding the unproductive. This
is an example of how, in different economic formations, economic 'laws'
may be inverted.
12. Once permanent settlement is allowed in the capitalist sector, these
functions are fulfilled by urban mutual-aid associations.
13. G. Balandier was one of the first to analyse this 'colonial situation' and
the notion of 'crisis' (Balandier, 1955).
 From reproduction to production
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