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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
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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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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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
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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