pol-eco

 Political economy

Don Robotham

Political economy is characterized by an analytical approach which treats the economy from the point of view of production rather than from that of distribution, exchange, consumption or the market. It does not ignore distribution and exchange but analyses these in relation to the role they play in the production of the material needs of a society, including the need to reproduce and expand the means of production themselves (Dupré and Rey 1978). The field is a vast one and contains many disputes. This chapter will address some of the central themes that arise within the political economy tradition. These themes will be pursued in general and by discussing their representation in the works of well-known anthropologists.

The emphasis in this chapter is on the relationship of political economy to economic anthropology. At the same time it is important to recognize that political economy presents itself as a general theory of society, inequality, politics and culture. Some of the most significant work in political economy has been done in relationship to politics, for example the very important work of the late Eric Wolf (1999). Likewise, it is difficult to understand many of the current approaches to gender inequality in anthropology unless one understands the basis of this in theories of political economy. Here debates around the earlier work of Lisette Josephides, which explains the inequality of women in Melanesia as deriving from the exploitation of women in the production process, have played critical roles (Josephides 1985; Strathern 1988).

From the point of view of economics, the central concept in political economy is that of the ‘mode of production’. This focus on production is in sharp contrast to various forms of exchange theory, which characterized the work of both the formalist and substantivist schools of economic anthropology and which continues unabated in recent work on anthropological theories of value. The political economy approach is also part of a broad Enlightenment met a narrative of progress. At its core this is the question of the nature and significance of history in general and economic history in particular. Analyses of particular societies are placed within a broader schema of social evolution that strongly affects the specific study. Critical issues which continue to preoccupy anthropologists are the significance of the non-Western economic experience in its own right and from the point of view of Western and world economic history, the related issues of Third-World development and of economic alternatives to globalization. These issues are addressed in political economy from a distinctive point of view.

One should note that here I am writing of political economy in the Marxist sense. This tradition of economic anthropology derives from the works of Georg Hegel, and from the critique of British political economy in the work of Karl Marx and of Friedrich Engels. However, there is a vibrant version of political economy which is the application of rational choice theory to political decision making at the collective level in both developed and underdeveloped economies. Practitioners of such brands of political economy, ultimately deriving from the work of Adam Smith, exist in anthropology (Bates 1987). This microeconomic political economy is not the subject matter of this chapter.

The discussion begins with the themes raised in the work of the most influential group of political economists in the field of anthropology to date; the French structural Marxists, also known as the ‘articulation’ school. This trend arose in the late 1960s and exerted a major influence on economic anthropology and anthropology in general through the entire decade of the 1970s. Here the critical representatives were Claude Meillassoux, Maurice Godelier, Emmanuel Terray, Pierre-Phillipe Rey, Georges Dupré, Marc Auge as well as historians of Africa – Jean Suret-Canale and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch – with whom they worked closely (Seddon 1978). Today all of these anthropologists have abandoned or substantially modified their theoretical outlook with the consequence that this once highly influential school of economic anthropologists is now largely defunct. Where their influence is still strongly felt is in South African anthropology and social science, where structural Marxism was one of the inspirations leading to the efflorescence of neo-Marxist political economy (Asad and Wolpe 1976). Structural Marxism was primarily an Africanist school, except for Godelier whose speciality is Melanesia. Their work was characterized in particular by a detailed empirical knowledge of the societies of West and Central Africa and Madagascar, which had been a part of the French African colonial empire. This was by no means the first application of a Marxist-influenced political economy in anthropology. The work of Godfrey Wilson and of Ronald Frankenberg, strongly influenced by the more processual functionalism of Max Gluckman, preceded that of the French by decades (Frankenberg 1978; Wilson 1939).

This group of early British political economists was not theoretically oriented. They were primarily interested in analyzing and documenting empirically the impact of British colonialism: the transformation of land tenure relations; the effects of copper mining in Zambia and of diamond and gold mining in South Africa; the breakdown of ‘tribal cohesion’ in the economies and societies of Central and Southern Africa; the rise of large-scale labour migration, forced or otherwise, leading to urbanization and ‘detribalisation’. Their work in the application of political economy in anthropology, economics and history was pioneering. It provided an invaluable account of the dire economic and social impact of colonialism in the inter-war and early post-war years.

What was distinctive of the French school, however, was the combination of traditional ethnographic empiricism with a self-consciously theoretical orientation. Strongly influenced by the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the highly abstract structural Marxism of Althusser and Balibar, their intervention was aimed at having a far-reaching impact on anthropological theory in general (Althusser and Balibar 1998). Whereas previous Marxist theoretical interventions tended to distort anthropological knowledge in order to force it into a preconceived schema, their approach was different. Their aim was to use fieldwork as a necessary point of departure for theory. They insisted on a detailed, fine-grained analysis of the economic, political and kinship relationships revealed in their data. On this basis, they approached theory as a construct that should respect and be supported by the data. Part of their influence on economic anthropology was due to this derivation of theory from the familiar fieldwork ethnography long characteristic of anthropology.

As a result of this approach, the French school raised fundamental challenges pertaining to the entire endeavour of economic anthropology. What were the relations of production characteristic of kinship societies? Did exploitation exist within them? What was the connection among production, exchange and the development of markets? How were the main concepts, in particular the central one of ‘mode of production’, to be understood and applied? What was the source of value in such economies and what was the relevance to other concepts of value in economic theory? How were such economies to be understood in the broad sweep of human history? Could the orthodox metanarrative of progress that had always characterized Marxist political economy satisfactorily resolve such issues?

Modes of production

The emphasis on production leads to the master concept of this tradition, ‘mode of production’. The mode of production is understood to be made up of a particular arrangement of the ‘relations of production’ and a corresponding level of the ‘forces of production’. Relations of production have above all to do with control of the ‘means of production’. From this point of view, the key to understanding any economy and society, is to understand who (that is, which strata or classes) controls the means of production, by which every society makes provisions for its material existence and continuity.

The concept ‘relations of production’ is also central. It is the defining criterion for distinguishing one mode of production from the other. Thus the ‘Ancient Slave mode of production’ was characterized by unique relationships to the means of production. This is an economic system in which a particular social class not only owns the main means of production privately, that is, the land, this class also owns the human beings who work the land. Or, to put it from the point of view of the people who do the work, their relationship to the means of production is one in which they are both deprived of the means and are themselves the property of the dominant slave-holding class.

The other major concept is that of ‘forces of production’, of which the ‘means of production’ are a part. Means of production include the ‘objects of labour’, such as land and raw materials, and the ‘means’ or ‘instruments’ of labour: tools and technology. However, the most important ‘force of production’ is neither instrument nor object of labour. It is ‘human labour power’ itself, the chief ‘force of production’. In other words, integral to the political economy approach is a labour theory of value. Central also is the political, indeed philosophical, conclusion drawn from this idea: namely that, human labour and thus ‘the working people’ are necessarily the motor of human history. It is here that the character of political economy as a labour theory of value and a theory of exploitation is revealed. For once class-divided economies emerge, each mode of production has a characteristic form of the extraction of surplus. Indeed, it is the very growth of an economy which has the capacity to produce a regular surplus that leads to class division, the transformation of kinship-dominated economies into ‘political’ societies and to the rise of the state.

The concept of forces of production is not to be confused with or collapsed into the concept of technology. Technology is a human creation and is always applied in association with some form of human labour, even if this increasingly is ‘mental labour’. It is only one of the forces of production. In so far as technology achieves a relative autonomy this is only because the division of labour has been developed to a high level. Political economy, although attaching great importance to technology, does not offer a technological explanation of the economy. Likewise, this viewpoint differs substantially from the view sometimes characterized as ‘ecological’ anthropology. This ecological view has had an important influence on the work of political economists such as Frankenberg and Wolf (Frankenberg 1978; Wolf 1999). Geography and climate have an effect on economic processes, but these operate only through human productive activity within a specific set of production relations. Human labour power by brawn or brain thus is reaffirmed as the chief force of production, its political expression is in class struggle, and it is retained as the motor of human history.

The practical application of this ensemble of concepts is best understood in relationship to specific modes of production. In the kinship-dominated societies frequently studied by anthropologists, the means of production are communally owned. Tools are usually privately held but ownership of the chief means of production – the land, rivers or lakes – is vested in the kin group. Elders exercise control not in their own right but on behalf of the group. Division of labour is by sex and age, which in general gives seniors power over juniors and men power over women. The mode of production generates only a small surplus, if any at all, and the product is controlled by the elders, who have various mechanisms for distributing it. Exchange exists but is relatively restricted.

In the case of the history of India and China, some argued, various communal modes are followed by the development of an ‘Asiatic’ mode of production. Here access to land remains under communal control but formal ownership is transferred to the state. Relations of production have a peculiar dualism. At the village level, kin groups and the village have what amounts to usufructuary (that is, use) rights to the land but legal ownership of land and of large-scale irrigation works as well as control over long-distance trade is in the hands of the state and an associated aristocracy. Production generates a substantial and regular surplus and this surplus is appropriated by both state and aristocracy as a tax in kind, as forced labour or as ground rent. This surplus is distributed and exchanged in a complex long distance commodity chain. A broad-based ‘commodification’ is regarded as originating here long before the emergence of capitalism. Both local and long-distance markets develop on a regular basis. Major advances in the productive forces occur in tools, weapons, shipping and technology more generally. Socially, this provided the economic basis for the consolidation of class divisions, politically for the emergence of empires and culturally for the emergence of ‘civilization’.

It is the fact that the surplus was extracted while leaving communal relations intact which is held to explain the ‘relative stagnation’ of the economies of Asia over long historical periods. Empires came and went, but the village economy continued relatively intact. Modern Indian historians, political economists or not, accord some limited credence to the idea of long periods of relative economic stagnation in Indian pre-colonial history, but reject the idea of an Asiatic mode of production (Mukhia 1985).

French historians of Africa, influenced by this argument about the existence of an ‘Asiatic’ mode of production, identified what was claimed to be a distinctive ‘African’ mode. The notion here was that in all cases of African pre-colonial economies, whether in small subsistence economies dominated by kinship or village life or in the large trading empires which emerged in West Africa from the eighth century, private property in the chief means of production is practically unknown. Land remains communally owned by the lineage, clan or the village group. What then was the basis of the large states? The answer provided was that these were essentially trading states. A tribal aristocracy transformed itself into a ruling class by becoming a trading aristocracy. In the case of West Africa, they controlled the trade in gold, salt and slaves. These products were obtained not by transforming the relations of production but by extracting tribute and by trade.

These arguments are important because, as was the case with the concept of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production, this was an attempt to explain the relatively low level of the development of the productive forces in the pre-colonial period. According to these ideas, the relative stagnation in the pre-colonial African economy was due to the fact that the ruling classes obtained their wealth from exploiting long-distance trade. Due to their fundamentally mercantile character, they were not driven to develop the productive forces. Communal relations of production persisted undisturbed as the basis of the village economy. Where transformation from above began to take place in Dahomey in the nineteenth century, it was cut short by European colonial conquest (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1978).

In the case of Western economic history, however, the unique feature is the early emergence of private property in the relations of production. At one point Engels even writes of the existence of a ‘Germanic’ mode of production in which communal rights over land and forests exist side by side with private property (Godelier 1978: 226–7). But this is not the main line of development. In Greece and especially Rome, the original communal relationships to the means of production are superseded by the emergence of Ancient Slavery. Private property in land and slaves becomes the norm at least for patricians (members of the aristocracy). The slave-owning class appropriates the entire product, including the surplus. Hence the tendency in such systems is for there to be very high rates of slave mortality and for there to be the need for a continuous source of re-supply. This is especially the case when, as in the plantation slavery in the Americas, slavery was involved in the production of a commodity, sugar, for an emergent world market. Exploitation in slavery is obvious and brutal. Although an enormous advance over previous modes, slavery was very common with inner contradictions. Because of its coerciveness, it is plagued by low productivity and the tendency to destroy the main force of production, human labour power. None the less, during slavery there is an enormous development of technology and this too is a period of empire and civilization.

While the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘African’ modes persist in the East and in Africa, in the West (according to this view) slavery passes away, superseded by a relatively less brutal mode of production, Feudalism. Again the hallmark is the further development of private property in the means of production. The peasant obtains some means of production. He/she is no longer a slave but is transformed into a serf. The dominant class does not take the entire product, only the surplus, although the surplus extracted may be larger than under slavery. Slave masters are transformed into landlords. But in Feudalism, the exploitation of labour is also visible and obvious. This is because surplus labour is extracted in a separate place and at a separate time: on manor land as distinct from the peasant plot, in various forms of forced labour service, in the form of commuted rent. In the case of capitalism, on the other hand, exploitation is concealed within what Marx called ‘the hidden abode’ of the production process.

The capitalist mode of production is the culmination of the early private property tradition of the West. What is critical here is not commodification in general but the commodification of labour power in particular. The means of production previously held by the peasant and the craftsman are expropriated. They are consolidated in the hands of the capitalist class as privately owned means of production. Peasants are no longer tied to the land or to the guild as in Feudalism. They are formally free to work for whichever capitalist they please. They are no longer serfs but workers.

The capitalist buys only the worker’s labour power for which the worker is paid a wage. However, in return the capitalist extracts the labour of the worker over the length of the entire working day. The worker works both to pay him-/herself (a small part of the working day); to replace the existing stock of capital (another part of the working day); and to produce surplus value for the capitalist (often the longest part of the day). This surplus is appropriated as profit and accumulated as capital. Since the working day is not partitioned into three separate sections and labelled accordingly, but is simply an uninterrupted working day, it appears that the capitalist is paying the worker for the entire value of his/her entire day’s labour. In fact the capitalist is only paying for the portion corresponding to the value of the worker’s labour power. The organisation of the production process conceals the manner in which the surplus is extracted.

The extraction of surplus is accomplished in capitalism, unlike in other exploitative modes of production, largely by relying on economic means: on wage rates, prices, profits, credit, debt, the threat of unemployment, the commodification of housing and the organisation of the production process. This is unlike Ancient Slavery, the ‘Asiatic’ or ‘African’ mode or feudalism, in which direct force was an integral part of the production process. Naked force, although never far away in the institutions of the state, is held in reserve. Ideological and cultural forces, the media and the system of rights embodied in the rule of law, play a far more important role in ensuring social stability than in all other modes of production. This opens the door to a political economy of culture derived from the works of Antonio Gramsci, leading to the field of cultural studies (Hall 1997). Gramscian notions of ‘hegemony’ become particularly appealing for cultural anthropologists seeking a more political culture concept (Crehan 2002).

This is also the point in political economy at which the notion of ‘fetishism’ emerges, a notion regaining currency in the work of Jean and John Comaroff and others on so-called ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; West 2003). This is the idea that the hidden nature of the process by which surplus value is generated, distributed and accumulated under capitalism leads to the mystification of the process in popular consciousness. Unable to see into the ‘hidden abode’, a belief system emerges which attributes the unusual wealth of the elite to occult practices. According to this argument, belief in an occult economy develops in social situations in which people find the sudden wealth of individuals inexplicable by secular means. This is held to be the case particularly among the severely impoverished in developing societies who already have a belief system which incorporates elements of sorcery and witchcraft. To many in such a situation, only occult practices can explain the sudden wealth of the local elite in the newly globalised ‘millennial’ world. This is one current application of the idea of fetishism, taken from political economy. The difference is that in this new work on ‘ethnologies of suspicion’, the source of the fetish is attributed to the new scale and complexity of exchange relationships, the global marketplace. Fetishism is not theorized as originating in the growth of a global division of labour and production process, as in traditional political economy (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999).

One consequence of capitalist relations of production is that it is a far more productive economic system than all previous modes of production. It facilitates an unprecedented accumulation of capital and concentration and centralization of the means of production. Huge corporations arise. Large financial entities and stock markets emerge. Technical progress takes place at an unprecedented rate and reaches hitherto unknown levels. The division of labour becomes international and scientific technology is applied directly to the process of production. There is an immense socialization and internationalization of the forces of production. Capital is systematically exported to and subordinates other less-capitalist economies. A global economy emerges.

Yet the means of production continue to be privately owned. It is this fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system which is thought to generate crises of overproduction and which ultimately results in its transformation. What socialism is thought to achieve, from this point of view, is a fundamental harmonization. The means of production are removed from private ownership and placed in public ownership. The social relations of production now become realigned with the social nature of the forces of production.

The first point to note here is that this is a theory of value, a theory of money and a theory of ‘realization’. The theory of the export of capital is also a theory of the economic basis of imperialism, which is an integral part of the political economy outlook. In keeping with its focus, a distinction is made between the sphere in which value arises and the sphere in which it is exchanged, realized and distributed. In political economy, value is created only in the process of production, never in the process of exchange. The second point is the source of value. It is human labour that is the chief force of production and the source of value in the economic sense. This is regarded as a given for all economic systems. A basic distinction is made at this point between two differing senses of value, ‘use value’ and ‘value’. Use value has to do with the physical properties of a product that make it useful in one way or another. Value in the second sense has to do with the importance attached to goods and services and is socially assigned. This is so whether production is for self-consumption or for exchange. Once the division of labour and market relations emerge, value in this second, social sense is necessarily expressed in ‘exchange value’. In a capitalist economy exchange value is roughly approximated in price. Likewise, money is a measure and a store of this value. Distribution and exchange are the spheres where value is realized but not where it is generated. Demand and supply cause fluctuations in exchange value but are not themselves its source. For instance, they may cause fluctuations in the value of currencies, but the source of the relative value of currencies is necessarily the relative productivity of the economies to which these currencies belong, more or less captured over a long period of time in balance of payment transactions. The source of exchange value and thus of value in this economic sense is the quantity of socially necessary labour time expended on its production.

The third point to note is that the production of value, crucial though it is, is only one part of the economic process. This value still has to be ‘realized’. After being produced, the products which now embody value have to be consumed. In a subsistence economy some of the crop has to be stored for future use. Food or other goods may have to be exchanged for tools and other craft items. This can become a fairly complicated process. Severe inequalities may arise, especially in gender relations, even though fully-fledged classes have not yet arisen. As the work of the French Marxist anthropologists already mentioned has shown, seniors often exploit juniors. As the work of Josephides demonstrated, men seriously exploit women.

In a capitalist economy the process of realization is infinitely more complex. Almost every single product and service is bought and sold on the market, including human labour power. This in itself is a very complex process of exchange given that some goods are for direct consumption, some are for consumption in the process of production and that there is a continuous (although cyclical) expansion of the process of production. Today one is dealing with a global market, in particular a global stock and currency market. Once the forces of production achieve this high level of socialization, the social value embodied in goods and services can only be expressed through this process of exchange, with realization now taking place on an international scale. Given the global scale of the production process, a global process of exchange becomes inescapable. The social importance that goods and services have today is internationally evaluated and no longer the ‘decision’ of the economy of a single nation or region. Global market exchange then becomes the only feasible way for the globally-embodied value in products to find expression. Markets, although fluctuating, distorted, manipulated and subject to periodic crises in the short term, over the long term provide the economy with a social verdict. Within the limits of the class relations of capitalism, markets are a social mechanism for measuring the value accorded by consumers to a particular good or service relative to others and for the distribution of surplus value across the economy.

Furthermore, under capitalism, the socially necessary labour time embodied in goods and services takes the form of their cash value. Value embodied physically or in a specific service has to be converted into its money equivalent. From this intake wages have to be paid; raw materials, utilities and other supplies have to be bought; rent and interest have to be paid; provision has to be made for depreciation; wholesaling, retailing, advertising, marketing and other producer services have to be paid; capital has to be accumulated and the next round of production expanded by reinvestment in the production process. The process of the realization and distribution of value, especially of surplus value, among all these parties and among the different branches of the economy, becomes extraordinarily complex.

Because it takes production as its point of departure, political economy has often lost sight of the dynamics of the processes of distribution, exchange and accumulation of surplus value. Neglect of price and profit mechanisms generally, both theoretically and in practical policy, has been a common and fatal weakness of political economy. Yet these processes provide the main mechanism for measuring and realizing social value when production takes place on a large scale. The market goes beyond being a necessary feedback mechanism to the production process: it is itself part of the realization process, with a profound effect on this production process itself. Even where the means of production are socially owned and there is some degree of central planning, some social process of distribution and exchange remain the only way to realize value in an economy in which large-scale national, regional or global production takes place. Price and profit mechanisms continue to play an invaluable role in such an economy, giving powerful indications of the social value really embodied in goods and services and in how value should be distributed between different enterprises and branches of the economy (Nove 1983).

This is why the neglect of objective measures of value in the purchasing decisions of real consumers, including consumption for production, has been fatal for the economies which claim to be socialist. This is also why contemporary anti-globalization theory which attempts to develop economic alternatives to globalization essentially by critiquing and restricting the process of exchange is so problematic from the point of view of political economy (Cavanagh 2002). These ‘localist’ alternatives leave intact the relations of production which give rise to the market. This leads to the idea of trying to abolish globalization by restricting the role and scale of exchange rather than by redirecting globalization through forms of social ownership and control of the means of production, and supervision and regulation of the international market.

History, historicism and ‘time’

These theories raise fundamental questions about the economic development process and about economic history as a whole. The dominant idea in political economy is the idea of progress derived from the Enlightenment in the form of historical and dialectical materialism. This approach to economic history makes two principal assumptions that have been strongly contested, both by anthropologists who adopt the political economy approach and by those who do not.

The first assumption is that there is an objective social reality ‘out there’ that exists independent of the consciousness of the anthropologist. In other words, social and cultural reality is not ‘constructed’ but ‘discovered’, albeit through a cognitively complex and contradictory process. This objective social reality, the mode of production, is the appropriate subject matter of the discipline of economic anthropology.

This whole complex of economics, politics, and social inequalities is often referred to as a ‘social formation’. This idea is sometimes expressed in abstract philosophical terms: that it is social being (economics, politics) that determines social consciousness (culture, ideology), not social consciousness that determines social being. In this sense, deeply influenced by Hegelian philosophical ideas, the Scottish–English civil society tradition and French rationalism, political economy is more in the tradition of social than of cultural anthropology.

Second, there is the much-disputed notion that these modes of production and the social formations that arise from them develop through history in an evolutionary sequence. The idea here is that it is possible to construct a theoretically coherent and objective global economic history, a unified history of humanity that is at the same time a history of human progress. In this line of thinking such a history is not simply an account of technological or material progress; it is at the same time a broad story of human social, political and spiritual emancipation. Such a view clearly assumes the existence of a single objective notion of time, one which has a validity beyond any specific cultural construction. It is this idea-complex which is characterized by the term ‘historicism’ and rejected as a modernist illusion by all trends in history and anthropology influenced by post-modernism. Whether such an exercise in historicism is possible at all, how fruitful such an exercise would be and what are the broader consequences of adhering to such a ‘totalizing’ perspective of human history, continues to be hotly debated in the discussions of the work of historians such as Chakrabarty and Pomeranz (Chakrabarty 2000; Pomeranz 2001; see also American Anthropological Association 2002: 179).

Broadly speaking, there have been three approaches to this debate within political economy, all of which accept the objectivity of time and reject the charge of historicism. The first has been the orthodox schematic one which prevailed during the period of Soviet dominance of Marxist theory. This view laid down a rigid schema of four universal economic and historical epochs that succeeded one another inexorably and on a global scale. Primitive communalism was succeeded by Slavery which was succeeded by Feudalism. Feudalism was succeeded by Capitalism, which has been superseded by socialism. According to this self-serving interpretation of Marx and Engels, the Soviet Union therefore was no ordinary nation. It was the culmination of thousands of years of human economic history!

Anthropologists who accepted such dogma necessarily were compelled to find ‘Feudalism’ in Africa and to hunt for signs of a ‘Slave’ mode in China. Moreover, in addition to such absurdities, they were required to accept and propagate the notion that this single unified global economic history was at its core the economic history of the Western world. Other ‘people without history’, the usual subjects of anthropological enquiry, could be historicised, but only as objects within the framework of an irresistible Western economic dynamic. They had economies to which things were done by the West in the process of Western colonial expansion. Their own distinctive course of economic development, if such existed at all, was of purely local significance, a dead end at the global level. The initiative in world economic history belonged solely to the West (Wolf 1982). ‘Anthropological peoples’ remained without history in that broader global sense.

The French structural Marxists adopted a different approach. They succeeded in re-opening within the framework of political economy the critical general question of the diversity and coherence in global economic history. This was done from two points of view, empirical and philosophical. Rather than proceeding from a grand conception of world economic history, this approach was more from the bottom up. Meillassoux (1970), in his detailed empirical analysis of the economy of the Guro of the Ivory Coast, posited a ‘lineage’ mode of production combined with a dominating  ‘colonial–commercial’ mode. Terray (1972) went further and argued that what appeared to be a single lineage mode in Guro was in reality two modes, one based on the labour of all members of the village and another based on labour confined to the lineage.

This reintroduced the notion of ‘articulation’ of modes of production in a single production system. What this term meant was that empirically a production system could consist of more than one mode of production, ‘articulated’ in such a way that one of the modes was the dominant one (Foster-Carter 1978). In the United States, Wolf, influenced by world-systems theory, carried forward this idea, trying unsuccessfully to eliminate Feudalism as a mode and to merge all pre-capitalist class economies into a single ‘tributary’ mode of production (Wolf 1982). As was swiftly pointed out by Godelier, this clearly was confusing different labour processes within a single mode, with different modes. But he himself complicated the picture further by reviving the idea of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production (Godelier 1978). As was pointed out above, Coquery-Vidrovitch went further and proposed an ‘African’ mode of production.

What was critical for economic history in this second approach was not the specific theoretical constructs elaborated. A more basic issue was at stake, the ‘plurality of forms of transition to class society’ and ‘of the [diverse] way[s] in which inequality is introduced into classless societies and leads to the appearance of antagonistic contradictions and the formation of a dominant class’ (Godelier 1978: 237–43). As a result of this work, structuralist political economy returned to a view more compatible with traditional anthropological relativism. It ceased to treat Western economic history, characterized by an early development of private property, as the norm and paradigm for all economic history. In fact, the Western case became the exception. A relative de-centring of the West was achieved that had not been the case with world-systems theory (Wallerstein 1997).

But structural Marxism went further. Deeply influenced by the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and Althusser, it emphasized that structures were ‘synchronic’ not ‘diachronic’. The logic of structures led them to perpetually reproduce themselves. They were fundamentally ahistorical. This notion inclined structural Marxists to the view that history itself had no ‘structure’: there was no force generating change from within; change itself had no logic. Each ‘mode’ existed in its own right, ‘led’ in no particular direction, was part of no larger, structurally coherent, global whole. It was therefore difficult to speak of a theoretically coherent universal human economic history.

These conclusions are not unproblematic. They have the effect of reducing the epistemological status of history relative to anthropology, the only level at which structures are thought to exist. The character of ‘structure’ also becomes ambiguous. Structure ceases to be economic and objective in the orthodox political economy sense. Instead economic structure becomes only one of an ensemble of structures that constitute society and culture, in the characteristic Durkheimian and Lévi-Straussian manner, instances of the conscience collectif. One and the same symbolic system or ‘deep structure’ expresses itself in language, marriage rules, religion and the mode of production, each of which mirrors the others (Dews 1994).

This mentalistic notion of the economy as an expression of a cultural structure has had a lasting impact on the work of many anthropologists, for example that of Marshall Sahlins (for example, 1978). More to the point, by locating causality in a self-subsistent ‘structure’, both individual and collective agency is undermined. Structures have a ‘logic’ of their own and seem to be able to ‘act’ of their own accord. Economic determinism is rejected and replaced by a supra-individual cultural determinism.

Yet structural political economy stopped short of the rejection of the notion of objective historical time, the view put forward by Leach (1976), for example. Given the basic assumptions of Marxism, this critique of historicism could only be very partially accepted. Godelier affirmed ‘plurality’ in the various trajectories of economic history. At the same time, by a complex line of reasoning, he reaffirmed the idea that there was such a thing as global economic history and that Western economic history provided the only framework for this. He concluded by arguing that while modes of production were diverse and did not succeed each other in any pre-ordained direction, Western economic history still provided the ‘typical line of development of humanity’. This is allegedly because ‘it alone has created the pre-conditions for Western and all other societies to pass beyond the organization of class society’ (Godelier 1978: 246–8).

Godelier wrote of Western economic history, ‘It is typical because it has value as a “model” or “norm” because it provides possibilities which no other single history has offered and gives other societies the possibility of saving themselves the intermediary stages’ (1978: 248–9; original emphasis). This is an allusion to one of the hotly debated topics in economic development theory of that period, the notion of bypassing economic stages. This was the issue of whether an underdeveloped economy could advance rapidly to the level of a developed socialist economy without first passing through a number of stages. This was not only a theoretical debate, but one filled with major political implications. Soviet-dominated political economy took the view that bypassing was not possible and that to argue otherwise was to lapse into voluntarism. The Soviet view affirmed the necessity of a relatively long and complex transitional period of what was termed ‘non-capitalist’ development. Godelier rejected this argument. With the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, the far-reaching extension of market relations in China and the global triumph of neo-liberalism, these arguments have been resolved by life itself.

However, at the purely theoretical level, they remain open. Political economy also rejected the views of the Annales school in which there are a plurality of ‘temporal strata and rhythms – the political, economic, the geographical’ (Dews 1994: 112; see Braudel 1982). Likewise, political economy rejects the thinking of advocates of German ‘conceptual’ history (Begriffsgeschichte) such as Reinhart Koselleck, who argue that the concept of an objective historical time is a cultural artifact, itself requiring explanation, one particular view of historical time that emerged under certain identifiable historical and cultural conditions. The argument here is that it is a modernist myth to imagine that the concept of objective historical time has a general validity, least of all for all epochs of European history. It can therefore have no supra-historical validity and cannot provide a framework for a general human history, which, indeed, cannot ever be said to exist in the objective sense (Koselleck 1994).

Similar ideas were developed at the same time in the work of Michel Foucault, who had been Althusser’s student (Foucault 1994). These critiques of historicism continue to have a powerful influence in early twenty-first century economic anthropology through the general influence of post-structuralism. The ideas of Edward Said (1995) and Partha Chatterjee (1993), very much in this vein, have also had a major impact. Ultimately, the effect of these ideas is to relocate the economy in the domain of culture in the manner of Sahlins, and to establish a radical incommensurability between differing economies (Sahlins 2001). Thinking along these lines influences the even more critical issue of the economic development of the Third World. The very notion of ‘development’ is now called into question (Escobar 1994; Gardner 1996).

But there is a third attitude to economic history in the political economy tradition. This approach also reaffirms historicism. This line of reasoning is of particular importance for economic anthropology because it has the consequence of problematising the relationship between production and exchange in a theory focused on production. This is a political economy deeply influenced by Hegel and the writings of the young Marx in the Economic and philosophical manuscripts (1844) and The German ideology (1846). It conceives of economic history as a dialectical process (Hegel 1979; Lukacs 1971). The objectivity of historical time and the structural coherence of global economic history are affirmed. But this structural coherence is not stable in the manner characteristic of a Lévi-Straussian deep structure. Not binary oppositions constitute the economic structure, but irreconcilable internal contradictions. It is the thrust to resolve these antagonisms that necessarily leads to economic advance and which is the basis of the coherence in human history.

The crucial point here is the manner in which the antagonisms are overcome, by a process captured in the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung or ‘sublation of bourgeois Gesellschaft’ (Fritsche 1999: 153). Historical advance is not conceived of as a simple negation of the old by the triumphant march of the new economy. On the contrary, all that is harmful is shed but at the same time, all that is worthwhile and of lasting value is retained and extended. It is superseded not in the sense of being abandoned, but through a process of purification and substantive extension. From this point of view global economic history, although ruptured by the transformation of one mode of production into another, is also a process of continuity and cumulative human economic advance.

This is an idea of compelling importance. An anthropological political economy that is humanist because it is dialectical has particularly profound political and economic consequences. For example, one result is that abstract ‘bourgeois rights’, such as freedom of speech, movement and assembly and of the rule of law, stripped of their formalism, contain many elements of lasting human value (Neumann 1996). The same applies to the market and to exchange relations in general. Unlike what has occurred in all examples of socialism so far developed, the transformation of capitalist economy cannot simply attempt to cancel previously existing economic relations on the spurious grounds that they are bourgeois: on the contrary, transformation must seek to expand them by making them substantive. The market or, for that matter, commodification, cannot be simply abolished. Paradoxically, relations of exchange can only be ‘sublated’, a process of extension which gives them substance. This approach to political economy has major implications for efforts to theoretically critique capitalist globalization.