there is nothing simple about simple commodity production

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There is nothing simple aboutsimple commodity productionJacques M. Chevalier aa Associate Professor, Department of Sociologyand Anthropology , Carleton University , Ottawa,CanadaPublished online: 05 Feb 2008.

To cite this article: Jacques M. Chevalier (1983) There is nothing simple aboutsimple commodity production, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 10:4, 153-186

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There is Nothing Simple aboutSimple Commodity Production

Jacques M. Chevalier*

This essay offers a theoretical rethinking of simple commodity pro-duction that avoids two extreme notions of capitalism: one whichreadily embraces all relations of production found in the pervasiveworld system, and another which produces a rigidly eroded model towhich everything else is externally articulated. It is argued that somespecific forms of SCP can be treated as variations of capitalismintegral to its polymorphous logic, and therefore as subjected, underdeterminate conditions, to a flexibly defined process of labour'ssubordination (formal and real) to capital. Self-employed labour isalso re-examined in the light of (a) the basic exigencies of capitalaccumulation, (b) the contradictions inherent to capitalism, espe-cially those pertaining to the confrontation between intraverted andextroverted economies, and (c) the active struggle of all workingclasses against their total dispossession from commodified wealth.

1. THE DEPENDENCY VS. MODE OF PRODUCTION DEBATE

Marx and many of his followers, such as Kautsky [1970] and Lenin in hisearly works [1968], tended to forecast the imminent or inevitable eradica-1 ion of those forms or relations of production which were alien to the logic ofproduction founded on capital and wage-labour. Frank's well-articulatedrejection of theories of economic dualism was initially welcomed as a pene-trating critique not only of bourgeois theories of economic growth, but alsoof the 'suffocating orthodoxies of Marxist evolutionary theory' [Brenner,:.977: 90]. Much like early Marxists, the dependentistas (and world-systemtheorists) have insisted upon the historically determining role of capitalismas the main path of the 'modern wheel of history'. In a sense, it is the lattershared assumption which has led Frank [1969, 1978], Cardoso and Faletto[1970], Dos Santos [1973], Wallerstein [1976], and many others,1 to abroader reformulation of the Marxian discourse, or to a redefinition ofunderdevelopment from being a direct effect of the economic backwardnessof poorer countries to being an immediate consequence of capitalist growth.

* Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University,Ottawa, Canada.This article was first published in Studies in Political Economy, 7, 1982. A more detailed andempirically illustrated version of the argument presented here can be found in the author's recentbook, Civilization and the Stolen Gift; Capital, Kin, and Cult in Eastern Peru, University ofToronto Press, 1982, see chapter 4.

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154 The Journal of Peasant Studies

Instead of confronting the Marxian perception of capitalism as the all-pervasive force of the capitalist world with the actual complexities of theso-called modern era, they have chosen to redefine capitalism on the basis ofa much broader conception of its historical unfolding, such that all forms ofunderdevelopment in the world economy could be seen as intrinsic to thefunctioning of capitalism itself. 'For Frank, as more recently for Wallerstein,there is but a single "world-system"; and it is capitalist through and through'[Foster-Carter, 1978: 49].

As Laclau [1977] and Althusserian Marxists have pointed out, the de-pendency approach led to the unfortunate development of conceptualunderdevelopment within a Marxian-like framework. The approach wasshown to lack rigour in so far as it reduced the structuring of capitalism to therecursive unfolding of a single, and relatively simple, principle: the hierar-chical differentiation between metropolis and satellite(s), or between cen-tral and peripheral economies, and the profit-oriented exploitation of thelatter at both intra-national and international levels, through marketmechanisms, a complex sectoral division of labour, and a conjuncturalmyriad of economic and political relations of domination and subordination.In short, every relation of production or exchange that could be seen ascontributing to the world-wide accumulation of capital (and the resultingdevelopment of underdevelopment) was to be treated, almost auto-matically, as an integral part, or internal articulation, of capitalism itself.

Many critics of dependency have strongly objected to the latter combina-tion of vulgar historicism and an unsophisticated concentric formalism asapplied to the understanding of capitalism and of its polymorphous ubiquity.Their suggestion is that we view underdevelopment as resulting not from theinternal connections and polarizations of a world-wide capitalism, but fromthe articulations of capitalism to its outside world, that is, pre-capitalistmodes (or forms) of production, those based upon primitive communism,slavery, feudalism, or any other non-capitalist set of productive practices. Inthe words of Rey:

if feudalism, and notably its determinant relation of production, theextortion of ground rent, continues to play a role in the transitiontowards capitalism among those societies which were formerly domin-ated by it, then we can expect the exploitative relationships of anotherspecific mode of production to play a similar role during its transitionto capitalist domination. This is one of the central questions to beraised in the study of any social formation where capitalism establishesits domination over one or several modes of production. [Rey, 1973:21; my translation]

Structural Marxists have thus stressed both the structural specificity and'homoficence' (or parallel action) of capitalism as a mode of production suigeneris, with its own set of forces and relations of production, and thehistorical and geographic variability of capitalism's articulation to othermodes or forms of production within concrete social formations.

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Simple Commodity Production 155

The preceding problematic has paved the way for studies of either 'modesof production' and their formal/historical properties [e.g., Hindess andHirst, 1975], or their complex articulation and interaction, usually in thecontext of capitalism's own historical expansion.2 The analysis of 'plural'economies is by no means a new concern within historical materialism andmay be seen as a methodical reformulation of Trotsky's law of uneven andcombined development, or the notion that pre-capitalist or semi-capitalistmodes of production may serve an important function in the multi-lineare volution of capitalism. The possible reproduction of older forms of produc-tion for reasons pertaining to the development of capital has also beendiscussed by Lenin, Luxemburg [1951], Preobrazhensky [1971], and Marxhimself, who recognized that such forms can 'survive and reproduce them-selves as transitional subforms within the framework of capitalist produc-tion' [1976: 1023]. Similar positions surfaced more recently in studies ofLatin American underdevelopment [Stavenhagen, 1975; Burawoy, 1977],and in various debates on the historical relationship between feudalism,colonialism and capitalism.3

Yet the contribution of the recent 'articulationist' school is an importantone since it has permitted us to go beyond the treatment of non-capitalistmodes of production as passive horizons of capitalism, that is, as historicallygiven environments which simply furnish some of the elements (raw mate-rials, labourers, markets) needed for the growth of capital accumulation.Rey's characterization of Luxemburg's approach to non-capitalist environ-ments applies quite well to most of the earlier discussions of uneven develop-ment within a Marxist perspective:

In short, non-capitalist modes of production are dealt with only interms of those elements which capitalism needs and is able to stealfrom them, never as structured systems and even less as entitiescapable of resisting their dissolution by the action of capitalism and ofbeing articulated to the latter. On the whole, Rosa Luxemburg'sthesis, although positing the impossibility for capitalism to survivewithout an external world, can do without the study of what liesoutside capitalism itself. Other modes of production are reduced to adistant horizon of capitalism, one which is constantly pushed back byits forward march. [1973: 28; my translation]

I : is not possible to examine the 'mode of production' literature in detailhere, let alone the numerous debates generated by, or within, this relativelynew paradigm. It is, however, important to situate the theoretical argumentthat follows in relation to the fundamental issues mentioned above. Thereare several basic generalities that will guide us in our discussion of simplecommodity production, all of which have direct bearing upon the claims andcounterclaims of divergent streams of neo-Marxist thought.

Firstly, it is imperative that we retain one of the most fundamental insightsof world-system theorists, which is the complexity (or polymorphous de-velopment) of capitalism as seen from within its own internal dynamics, and

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that we avoid reducing the latter to the unfolding of a narrowly defined set offormal invariants. Proponents of 'economic articulationism' have tended toview the logic of capital as centred upon formal constants which permit fewinternal variations; 'what is variable, therefore, must be the other half of thearticulation, viz. the pre-capitalist modes of production' [Foster-Carter,1978: 58]. The danger of such formalist views is that they thrive upon arigidified conception of capital, reducing all those elements that take onappearances other than capitalistic to so many manifestations of othermodes of (non-capitalist) production.

Yet the internal variations of capitalism need to be theorized on the basisof a rigorous conception of capital, one which is often lacking in macro-studies of the modern world economy, or unduly restricted to a discussion ofthe sectoral division of labour, and the unequal exchanges between pola-rized departments of production or unevenly developed economies. In theanalyses which follow, I shall attempt to show how a definition of capitalismas a polymorphous structure of variable relations of production may permit abetter understanding of certain relations which deviate, at least on thesurface, from the productive logic of the CMP (capitalist mode of produc-tion).

The preceding approach is by no means incompatible with a theoreticalrecognition of the other half of the articulation, which involves the complexconnection of capitalism to social relations other than its own. On thecontrary, the development of a capitalist economy presupposes the practicaldifferentiation between capitalism and a non-capitalist environment (whichmay comprise practices of both capitalist and non-capitalist societies), andtheir structured intersection in concrete historical contexts. The latter pointis indeed a crucial one, for it enables us to move beyond the constrainingviews of economic reductionism as applied to the study of social formationsdominated by capital. This issue, however, will not be tackled in the discus-sion that follows; rather I shall concentrate on the development of a concep-tual problematic that avoids two extreme notions of capitalism: one whichembraces all relations of production and exchange found in the worldsystem, and another which produces a rigidly eroded model to which every-thing else is externally articulated. More precisely, my wish is to locate somespecific forms of simple commodity production as variations of capitalismintegral to its logic while at the same time offering a methodical account oftheir subsumption under capital.

The purpose of this paper consists, therefore, in making a tentativecontribution to our rethinking of class relations in the CMP, or to theresolution of an important riddle in Marxian theory: namely, the status ofsimple commodity production (SCP) in the development of 'modern under-development'. My contention is that the 'simplicity' of this form of produc-tion comes mostly from without, that is, from a tendency to oversimplify thesocial structuring of capitalist relations of production. While world systemmodels have treated SCP as a merely contingent form in the forward marchof capital, structural Marxist accounts of the same relations have failed to

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avoid what might be called the teleological 'BC knowledge effect': by this Imean that the pre-capitalist (or 'Before Capitalism') attributes are mechani-cally imposed upon the latter form of self-employed work and represent aconvenient way of expelling, from within the narrowly defined boundariesof capitalism, those anomalous practices that are not reducible to the uni-l'orm appearances of the capitalist mode of production.

The Marxist account of SCP as the embodiment - distorted or well-preserved - of an older form of pre-capitalist production is usually presentedas follows: much like independent subsistence workers, simple commodityproducers own their means of production; unlike them, however, they doengage in commodity transactions and are dependent upon the correspond-ing market mechanisms for the acquisition of those goods and services whichi:hey have not produced but need. Thus they sell what they produce and donot use and buy what they need but do not produce. The resulting circuit isdepicted in the following manner:Personal & Product- C Selling M Buying C Personal & Product-ive Consumption EXCHANGE ive ConsumptionThose commodities (C) engendered through the productive consumption ofraw materials, labour-power, and instruments of production, are sold inexchange for the money (M) needed to purchase commodities (C) that will>;nter into subsequent acts of personal and productive consumption. Thechief concern of the producers is not to enlarge, but rather to reproduce theirTieans of personal and productive consumption, all of which are treated asnecessary use-values. In order to do so, however, they must be able toproduce use-values that may be converted into objects of market exchange,and therefore into exchange-values, or concrete objects which possess the' abstract' property of being quantitatively comparable to other commodi-:ied goods. In short, they must create those commodities that will enablei:hem to reproduce their means of exchange and conditions of subsistence.

The essence of SCP is thus constituted by its resistance to what Marx hascalled the twofold subsumption - formal and real - of labour under capital;hence a limited development of both the forces of production and theappropriation of commodified factors of production by agents of capital. Inthe discussion that follows, I argue that the preceding characterization ofSCP fails to do justice to this not-so-simple form of production. Moreprecisely, I shall try to show how the model given above hinges on theacceptance of four misleading theses which result in an artificially consistentportrayal of SCP as a form partly or fully governed by a pre-capitalist logic ofits own. The four theses in question lay emphasis on:

i. the exclusion of simple commodity producers' labour-power fromthe sphere of monetized exchange, and therefore from the processof labour's formal subordination to capital;

ii. the worker's ownership of some means of production, which isanother expression of the non-realization of the formal subsump-tion process;

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iii. the maintenance of some artisan control over the production pro-cess and the corresponding absence of the real subsumptionmechanism;

iv. the alleged subsistence-mindedness, or simple-reproductionrationale, of simple commodity producers.

My intention is certainly not to exhaust each of the preceding subjects. Imerely wish to offer a tentative outline of an alternative view of both SCPand the process of labour's subsumption under capital, with special refer-ence to the role of agriculture in the context of capital-dominatedeconomies. This will involve an attempt to specify the general conditionsunder which SCP may be fully governed by the logic of capital, without everbeing transformed into what is strictly defined as proletarian labour. Finally,the questions at issue must be dealt with from three complementary angles:(a) the exigencies of capital accumulation, (b) the contradictions and limi-tations inherent to capitalism, especially those pertaining to the confronta-tion between 'central' and 'peripheral' economies, and (c) the active struggleof the working classes against their full exploitation by all agents of capital.Needless to say that this text should be read not as a full elaboration of thisthreefold argument, but rather as a hopefully useful contribution to itsdevelopment. Finally, I must remind the reader that the following exercisein political economy precludes by no means a rigorous consideration of theways in which social factors of ethnic, domestic, and cultural differentiationmay play a determinant role in the formation of relations of simple com-modity production in contexts ranging from advanced capitalist societies tothe most remote regions of the world system. Such issues and relateddebates, however, many of which I have addressed myself to elsewhere andat considerable length [1982], will not be tackled here.

2. FORMAL SUBSUMPTION THROUGH COMMODIFIED LABOUR

In the originally planned Part Seven of Volume 1 of Capital, entitled 'Resultsof the Immediate Process of Production', Marx introduces a distinctionbetween two mechanisms of subsumption of labour under capital, both ofwhich are indispensable for capitalist production to establish itself as a'mode of production sui generis'. The first process of subsumption is called'formal' and consists of two mechanisms: the monetization of all factors ofproduction, and the dispossession of workers from all means of production.It implies not only the monetization of labour-power (wage-labour ex-changes do occur in the medieval guild system), but also the purchase oflabour-power by capital, which presupposes the employer's monopoly of theworkers' 'objective conditions of labour (the means of production) and thesubjective conditions of labour (the means of subsistence)' [1976: 1026].

The distinctive character of the formal subsumption of labour undercapital appears at its sharpest if we compare it to situations in whichcapital is to be found in certain specific, subordinate functions but

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where it has not emerged as the direct purchaser of labour and as theimmediate owner of the process of production, and where in con-sequence it has not yet succeeded in becoming the dominant force . . .[1976: 1022-23].

Marx recognizes that the confrontation of merchant capital (or usurers)and simple commodity producers is the locus of an effective exploitation oftie latter by the former, but under conditions which do not yet involve theformal subsumption of labour under capital since labour-power is not yetpurchased or directly exploited by capital. The development of a specificallycapitalist mode of production implies, therefore, the generalized purchaseof labour-power by owners of capital.

As already mentioned, dependency and world-system theorists haveadopted a much broader conception of capitalism, one which allows for agreater diversity of productive relations in the process of capital accumula-ti on, but which fails to account for the structural specificity of social relationsin a capitalist economy. Conversely, other Marxists have preferred to adopta stricter definition of capitalism, and to explain the observed plurality ofproductive relations as the manifestation of a historical process of transitioninvolving either the rapid transformation and eradication of older andnon-proletarianized forms of labour (as early Marxists would argue), or theuneven, protracted, and combined development of capital in the context ofmixed economies.

Most Marxists, with the exception of the dependentistas, would tend toagree on at least one thing: the non-capitalist (or pre-capitalist) nature ofnon-monetized forms of labour and the absence of a formal subsumptionprocess (as described by Marx) within all forms of simple commodity pro-duction. In the words of Mollard:

In all forms of petty commodity production - and notably in peasantagriculture - the process of accumulation retains features characteris-tic of primitive accumulation:

- Variable capital does not exist as capital since labour-power [...] isnot a commodity and thus has no exchange-value . . .In other words, primitive accumulation 'which produces the separa-tion of labour from its external conditions' is not only the starting pointof capitalist production, but also a contemporary element of it as longas all forms of pre-capitalist production have not been dissolved.[1977: 228; my translation]

In short, the labour-power of a simple commodity producer is never pur-chased by capital and is ipso facto the locus of a non-capitalist relation ofproduction; whether the latter is dominated by a feudal or a capitalisteconomy (or any other social formation) is of course another matter.4

The position I wish to adopt differs from the latter thesis, or from thedaminant conception within the Marxist literature, of what is meant by thecommodification of labour-power. My contention is that there are some

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cases of so-called SCP which are fully subsumed, although in their ownparticular fashion, under the logic of capital. One question which thenimmediately arises concerns the ways in which the formal penetration ofcapital can assert itself without entailing the direct purchase of labour-power, a question which seems almost self-contradictory.

To put this enigmatic question differently: can labour-power be commod-ified without ever being exchanged? According to Marx, a commodity has atwofold mode of existence: it contains a particular use-value which has thequalitative property of satisfying a concrete need, and a particular exchange-value, or a definite quantity of exchangeable and commensurable wealth.By exchange-value, however, is not meant the actual act of exchange, butrather the quality of measurable exchangeability which such an act presup-poses [Marx, 1973: 165]. This distinction is quite crucial, for it implies thepossibility of not realizing the exchange-value of a commodity through theact of monetized exchange. Marx is quite explicit about this when he says, inNotebook III of the Grundrisse, that

In no moment of the production process does capital cease to be capitalor value to be value, and, as such, exchange value. Nothing is moreridiculous than to say, as does Mr Proudhon, that capital changes froma product into an exchange-value by means of the act of exchange, i.e.by re-entering simple circulation. [1973: 311]

The presupposition of a self-preserving exchange-value comprises thepossibility that capital (e.g., raw materials), after its consumption as use-value in the productive process, re-enters into circulation as a commodityand an exchange-value, such that the product obtains a price and is realizedas such in money. Marx adds immediately, however, that the fate of anexchange-value within circulation 'may be to be realized in money, or it maybe equally that it does not realize itself in money; i.e. that its exchange valuebecomes money or not' [1973: 312].

The presence or production of barriers to the realization of value is in factinherent to production founded on capital. Capitalism is constantly engagedin a struggle to realize the value of what it produces. In this sense, thenecessity of 'evening-up' supply with demand presupposes not only their'uneveness' but, more generally, 'the disharmony and hence the contradic-tion . . . between capital as directly involved in the production process andcapital as money existing (relatively) outside of it' [1973: 413]. Credit,over-trading and over-speculation represent various ways of 'expanding andleaping over the barrier to circulation and the sphere of exchange' [1973:416]. More generally, the greater the expansion of the total mass of pro-ducts, the greater 'the difficulty of realizing the labour time contained inthem - because the demands made on consumption rise' without there beingan equivalent increase in the workers' exchange capacity [1973: 422].

The failure to exchange an exchange-value is usually treated by Marx asresulting from a difficulty in realizing the price of a commodity, for the latteris 'realized only when it is exchanged for real money, or in its real exchange

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for money'. The development of capital requires that exchange-values beideally transformed into money by means of prices or that commodities beideally measurable in terms of accounting money (or 'money in the mind');b ut the realization of such exchange-value presupposes its transformationinto 'real' money [1973: 190-93].

The labour-power of a simple commodity producer, although productive-ly consumed, is never purchased by capital or exchanged for real money. Itis, therefore, without an exchange-value, and cannot be realized as a com-modity. In this sense the specificity of SCP would reside in its resistance to itsformal subsumption under capital.

To be sure, Marx and most of his followers adhere to the latter views quiteconsistently throughout their works. There is, however, some indicationthat Marx did adopt, in the analysis of the 'Results of the Immediate Processof Production', a slightly different - and less constraining - understanding ofthe valorization of capital process. In his discussion of 'commodities as thep roduct of capital', Marx states that the transformation of money into capitalrequires that the working population cease to enter the market-place as thep roducer of commodities.

Instead of selling the products of its labour it must sell that labouritself, or more accurately, its labour-power. Only then can it be saidthat production has become the production of commodities through itsentire length and breadth. [1976: 950]

He adds that capitalist production destroys the basis of independent indi-vidual production and the exchange of commodities between owners (andthe corresponding exchange of equivalents). In short, the 'formal exchangeo:: capital and labour-power becomes general' [1976: 951].

Yet Marx goes on to say that the form under which the conditions ofcapitalist production enters into the labour process is immaterial to thevalorization process. For instance, it matters little

whether, as in the case of seed in farming, a portion of the product is atonce employed by the producer as the means of labour, or whether it isfirst sold and then converted back into a means of labour . . . all themeans of labour that have been produced now also serve as ingredientsin the valorization process. [1976: 952]

Unsold commodities may be converted into accounting money and used asexchange-values and may therefore transfer an element of calculable valueto the product to which they are productively added. To the extent thatagriculture, for example, produces commodities for the market, 'so too, andto the same degree, it calculates its costs, treats each item as a commodity(regardless of whether it buys it from another or from itself, i.e., fromproduction).' [1976: 952; my emphasis] Via the valorization process, pro-ducts and their conditions of production are thus treated as commodities andas calculable sums of accounting money, the realization of which may beperformed by means other than their direct sale on the market.

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The value of the ingredients which a capitalist produces and buys fromhimself may be transferred on to other products and valorized in the processof producing an optimum amount of exchange-value. This argument has anup-to-date ring if we consider those phenomena of complex integrationwhich have marked the development of the labour process within advancedcapitalism. My contention, however, is that this more flexible approach tocircuits of capital accumulation implies unforeseen possibilities that have yetto be theorized and that may have a direct bearing upon our conception ofSCP. These implications can be summarized as follows: any factor of mate-rial consumption can be commodified - and its exchange-value realized -without ever entering the sphere of 'real' market transactions. This occurswhenever the calculable value of the ingredients directly appropriated bythe worker (his own labour-power included) is transferred on to otherproducts sold on the market and valorized in the process of creating max-imum profits for productive capital and the corresponding conditions oflabour's own subordinate reproduction. The realization of the exchange-value of what might be called 'subsistence commodities' - those immediatelyconsumed by the worker — is thus subjected to the determinate action ofmarket calculations (on the part of both labour and capital) and the measur-able weight of precise conditions of market transactions in labour and otherfactors of production. In negative terms, all cases of SCP which fail torespond to the influence of the latter capital-dominated market can be seenas effectively resisting the mechanism of formal subsumption.

Consider the following situations. A self-employed worker may buy hisown labour-power from himself and be able to evaluate its approximateworth (or exchange-value), thus treating it as a commodified condition ofproduction. This may be done by calculating the market value of thosecommodities which are necessary for personal consumption (some of whichhe may buy from his own production) or the equivalent sum of money whichgoes into the reproduction of his labour-power. The resulting amount maybe part of an overall budget that must be minimally balanced if the worker's'enterprise' is to survive. The budget may take account of many roughlyestimated costs and benefits, such as the revenue that must be ploughed backin the simple or enlarged reproduction of his means of production, the wageearnings which the producer could or must derive from the sale of hislabour-power on the labour market (agricultural or industrial), or the in-come which he could or must spend in order to purchase the labour-powerneeded to replace or supplement his own. It is on the basis of such market-determined calculations that a smallholding unit may decide not to sell itslabour-power or to sell only part of it in order to maximize its limitedrevenue and to secure the reproduction of its means of production.

By 'purchasing' its own labour-power, a household (or farming popula-tion) can be attempting to reach a calculable optimum in the employment ofits commodified means of livelihood. The same can be said of its produce,which it may 'buy' (in an economic rather than legal sense) from its ownproduction, instead of selling it for an amount of money that could be

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îxchanged for fewer equivalent goods. The value of its own subsistenceconsumption is thus realized through mechanisms other than exchange, butfor reasons which pertain to their rate of exchangeability and the corres-ponding determinations of markets in labour-power, credit, products, andmeans of production.

It is important to note here that the latter calculations do not occur onlywithin a context of unlimited access to market information and high mobilityof factors of personal and productive consumption. A farmer may have verylittle choice in the allocation of his limited resources; this, however, does notmean that he can dispense with at least a rudimentary estimation of whatalternatives he has and a rational elimination of those strategies that wouldprove fatal to his enterprise. Nor am I suggesting that these elementaryforms of SCP accounting be accorded a high degree of causal weight in theeffective subordination of self-employed labour to capital; rather the point is:hat they can be seen as an integral moment and indicator of what is truly ageneralized commodification process.

Another point should be made in regards to the basic category of 'abstract'. abour' which is directly associated with the formal subsumption principleand, according to Marx, becomes a practical fact in capitalist economies only\Morishima and Catephores, 1975: 318]. The labour-power of a self-employed worker is commodified - and therefore given an abstract value -only if its consumption can be shown to be affecting or directly affected by awider market in both constant and variable capital; failing this, his labour-power cannot be the subject of an 'abstract' cost/benefit treatment and isconsumed under non-capitalist conditions which bear little resemblance tothe capital-dominated forms of SCP. The implications of this argument for ageneral theory of SCP are quite obvious: the notion of a distinctly recogniz-able form or mode of SCP conceals a multiplicity of radically differentpractices that cannot be theorized in isolation from their variable economiccontexts.

Finally, SCP may be the locus of a calculated response of some workers toI he predatory pressures of capital while at the same time constituting animmediate effect of capital's strategy of profit maximization in settingsranging from the wealthiest to the poorest regions of the world economy.There is now a relatively vast literature that demonstrates (a) how mer-chant, industrial and financial capital can derive appreciable benefits fromits domination over simple commodity producers in both developed andunderdeveloped economies; and also (b) how the internal contradictionsand limitations of capitalism may cause the dependent reproduction ofcertain forms of SCP - especially those found in peripheral economies -which impose severe constraints upon the overall appropriation of relativesurplus-value [e.g., Mouzelis, 1976; Rey, 1973].

There is considerable disagreement among neo-Marxist theorists regard-ing the relative importance of (a) and (b). My position is that both are part ofthe same fundamental question: namely, the exigencies and contradictionsof capital accumulation. As shall be shown later, the preceding issue is

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directly relevant to any discussion of variations in the observed forms ofcapital-dominated SCP. Suffice it to say for the moment that these twoaspects (a and b) of SCP's subjection to the logic of capital can be equatedwith an effective realization of the more flexibly defined law of 'formalsubsumption'.

3. FORMAL SUBSUMPTION THROUGH DISPOSSESSION

According to Marx, the formal subsumption of labour under capital involvesmore than the commodification of all factors of production. It also presupposes a twofold process of dispossession: the exclusive ownership of themeans of production by capital, and the concomitant appropriation of(absolute) surplus-value by the latter.

The more completely these conditions of labour are mobilized againsthim as alien property, the more effectively the formal relationshipbetween capital and wage-labour is established, i.e., the more effec-tively the formal subsumption of labour under capital is accomplished. . . [Marx, 1976: 1026; cf. 1965: 67, 99]

Our understanding of SCP in developed and underdeveloped economiesrequires that we rethink the latter thesis in the light of a crucial distinctionwhich is all too frequently blurred in the Marxist literature or simply left outin the analysis of self-employment practices among workers exploited bycapital. I am referring to the distinction between the legal process of proper-ty ownership and exchange and the actual relations of material appropria-tion and economic control. As argued by Althusser, Poulantzas, and others,Marxist studies of the political economy of capitalist societies must avoid thenotion that there is an unproblematic correspondence between legal andeconomic mechanisms of appropriation. The conclusion reached in thepreceding section regarding the formal subsumption process can be seen as adirect application of the latter principle to our re-examination of SCP in acapitalist context. The formal domination of labour by capital can occurwithout the legal sale of the worker's labour-power to capital; more precise-ly, the labour-power of a self-employed labourer can be commodified andeffectively exploited if it is subjected, through the purchase of his means of(personal and productive) consumption and the sale of his produce and/or afraction of his labour-power, to the predatory forces of a capital dominatedmarket. In other words, formal subsumption is operative wherever theprocess of capitalist circulation and production 'becomes in effect the pre-condition of his production' [Marx, 1976: 952]. The labour-power of thisnot-so-independent producer may never enter the sphere of legal circulationand yet be economically 'purchased' by capital. This occurs whenever itbecomes a calculable ingredient which enters into the products that arepurchased by capital either directly, as part of its own costs of production, orindirectly, as part of the necessary consumption of its own wage-labourers.In the latter case, paid workers are given the means to purchase goods from

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'independent' workers or from their own part-time subsistence production(if they are indeed engaged in such activity).

The same reasoning holds true in respect of the worker's legal ownershipof factors of production other than his labour-power. A simple commodityproducer may own some of the means of production, land for instance,without fully possessing or controlling more value than what is needed toreproduce his limited means of personal consumption. This brings us to aniinportant aspect of SCP: the worker's ownership of agricultural land and thep articular status which may be attributed to landed property and to the valuecf the object of labour (as opposed to its product) in capitalist economies.

Briefly stated, the issue is whether or not the monopoly of landed propertyis to be treated as a basic requisite and an internal effect of capitalist laws ofmovement. Let us begin with Marx's own position on the matter. Marx'swritings display a certain ambivalence towards the problem of ground rentand the role of the naturally given conditions of production in the forwardmarch of capitalism. There is a tendency, on the one hand, to consider thelegal ownership of the object of labour as an integral part of capital and of itsmonopolistic control over all objective conditions of labour. As Marx put it:

The same process which placed the mass face to face with the objectiveconditions of labour (land and soil, raw material, necessaries of life,instruments of labour, money, or all of these) as free workers alsoplaced these conditions, as capital, face to face with the free workers.[1973: 503; see also 1965: 106]

The domination of exchange-value thus presupposes:

alien labour capacity itself as an exchange value - i.e. the separation ofliving labour capacity from its objective conditions; a relation to them- or to its own objectivity - as alien property; a relation to them, in aword, as capital. [1973: 510]

'Capitalized rent', on the other hand, is seen as radically different fromc ther forms of capital, in so far as it is appropriated through the ownership ofan object of labour which contains no value: that is, land is not a product oflabour and therefore is without value. The source of rent comes not fromland itself but from the fact that the agricultural produce

is not sold at its price of production but at its value, and that the latterexceeds the price of production because the organic composition ofcapital is lower in agriculture than in industry, whereas the monopolyof landed property prevents the free flow of capital in and out ofagriculture, so that agricultural capital is thus prevented from 'sharing'in the social equalisation of the rate of profit, giving up part of thesurplus-value created in 'its' sphere to the general share-out of thissurplus-value. [Mandel, 1968: 279]

Marx distinguished between differential rent, which is derived from differ-ences in 'natural' or 'economic' fertility between pieces of land, and absolute

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rent which presupposes: (a) higher profit rates in the agricultural sector(due to a lower organic composition of capital) ; (b) the ownership of land bynon-pröducers, which permits landowners to appropriate the agriculturalsurplus profit, thus withdrawing it from the process of equalization of ratesof profit; (c) the capitalist farmer's appropriation of no more than theaverage profit.5

Marx thus explains the capitalization of ground rent as an effect of specificrelations of ownership on the economic redistribution of surplus-valueamong non-working classes. It is the locus not only of an extra-economicintervention in the material valorization process, but also of a transitionalphase in the forward march of capital. The notion that landed property is notan invariant of capitalism is clearly stated in the Grundrisse where Marxrecognizes that the modified reproduction of medieval forms of exploitationmay be essential to the initial use of capitalism but not to its full develop-ment. In its advanced stage, capital

regards the existence of landed property itself as a merely transitionaldevelopment, which is required as an action of capital on the oldrelations of landed property, and a product of their decomposition; butwhich, as such - once this purpose achieved -*is merely a limitation onprofit, not a necessary requirement for production. It thus endeavoursto dissolve landed property as private property and to transfer it to thestate. This is the negative side. Thus to transform the entire domesticsociety into capitalists and wage labourers .. . the negation [of landedproperty] from the side of capital is only a change of form, towards itsundivided rule. (Ground rent is the universal state rent (state tax), sothat bourgeois society reproduces the medieval system in a new way,but as the latter's total negation). [1973: 279]

To be sure, recent Marxian-inspired studies of capitalist penetration inagriculture have shown a certain reluctance to accept Marx's views on thematter and the notion of a quasi-automatic eradication of SCP in either theformative or advanced phases of capitalist evolution. Two extreme positionshave emerged from within the latter literature. The first one is taken byPierre-Philippe Rey in his influential Les alliances de classe. Briefly, Rey -although very critical of crude evolutionary models in Marxian theory -reaffirms in his own way the early predictions formulated by Marx, Lenin,and Kautsky with regard to the long-term future of the feudal landowningclass. Much like earlier followers of Marx, Rey also associates the fulldevelopment of capitalism and the corresponding transformation of feudalrent into capitalized rent with the gradual disappearance of the 'worker asowner', the dissolution of the labourer's property in land or any other factorof production, and therefore with the complete expropriation of the workersfrom all means of production, excepting their labour-power which remainstheirs to sell.6 His contention, however, is that landed property is essentiallyexternal to the capitalist mode of production and rests upon pre-capitalistrelations of productions; that is, a feudal opposition between peasants and

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landowners, the effects of which may intervene in the process of capitaldistribution within the CMP [1973:20,60,88,93]. From a dominant relationof production in feudalism, the ground rent gradually assumes, with theexpansion of capitalism, the secondary role of a distributive mechanism. Asymbiotic relationship is initially formed between European feudal land-lords and capitalists: the former can increase their rent only with economicgrowth founded on capital, whereas the latter can ensure the supply of1 îbour and raw material to their enterprises only with the help of a modified/intensified mechanism of feudal exploitation [1973: 73-74]. In the advancedstage of European and American capitalism, capital penetrates into theagricultural sector, destroys peasant forms of production by means of mar-ket competition, and asserts the dominance of its own economic mechan-isms in the exploitation of agricultural workers. In undeveloped countriesand ex-colonies of Europe, where feudal landed property is often absent,ether extra-economic systems of exploitation must be employed for capital-ism to 'take root'. This takes a much longer time, however, since theresistance of such 'ancient structures' to the expansion of the CMP is muchfiercer than in Europe and lends itself to the establishment of potentiallyrevolutionary alliances between the proletariat and other exploited classesin their resistance to exploitation.

An alternative approach is proposed by Vergopoulos in La questionpaysanne et le capitalisme, which also contains an article by Amin on thesame issues. Vergopoulos's thesis departs from the views expressed by Marxand Rey in two essential ways: the forced development of SCP in agricultureis integral to the enlarged reproduction of capitalist exploitation and islargely conditioned by the determinant role which the extra-economic prin-ciple of scarcity and the market forces of unequal exchange play in thedomination of all workers by capital. The author suggests that there are twocontradictory tendencies which determine the evolution of agriculture in allcapitalist economies. There is the relative scarcity of land and agriculturalproduce which constitute the real (extra-economic) source of the groundr;nt and which permit large landowners to retain a certain portion of thetotal surplus value of a given economy, to the detriment of both productivecapital and all labouring classes: just as interest rates are determined by therelative scarcity of credit, so the ground rent is determined by the limitedavailability of land (and foodstuffs) [1974: 98]. Moreover, the greater thegap between the development of agriculture and industry then the higher therelative market value of land and its produce, the larger the potential size ofdifferential and absolute rents, and therefore the greater the relative stagna-tion of agricultural production [1974: 143-58]. Vergopoulos adds that suchmechanisms are fully internal to the functioning of capitalism and have verylittle to do with the preservation of feudal-like forms of exploitation (as Reywould have it). His thesis also implies that absolute rent may exist in theabsence of a lower organic composition of capital in agriculture and that it isthe relative size of agricultural capital (and food supply) that matters in thefinal determination of the .rnarket values of land and foodstuffs.

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The functioning of a market economy, however, implies a constant redis-tribution of 'value' from departments with lower investments in variable (V)and constant (C) capital to those which employ more capital. The greater thecontrol over scarce capital (C + V, as distinct from C/V), the larger the totalamount of surplus profit extracted from other branches of capital. The neteffect of such unequal exchanges coincides with the consequences of the firsttendency described above: namely, the unequal development of sectoralbranches and the relative stagnation of agriculture.

The confrontation of these two opposite tendencies implies that the gainswhich industrial capital {capital-fonction) may derive from the strengtheningof its overdevelopment may be partially or totally cancelled out by thesurplus profit which landowners or capitalist farmers can obtain from aconcomitant rise in the overpricing of those commodities which they control(land arid agricultural produce) [1974: 159]. The establishment of industrialcapital as a dominant force in advanced capitalism presupposes thereforethe removal of such obstacles in the pursuit of maximum profit. Capital's•plan of action', which requires the effective manipulation of market andstate apparatuses, involves: (a) the elimination of landed property (capital-propriété) as the private monopoly of land and the recuperation of the rent'svalue by industrial capital; (b) the forced development of agricultural pro-duction ; and (c) the greater exploitation of a weaker - and more productive- middle-size peasantry (i.e., salariés à domicile).

Both Rey and Vergopoulos have attempted to keep crude evolutionarymodels at a distance from their own interpretations of capitalism's impact onthe reproduction of peasant economies. Each author, however, has reintro-duced evolutionary claims of his own, with an emphasis on either theprotracted articulation of a strictly defined CMP to older relations of pro-duction, or the market regulated dominance of increasingly productiveforms of agricultural SCP by all agents of urban capital.

Middle-of-the-road positions have been taken up from different angles byAmin and Mollard on the issue of whether SCP is articulated to the CMPfrom within or from outside the logic of capital. Amin basically accepts Rey'sargument regarding the feudal correlates of landed property, its timelesscontribution to the initial rise of capitalism, and the long-term incompatibi-lity between the reproduction of a landowning class of exploiters and the fullstrengthening of capital. Yet he agrees with Vergopoulos that the penetra-tion of capital into agriculture can take the form of an indirect (and moreprofitable) process of proletarianization. The creation of a rural class ofworking owners (prolétaires à domicile) presents many advantages from thepoint of view of capital accumulation: agents of capital can thus avoidassuming the cost of land ownership and may effectively exploit agriculturalworkers through a process of forced mechanization, direct control overmarket mechanisms and the resulting overpricing and underpricing of agri-cultural inputs and outputs, respectively [1974: 46-47].

Unlike Vergopoulos, however, Amin goes on to apply the unequal ex-change model to the analysis of relations between the economies of central

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and peripheral social formations, and to the corresponding variations (capi-talist/pre-capitalist) in forces and relations of production. The evolution ofagriculture in peripheral economies follows a path characterized not by therise of a self-employed proletariat, but rather by the highly constrainingreproduction of pre-capitalist forms of exploitation. Rural economies ofunderdeveloped countries are dominated by the wider forces of colonial (orneo-colonial) administration and capital accumulation. Their role is by andlarge restricted to the provisioning of cheap foodstuffs and underpaid wage-workers, cheap services for wealthier classes and overexploited labour forowners of plantations and primary industries. The formal ownership of landmay still reside in the hands of self-employed peasants ; yet the latter have nocontrol over market mechanisms and are not in position to retain any profitor rent from such formal possessions, let alone the full value of their ownlabour-power [1974: 57-58].

Mollard's outstanding analysis of French peasantry is also based upon thenotion that the subordination of advanced forms of SCP in developedcountries is to be distinguished from the older and less productive categoriesof peasant production which typify Third World agriculture. Briefly, hiscontention is that the industrialization of smallholding agriculture is a neces-sary condition for the enlargement of the (relative) surplus value producedby farmers and therefore a solution to the uncertainties and low level ofpeasant production which benefits only usurers and other representatives ofarchaic commercial capital. This new form of SCP, typically found in heavilyindustrialized countries, serves to reduce the costs of agricultural produceand thus to compress the proportion of capital allocated to the reproductionof the labour-power of all working families [1977: 24]. The gradual integra-tion/subordination of the peasantry within the CMP entails the separation ofrural agriculture and urban industry, the extension of monetary transactionsand the impossibility for farmers to derive any profit from either the own-ership of their means of production or from a situation of shortages in foodsupply which can be easily turned to merchant capital's favour.

Mollard shows how simple commodity farmers occupy a vulnerable bar-gaining position vis-à-vis the agro-industrial complex due to the dispersal oftheir means of production, the concentration of upstream and downstreamindustries and the reinforcement of capital's domination through state in-tervention. The resulting subsumption of peasant labour under capital man-ifests itself in the forced accumulation of constant capital under the pressureof off-farm enterprises, a radical revolution in agricultural productivity andthe development of excess production. As the prices of agricultural producetend to fall, the least productive farmers are compelled to accept lowerstandards of living or simply forced out of agriculture; conversely, those whoremain - although receiving higher earnings - are increasingly exploitedthrough an intensification and greater mechanization of their labour andstricter compliance with the technical exigencies of the agro-industrial com-plex.

Finally, without resorting to the unequal-exchange thesis or departing

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] 70 The Journal of Peasant Studies

from Marx's labour-time theory of value, Mollard shows how the appropria-tion of surplus occurs whenever peasants are obliged to pass through thesphere of capitalist circulation. Systematic exploitation is achieved by meansof monetary rents, an overpricing of constant capital investments, a rapidlyrising level of financial indebtedness, overmechanization and a quasi-totalloss of control over the productive process.7

In short, while early Marxists have tended to accept Marx's treatment ofsmallholding agriculture as an archaic economy doomed to rapid dissolutionunder the impact of capitalist growth, more recent theorists have chosen toview the latter form of production as involving either: (a) pre-capitalistrelations which can be articulated to the CMP and subjected to a transitionalyet protracted process of primitive accumulation [fiey]; (b) an integraleffect of capitalist exploitation through market-regulated mechanisms ofunequal exchange [Vergopoulos]; (c) a heterogeneous category whichrefers not only to highly productive farmers in central economies but also tothe more archaic peasantries of peripheral formations dominated by capital[Mollard and Amin].

The debates generated from within the preceding literature are complexand cannot be resolved without a thorough examination of many centralissues in Marxian theory. Although my immediate aim is certainly not tooffer a detailed theory of SCP's relationship to capitalism, there are severaltentative generalizations pertaining to the formal subsumption process that Iwish to derive from the latter discussion and which are at odds with the viewsexpounded above.

Firstly, there is a strong tendency, in the Marxian literature, to equatewage-labour with the commodification of labour-power, and therefore totreat SCP as either a pre-capitalist, transitional, or secondary sub-form inthe development of capitalism. Amin, Vergopoulos, Mollard, and a fewother theorists accept the notion of wage-labour equivalents [e.g., Bern-stein, 1979:436], yet they either fail to provide the theoretical foundations ofthis innovative construct or hesitate to detach it completely from a formalconception of capitalism based upon the centrality of the legal wage-labourrelationship. As already stated, my contention is that the commodificationof labour-power and the realization of its exchange-value can occur withouttheir 'real' monetization and under conditions which are not reducible to thesubordinate reproduction of pre-capitalist relations of economic livelihood.

Secondly, self-employed workers may be dispossessed from the surplus-value which they produce without being totally separated from the juridicalownership of means of production. As Marx once remarked, the develop-ment of capitalism may force simple commodity producers to restrict theirproductive activity to one kind of work in which they become 'dependent onselling, on the buyer, the merchant, and ultimately produce for and throughhim'. The capitalist buys 'their labour originally by buying their product'. Assoon as their labour is restricted to the production of exchange-values, whichimplies that they 'must exchange their labour entirely for money in order tosurvive', then they

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Simple Commodity Production ill

come under his command, and at the end even the illusion that theysold him products disappears. He [the capitalist] buys their labour andtakes their property first in the form of the product, and soon after theinstrument as well, or he leaves it to them as sham property in order toreduce his own production costs. [Marx, 1973: 510; my emphasis]

The latter quote is taken from Marx's discussion of the early forms in whichcapital appears and is therefore not at all representative of the author'sprincipal statements on the subject of labour's formal subsumption undercapital, especially in the advanced phase of capitalist growth. Yet it doescondense my own position in that it suggests the possible purchase of1 abour-power by capital as a whole through indirect means, and the mainte-nance of some limited ownership of productive factors by a special categoryof workers within the framework of production founded on capital. Legalproperty in productive factors may be used as a real asset in the workers'struggle against exploitation; yet its market value may be so low or the debts: ncurred so high that formal ownership can be of little use in reducing theDredatory effects of wider capitalist forces on smallholding economies lo-cated in either central or peripheral regions of the world system.

Thirdly, far from being a unitary process of economic domination, theformal subsumption of labour under capital lends itself to important varia-tions (from within) which reflect both the exigencies and contradictions ofcapital accumulation. As pointed out by many theorists, simple commodityagriculture in both developed and underdeveloped countries presents manyadvantages from the point of view of capital. It does away with the costs oflabour's direct supervision by capital, takes land away from the monopoly oflanded property and puts it in the hands of a fragmented and dependentpeasantry, thereby forcing it to surrender the value of all rents to agents ofcapital; moreover, it compels these producers to adjust their consumptionschedule (personal and productive) to the needs of capital-dominated mar-kets, the most important of which are the production of cheap food (orsupplementary subsistence) and the renewal of labour at minimum cost.8

The general applicability of the preceding argument is such that even theconspicuous underdevelopment of SCP in most areas of the Third World canbe seen as contributing in many ways to the enlargement of merchant andindustrial profits. Yet just as low levels of simple commodity productivityare not to be explained away as effects of lower stages of evolution or even asmanifestations of articulated modes and forms of production, so we mustavoid espousing the opposite thesis, which consists - as in Vergopoulos'swork - in reducing all forms of SCP to purely functional moments ofcapitalist growth, irrespective of the observed variations in levels of produc-tion, real monetization, mechanization, and capital accumulation. The con-tradictory functioning of world-wide capitalism and the confrontation ofdistinct branches and regions of the world system may impose severe con-straints upon capital's ability to stimulate the expansion of its own economicbase.9 This holds true especially in Third World countries where the domi-

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nance of relatively weak branches of capital tends to reinforce problems ofagricultural underdevelopment, which include low levels of mechanizationand the overdevelopment of subsistence commodity production (as an integ-ral moment of all forms of SCP; cf. upper leg of SCP circuit in diagram givenbelow). Furthermore, workers may turn these limitations on the pursuit ofgreater profits to their own account and strengthen their resistance to allforms of economic impoverishment. We have seen that capital can benefitfrom the eventual decomposition of landed property; yet, as suggested byMarx:

When capital has reached this point, then wage labour itself reachesthe point where, on one side, it endeavours to remove the landowneras an excrescence, to simplify the relation, to lessen the burden of taxesetc., in the same form as the bourgeois; on the other hand, in order toescape wage labour and to become an independent producer - forimmediate consumption - it demands the breaking up of large landedproperty . . . The negation (of large landed property) from the side ofwage labour is only concealed negation of capital, hence of itself aswell. [1973: 279]

To sum up, the attachment of agricultural workers to their land may resultfrom the combined action of the two contradictory facets of the formalsubsumption process: namely, the subjection of workers to the require-ments of capitalist exploitation and the reproduction of the limitations andstruggles inherent in the logic of capital. This argument presupposes arejection of crude evolutionary models as applied to the analysis of allcategories of SCP; but it also undermines any thesis which depicts theless productive categories of capital-dominated SCP, those usually found inThird World economies, as reducible to either pre-capitalistic moments ofthe combined development process or purely instrumental moments ofunlimited capital accumulation.

The last point that I wish to make is that the value of land certainly doesnot originate from its intrinsic material properties or from its mere owner-ship, nor can it be assigned to the intervention of legal property relations inthe redistribution of surplus-value, as Marx would have it. Rather it stemsfrom the relative scarcity of land as a quantifiable and commodified object oflabour. Any materialistic theory which reduces all value to the labour-timewhich it embodies, and the value of land to the interference of extra-economic mechanisms in the sharing out of surplus-value, fails to theorize acentral component of all extensively commodified economies: that is, thevalorization of all factors of personal and productive consumption as scarcevalues amenable to the economic laws of market supply and demand. Aspointed out by Cutler {et aï), 'there is no way the Marxist theory of value caneliminate the central role of supply and demand (Böhm-Bawerk was correctto note Marx's dependence upon competition to explain various tendenciesand effects of the capitalist mode of production)' [1977,1: 92]. The implica-tion, I suggest, is that capitalism thrives upon the commodified 'exploita-

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tion' of both the subject of labour and the naturally given object of labour,hence another twofold expression of the formal subsumption principle: thesubordination of labour under capital, and the subjection of nature to thesocial logic of abstract wealth. Correspondingly, the value of agriculturalrents and surplus production cannot be seen as originating from within thes:rict confines of the agricultural sector. The intrasectoral conception ofsuch values tends to prevail in most studies mentioned above, with thepartial exception of Vergopoulos's analysis. In spite of some theoreticalhesitations, Vergopoulos succeeds in showing the pervasiveness of theinfamous principle of scarcity in the integration of agricultural SCP withincapitalism and in locating the source of rents and agricultural profits in thesystematic, intersectoral operations of capital-dominated markets. Hisargument is that the profits derived from the market-regulated exploitationof peasants represent a portion of the total surplus rather than a strictequivalent of the surplus labour-time produced in the agricultural sphere[1974: 101]. For obvious reasons, a full elaboration of this illuminatingapproach cannot be offered here; my claim, however, is that a properanalytical treatment of SCP indeed requires an economic theory of the latters art.

4 REAL SUBSUMPTION

The preceding attempt to redefine the formal subsumption process calls foran explanation of what is meant - or should be meant - by the 'real subsumption of labour under capital'. According to Marx, the latter occurs onlywhen there is a revolution that takes place in 'the development of the socialforces of production of labour', hence a complete transformation whichbrings about large-scale production and the direct application of science andadvanced technology. Correspondingly:

If the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expressionof the formal subsumption of labour under capital, then the productionof relative surplus-value may be viewed as its real subsumption. [1976:1025]

Although absolute surplus-value will usually precede relative surplus-value,trie most highly developed form can serve to introduce absolute surplus-value in new branches of industry.

Capitalist forces of production involve not only industrial technology butalso a particular set of relationships between men and their means ofproduction and among men themselves. As pointed out by Balibar, capital-ism entails the separation of the worker from both the ownership of means ofproduction and 'any ability to set in motion the instruments of social labourby himself [Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 215]. Productive forces cease to beorganized according to craft principles and the worker is effectively strippedof his ability to control the labour process.

In one, the combined collective worker appears as the dominant

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subject..., and the mechanical automaton as the object; in the other,the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely con-scious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the auto-maton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central movingforce. The first description is applicable to every possible employmentof machinery on a large scale, the second is characteristic of its use bycapital, and therefore of the modern factory system. [Marx, 1976:544-45; cf. 548-49]

As a correlate of the preceding revolution, the labourer becomes a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none; he looks 'upon the particular content of hislabour with equal indifference', for the 'more fluid will be the movements ofcapital from one sphere of production to the next' and the 'greater thedemand will be for versatility in labour-power' [1976: 1014].

Marx claims that the introduction of large-scale industry in the sphere ofagriculture has the revolutionary effect of annihilating the 'bulwark of theold society' and substituting wage-labourers for peasants [1976: 637]. Mod-ern history has shown that this is not necessarily the case; agriculturalproduction may undergo a thorough process of industrial mechanizationwithout there being a complete separation of the worker from his means ofproduction or an 'absolute degradation' of his work. Studies of rural under-development in Third World countries show that the opposite is also true:the development of industry may fail to take root in agriculture yet provokea significant reduction in the control exercised by small peasants over theirintensified production and an increase in the mobility (and degradation) ofrural labour. What is at stake here, however, is not the degree of resistanceof older forces of population but the varying effects - or modes of appear-ance - which may be attached to the general process of real subsumption andthe corresponding interference of other variations in the functioning ofcapitalism: those which stem from the development of unequal developmentand from unequal combinations of elements of conception and execution inthe performance of different acts of production.

As already suggested, peasants in underdeveloped countries are oftendirectly dependent upon the wider economy for the purchase of necessarymeans of personal and productive consumption and for the sale of theirproduce. They have little control over those market forces which determinethe nature, quantity, and value of what they produce and sell (or of whatthey cannot afford at market prices and must therefore purchase from theirown production). They usually have no control over the 'real circulation' orphysical distribution of commodities, which is defined by Marx as an integralmoment of production.11 In many cases, agricultural production cannot bereproduced without labour's involvement in industrial wage-work (and vice-versa) and workers must show some versatility in their execution of un-skilled manual work (or what is treated as such). All this usually correlateswith a certain increase in the productivity of labour. Although productionmay not be fully mechanized,

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labour becomes far more continuous and intensive, and the conditionsof labour are employed far more economically, since every effort ismade to ensure that no more (or rather even less) socially necessarytime is consumed in making the product — and this applies both to theliving labour that is used to manufacture it and to the objectified labourwhich enters into it as an element in the means of production. [Marx,1976: 1026]

As shown elsewhere,12 the intensification of work generated by the develop-rr ent of agricultural SCP does not necessarily entail a noticeable change inthe scale of production (or total output per unit of cultivated land) or in thevolume of the means of production invested; rather, it may simply entail atendency to specialize in the production of a few cash crops, to bringrudimentary improvements on prevailing tools and techniques of produc-ti an and to perhaps devote more time in labour-intensive sectors of indust-rial production (as a necessary supplement to the household economy).

I must emphasize that the technical changes noted above, however impor-te nt they may be, can hardly amount to the industrial revolution which Marxassociated with the real subsumption process. The effective growth of pro-ductive forces in the agricultural sector of peripheral economies is usuallyhighly constricted. Farmers still dominate the simple technology they areusing; they still possess some traditional skills (for example, knowledge ofenvironment and of techniques of production); and they can still choosebetween several strategies of production, the most typical of which involvesthe combination of cash crop cultivation (or seasonal wage-labour) withhousehold subsistence production (hence a limited division of labour). Moreo::ten than not the 'movements of the instrument of labour' still proceedfrom them, such that there is no complete 'separation of the intellectualfe culties of the production process from the manual labour' or a complete'transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital overlabour' [Marx, 1976: 548]. Having said this, I hasten to add that a persistent-ly constricted version of the technical advances which Marx had in mind isnot to be automatically equated with a lower stage of unitary or combineddevelopment or an incomplete realization of the real subsumption process.Rather it may constitute an endemic effect of the compressed (or ex-traverted) development of satellite economies which in turn is conditionedby the wider functioning of a polymorphous world system dominated by theheavily industrialized centres of capital accumulation. Just as the realizationo!: exchange-value through means other than monetary transactions canresult from both the exigencies and contradictions of generalized com-modity production, so the failure to revolutionize all productive forces canbe caused by the concentration of industrial and financial capital in privi-leged regions of the world economy.13

Finally, I would suggest that the absence of an absolute degradation ofwork is also to be found among the technologically advanced categories ofsimple commodity agriculture but for reasons which are quite different and

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relate to the intraverted expansion of wealthier economies. In the lattercases, the strengthening of working-class solidarity and the greater applica-tion of science to production serve to promote the creation of many modernskills and the growth of an upper working class which occupies a not-so-unimportant role in such economies. Modern farmers are to a certain extentthe product of these metropolitan developments. Although Marx empha-sized the jack-of-all-trades effect of the capitalist mode of production, hedid recognize that:

Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as amanager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the thirdas manual labourer or even drudge. An ever increasing number oftypes of labour are included in the immediate concept of productivelabour, and those who perform it are classed as productive workers,workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its process ofproduction and expansion . . . And here it is immaterial whether thejob of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregateworker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manuallabour. [1976: 1040]

In brief, the real subsumption of labour under capital and the correspond-ing production of relative surplus value and division between the conceptionand execution of work should not be theorized in evolutionary, ideal-typicaland absolute terms; that is, they should not be thought of in rigid isolationfrom the determining effects of other tendencies of the CMP, which includethe contradictory development of underdevelopment, the struggle of labouragainst its total submission to capital, and an ever-increasing complexity inthe division of socialized labour.

5. MAXIMIZATION WITHOUT ACCUMULATION

To summarize, SCP is governed by the following logic, the components ofwhich are all conceivably produced from within an economy marked by theformal and real subordination of labour to capital:

r subsistence consumption r'

1 (personal and productive) 1'

g > ^ g'selling M buying

C: Commodityr: 'object of labour' (natural resources)1: labour-poweri: instrumentsg: articles of personal consumptionM: money and credit

The commodities produced or appropriated by a self-employed worker,whether they be articles of personal consumption (g) or factors of produc-

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tion (r, 1 and i), are divided into two categories: subsistence commoditiesdirectly consumed through material acts of household production (the upperleg) and market products to be exchanged for money (and credit) and thecommodities (O) which money can buy (the lower leg).

This composite SCP circuit goes beyond the classic C-M-C model offeredin most Marxian works. Unlike the latter, it includes a strategic subsistencecommodity component (C—>C), the most restricted expression of whichconsists in the direct conversion of self-employed labour into consumptiongoods (C1—>Cg). It also incorporates the possible necessity for the worker tosell part of his labour-power to other simple commodity producers or agentsof capital, or even to supplement his own production with the purchase ofother workers' labour-power. Moreover, it allows for crucial variations inthe relative weight assigned to each component. For instance, the greaterthe weight of the upper leg, the lower the level of overall productivity. Themodel can thus apply to a wide range of economic practices which can beunderstood without resorting to a mechanical application of structural arti-ci lation theory.

Given the contradictory combination of forces of growth and misgrowthw thin the overall process of capital exploitation, one may easily predict anincreased (or at least continued) and internally tensed differentiation ofpeasantries and other forms of SCP as a logical correlate of capitalism'sconstruction of a world economy. An important point, however, is that realvariations in the wealth and class positions of owning workers are by no meanstc be seen as either a step toward the inevitable eradication of self-employedwark and the full dominance of capitalized wage-work, as early Marxistswould have it, nor as a purely secondary feature of an otherwise essentiallyhomogeneous class of peasant farmers or self-employed labourers.

To be sure, the modified circuit given above begins and ends with a limitednumber of commodities, the total value of which may undergo little changeover time. Yet we must remember that SCP is subject to many criticalvariations such that the producer can effectively fail to make both ends meetand be forced out of self-employed production. Likewise, he may succeed inconverting his limited assets into capital investments if and when the oppor-tunity offers. As for those operating within the preceding upper and lowerlimits of self-employed labour, they are still faced with the necessity tocalculate the precise way in which they can make the best of a bad bargaina:id also with the possibility of significant changes - positive or negative - intheir overall level of limited consumption. Market-dependent workers musteigage in the production and exchange of measurable magnitudes ofmaterial wealth in order to secure the 'simple' reproduction of their ownlivelihood; this puts them in a class separate from peasants not exploited bycapital. Consequently, the practices of simple commodity farmers are oftenguided by a principle of concrete economizing, or the appropriation of anoptimum - albeit limited - magnitude of value which is embodied in thefollowing elements:

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(a) the instruments of production which they must purchase;(b) the land which they own and the rents which they must pay in

order to retain it;(c) the labour-power which they purchase from others or from them-

selves; and(d) the foodstuffs which they produce and sell (or buy from their own

production).

The notion of a peasant use-value rationale, which tends to be uncriticallyaccepted in the economic works of both Marxists and substantivists, maythus hide the profound differences which separate those economic practicesthat are subjected to the development of a commodified economy fromthose that are not. Market-oriented farmers, much like peasants in general,are primarily concerned with survival and subsistence. But this resemblanceis only a superficial one, for it is only in a commodified economy that theworkers' objectives (and results of their actions) take the form of specificmaterial magnitudes, that is, commensurable commodities possessing adefinite quantity of exchange-value.

The implication is that the satisfaction of the workers' socially definedwants is constantly subjected, in a capitalist society, to a fundamentalcontradiction which results from the twofold use-value/exchange-valuecomposition of the commodity form. The basic pursuit of workers (wage-labourers and simple commodity producers) is to secure their access to thoseuse-values which they need to achieve or maintain 'acceptable' living con-ditions. Yet they cannot pursue this goal without treating such use-values asobjects of market transactions and therefore as objects which contain valuein definite amounts. Consequently, commodities that serve as means ofpersonal or productive consumption are never apprehended as use-valuesonly: the total amount of commodities made available to the worker isalways comparable, in a purely quantitative way, to other amounts of'useful' wealth and, a fortiori, to other levels of consumption. In short, thereis more to the economic practices of these workers than the mere primitive-like pursuit of a limited set of material use-values.

The particularity of SCP in underdeveloped countries is that it is governednot by a relatively simple rationale of subsistence but by a highly constrictedform of economic maximization. In quantitative terms, the scale of calcu-lated consumption is extremely limited, its progressive enlargement oftennegligible or even negative and the level of overall development quite low;such conditions of consumption differ markedly from those of peasants indeveloped countries and, more importantly, from those of wealthier classesin Third World nations. In qualitative terms, it is a strategy of maximization'in-the-concrete', in the sense that the working owner is driven not by thepursuit of greater profits, but rather by the quest for a feasible optimum ofactual consumption (which may or may not be superior - or even equal - toprior levels of consumption).

In other words, it is maximization without capitalization. Simple com-

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mDdity producers own their means of personal and productive consumptionard will seek to enlarge them, yet they cannot treat the latter as means ofprofit accumulation. Unlike merchants, they sell goods which they haveproduced and in such a limited quantity (or at such low prices) that theimney thus derived is not always sufficient to sustain minimum standards ofpersonal consumption. And unlike industrial capital, the instruments ofproduction and object of labour which they own possess limited worth(because of low market value or long-term indebtedness problems) and canhardly be considered as the source of a profitable monopoly over scarcefactors of production. The same can be said of the labour-power thatworkers purchase from others or from themselves: it cannot be treated ascapital but only as needed use-values that are indispensable in securing thereproduction of the household economy. Correspondingly, simple com-modity producers who hire wage-workers do not necessarily form a classdistinct from those they employ: in many cases, the hired worker is also aself-employed producer and the employers, a productive labourer. AsFiiedmann aptly puts it:

In striking contrast to its central role in capitalist production, wagelabour would be a compensatory mechanism for demographic varia-tion within households under conditions of competition. Whilenecessary to the reproduction of simple commodity production, thelabour market would play an ancillary role. Instead of supplying theunique source of labour for production, it would simply redistributeexisting household labour among households undergoing cyclicalvariation in labour supply .. . In the context of simple commodityproduction, wage labour would be a phase in the individual life cycle ofmales belonging to the same class as their employers. [1978: 80]

The renewal of greater profit is the guiding principle of capital accumula-tion while it is the struggle against poverty which paradoxically governs thepursuit of maximum use-value consumption. Small farmers, not unlikewage-labourers, are irremediably confronted with an inescapable fact ofso:ial life in a capitalist economy: that is, the quantifiable distance thatseparates their actual living conditions from that which is necessary tosurvive or satisfy the basic socially defined wants and also from that which isconsumed and owned by agents of capital. The overall rationale of self-employed workers dominated by capital cannot therefore be reduced toeither the primitive-like pursuit of subsistence use-values, as many Marxistswould have it, or to a bourgeois-like obsession with profit-maximization.15

An exchange-value rationale, or capital accumulation 'in-the-abstract', can-not be detached from the capitalist production of use-values, the monopolyof means of material production, the realization of value through tangibleacts of consumption (personal and productive) and exchange, and thereforefrom capitalism as a system of concrete relations between men and natureand among men themselves. Yet the opposite is also true. A worker's questfor material survival in a capitalist economy can never be detached from his

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active involvement in the production and circulation of exchange-values,from the initial quantification of wealth (and needs) that goes with it, andfrom his constant pursuit of optimum wealth and tangible improvements inhis level of economic consumption.16 In the words of Marx:

Even though his wage is in fact nothing more than the silver or gold orcopper or paper form of the necessary means of subsistence into whichit must constantly be dissolved - even though money functions hereonly as a means of circulation, as a vanishing form of exchange-value,that exchange-value, abstract wealth, remains in his mind as some-thing more than a particular use-value hedged round with traditionaland local restrictions. [1976: 1033]

The actions of labour are effectively guided by a calculative rationale of itsown kind, one which enters into frequent collision - but also occasionalcollusion - with the forward march of capital. The real poverty to whichlabour is subjected results not from the absence of profit-mindedness butfrom the worker's direct separation from - and confrontation with - theownership of capital and from the forced compression of his level of concreteconsumption (which may fall below the value of what is needed to reproducehis own labour-power). While 'the ancients provide a narrow satisfaction',the modern world leaves men unsatisfied, or, where it appears to satisfythem, does so in a manner which is 'vulgar and mean' [Marx, 1965: 85].

CONCLUSION

The functioning of capitalism is complex and should not be theorized in suchrigid terms as to exclude the possible subordination - formal and real - ofSCP to its logic. The preceding analyses offer a tentative outline of atheoretical rethinking of SCP in light of its full subjection to the contra-dictory or unexpected effects stemming from both the extensive commodifi-cation process and the capitalist forces of growth and misgrowth. Thisalternative model of capital dominated SCP is also shown to entail a generalscheme of strategic conduct that lends itself to critical variations in levels ofproduction and in the allocation of limited economic resources.

This alternative approach to self-employed work in capitalist economies ishardly compatible with general characterizations of household production —especially in agriculture - as an abstractly recognizable mode of production,or an economic type endowed with its own logic.17 As argued by Friedmann[1979] and Ennew [et al. 1977], universally defined notions of domestic orpeasant economy are based upon the misleading assumption that householdproduction can be theorized without reference to the specific features ofwider economic structures. But I must also stress that my views on the matterof SCP preclude any attempt to establish rigid classificatory contrasts be-tween the developed and underdeveloped forms of SCP. Pre-capitalistrelations of production may indeed be shown to play an important role inThird World economies, yet one cannot assume, as most structural Marxists

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do, that household or subsistence production is a sure sign of capitalism'sarticulation to older modes or forms of economic livelihood.18

One last point should be made in regard to the possible intervention ofnon-economic or non-capitalist relations in the reproduction of SCP. Theargument presented above should by no means be read as implying a totalrejection of the combined development thesis as applied to SCP. My conten-tion is simply that the formal and real subsumption of labour to capital hascontradictory and unexpected effects which account for many of the essen-tial features of capital-dominated SCP. This does not mean that SCP can bereproduced without the active interference of non-capitalist or non-economic practices as such. On the contrary, one can easily demonstratethat external factors do play an essential role in the exploitation of self-employed workers by capital. This can be shown, however, without usingthe assumption that the essence of SCP lies in its articulation to capitalismfiom outside, that is, in the reproduction of its pre-capitalist or non-capitalistconditions of existence.19

NOTES

1. Reviews of this literature are found in Chilcote [1974], Harding [1976], and Taylor [1979].

2. See also Dupré and Rey [1978], Meillassoux [1972], Bradby [1975], Long [1975], andTaylor [1979].

3. Hilton [1976] and Sternberg [1974].

4. Similar characterizations of simple commodity production as a non-capitalist (or pre-capitalist) form of production, or of wage-labour as a defining feature of a capitalist'relation of production', may be found in the works of Amin and Vergopoulos [1974: 9-13,245, 254, 261], Braverman [1974: 63, 410-24], Hindess and Hirst [1975: 185], Kay [1975:63-72], Laclau [1977: 42-50], Long [1975: 261], Mandel [1968: 65-68, 119-20, 271-72], Meek[1956], Meillassoux [1975: 145-49], Poulantzas [1978: 285-86], Rey [1973: 35, 60-61, 74-76,85-87], Taylor [1979], and even Frank [1978: 240-41], to name just a few. Other theoristssuch as Banaji [1980], Bernstein [1979], Friedmann [1979], Morishima and Catephores[1975], and Vergopoulos [1974] have stressed the possible or actual integration of SCPwithin the logic of capitalist exploitation; none of them, however, have tried to relate theiruseful conclusions to a systematic rethinking of the formal and real subsumption mechan-isms. (Banaji's suggestion that 'wage-labour, labour which produces capital, can take aseries of unfree forms' such that even women who work at home and produce labour-powerfor capital enter into no other productive relations than those of capital, presupposes arelatively crude reduction of real variations in relations of production to so many express-ions of the essential wage-labour relationship and to functional moments of the all-inclusivelogic of capital accumulation; my position on the matter of SCP is by no means to beequated with the latter.)

5. Items produced under labour-intensive conditions are said to contain more value thancommodities created through greater constant capital investment. All items, however,must be sold at competitive prices, which means that technologically advanced firms are ina position to realize extra profits over the value of their products; conversely, labour-intensive firms must sell at the average price and can therefore realize only the averageprofit.

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6. A summarized version of this relatively orthodox argument can be found in Bradby'sdiscussion of the destruction of the natural economy as applied to the rural economy ofPeru [1975: 154-57]. Incidentally, in his 'Postface de novembre 1972', Rey changes his ownposition toward SCP and considers the latter as highly compatible with advanced capitalistdevelopment [1973: 215-16]. The author, however, does not address himself to the implica-tions of this theoretical qualification from the point of view of his structural articulationmodel.

7. In formal terms, a peasant's overall production is composed of three elements: the surpluslabour appropriated by capital in the form of ground-rent, interest, and value unrealized inprices (Rl); the investments necessary for the reproduction of his means of production(R2); and what is needed for the reproduction of his family's labour-power (R3). Mechan-isms of overexploitation may threaten the reproduction of the peasantry or lead to anoticeable increase in its regression and to rural depopulation. Finally, the greater the rateof surplus [(R1 + R2)/R3] and the higher the rate of appropriation [R1/ (R1 + R2], thehigher the rate of exploitation (R1/R3). [Mollard, 1977: 212-26].

8. The advantages of simple commodity and supplementary subsistence production from thepoint of view of capital accumulation in underdeveloped countries are discussed in Meillas-soux [1972: 98-105], Burawoy [1977], Bradby [1975], Paige [1975: 15-16], Bernstein [1979],Amin and Vergopoulos [1974], Hailey [in Stavenhagen, 1975: 246-47], de Janvry andGarramón [1977], and many others.

A concise cost/benefit formulation of such analyses is found in de Janvry and Garramón:

With semiproletarian servile labour the worker receives in payment for his work theusufruct of a patch of land, some consumption goods, and a small amount of cash. Forthe employer, the cost of servile labour is less than the price of labour even for meresubsistence because the opportunity cost of the land given in usufruct to the worker isless than the value of production that the worker can generate on it through use of familylabour. The cost incurred is thus less than the price of labour by an amount equal to thenet between the value of production on the land plot and the opportunity of this plot forthe landlord. This difference can be very large. [1977: 209]

Also for a highly informative discussion of stratification, competition, structural isolation,and other factors of divisiveness among commercially oriented peasants, see Paige [1975:30-38].

9. Similar points are made by Amin [1974], Bernstein [1979], Mouzelis [1980], and Taylor[1979].

10. Vergopoulos contends that the principle of scarcity originates from outside the logic ofcapital and that it penetrates the functioning of the CMP mostly, if not exclusively, throughthe agricultural sphere of production. [1974: 95, 144, 263-64]

11. Merchants do not busy themselves with financial speculations only; they must also pur-chase the necessary services, labour-power and instruments of physical distribution uponwhich their income depends (storage facilities, transportation services, clerical workers,wage-labourers, etc.). The capital which merchants possess, therefore, takes the form of atwofold investment: the purchase and constant renewal of a considerable quantity ofmarketable articles of personal consumption, and the purchase of what may be calledfactors of material distribution. Although Marx regarded the business of merchant capitalas confined to the non-productive sphere of circulation [1973: 856; 1976: 266, 1023], he didnevertheless draw a distinction which is crucial to the understanding of profit-orientedtrade, namely, between the act of monetary exchange and the productive process ofphysical distribution:

. . . the bringing of the product to the market, belongs to the production process itself...the reduction of the costs of this real circulation (in space) belongs to the development ofthe forces of production by capital, the reduction of the costs of its realization . . .

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circulation itself appears as a moment not only of the production process in general, butalso of the direct production process. [1973: 534]

These considerations are quite important for our understanding of those very smallbusinesses operated by 'merchants' or petty traders who own so little, in addition to theirown labour-power and limited factors of material distribution, that they can hardly beco isidered as real agents of merchant capital. Their economic position may in fact be muchcloser to that of 'simple commodity distributors' (for want of a better label). The latternotion is necessary if we are to avoid collapsing both activities of monetary and physicaldistribution into one simple category, which is a common mistake in Marxian studies ofpetty trade and exchange relations in general [Kay, 1975: 70; Laclau, 1977: 33-34; Dupréand Rey, 1978; Mollard, 1977; 229].

12. See Chevalier [1982].

13. Mann and Dickinson [1978] point out that the growth of capitalism in some areas of primaryproduction may be hindered by the naturally conditioned effects of an excess of productiontime over labour time and complications in the smooth circulation (preservation, trans-portation, and exchange) of commodified goods. These useful remarks apply to theagricultural sectors of many underdeveloped countries. We should be careful, however,not to fall into the trap of ecological determinism. The underdevelopment of techniques ofproduction and distribution may be not a cause but a consequence of low levels of capitalaccumulation. The technical obstacles to the full development of industrial capitalism inThird World agriculture cannot by any means be reduced to purely natural constraints andinsufficient advances in science and technology. Nor can the prevalence of SCP in agri-culture be explained away as direct effects of such technical difficulties.

14 Cf. Marx [1965: 101], [1973: 497, 505], and [1976; 544-54, 788, 1033-34].

15 Illustrations of the formal utilitarian approach to rural economies are given in Schneider'sEconomic Man [1974]. As for the Marxian notion of a use-value or subsistence rationaleamong simple commodity producers, see Vergopoulos [1974: 187-88, 218], Kay [1975:63-66], Mandel [1968: 57-58], Mollard [1977: 52] and Bernstein [1979: 425]. The latternotion is of limited value. It hides the profound differences which separate those economicpractices which are subjected to the development of a commodified economy from thosewhich are not. It throws little light not only on the calculative actions of simple commodityproducers dominated by capital, but also on the economic practices of pre-capitalistpeasantries. As argued elsewhere [Chevalier, 1982], the concept of use-value cannot bedetached from the logic of a commodified economy. Material goods may take the form ofuse-values only by virtue of a historically specific process - the formal subsumptionmechanism - which institutes the commodity unit as a basic value of social intercourse. Ifwe are to eschew, as I think we should, the formalist temptation of spreading the profitmentality around the world (to the inclusion of capital-exploited workers), then we shouldbe equally wary of any substantivist or Marxist vision of a quasi-universal use-valuerationale that would govern the economic actions of all men, with the unique exception ofthe modern bourgeois as the incarnation of capital wealth 'in the abstract'.

16. An excellent analysis of the effects of a commodified economy on farmers' behaviourtowards risk is offered by Wright and Kunreuther [1975].

17. See Shanin [1973], Chayanov [1966] and Sahlins [1974].

18. Although useful in many ways, Friedmann's distinction between systems of SCP andpeasant economics (and the corresponding levels of production, commoditization, marketcompetition and integration, factor mobility, specialization, social stratification and so on)is somewhat overdrawn. Economic stagnation, as she herself notes [1979: 180, note 7], maybe an integral effect of a world market economy (and therefore a sign of market integrationthrough dependent misgrowth).

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19. Non-capitalist conditions of SCP include eminently 'modern' systems of political anddomestic life based upon the dominant institutions of state polity and the nuclear family.External factors are not therefore to be automatically equated with social instances ofpre-capitalist formations. Any model that suggests the active interference of variablesoriginating from outside the logic of capital in the reproduction of SCP must allow for thelatter differentiation between the non-economic institutions of bourgeois society and thesocial practices of non-capitalist formations. It must also provide a proper theoreticalunderstanding of such exogenous elements and a rigorous reconstruction of their ownsystematic properties.

REFERENCES

Althusser, L. and E. Balibar, 1970, Reading Capital, (translated by B. Brewster), London:New Left Books.

Amin, S., 1974, 'Le capitalisme et la rente foncière (la domination du capitalisme sur l'agricul-ture)', La question paysanne et le capitalisme, S. Amin and K. Vergopoulos, Paris: EditionsAnthropos.

Banaji, J., 1980, 'Gunder Frank in Retreat?', Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 7, 508-22.

Bernstein, H., 1979, 'African Peasantries: A Theoretical Framework', Journal of PeasantStudies, Vol. 4, 431-43.

Bradby, B., 1975, 'The Destruction of Natural Economy', Economy and Society, Vol. 4,127-61.

Braverman, H., 1974, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twen-tieth Century, New York and London: Monthly Review Press.

Brenner, R., 1977, 'The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-SmithianMarxism', New Left Review, 104, 25-92.

Burawoy, M., 1977, 'The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labour: ComparativeMaterial from Southern Africa and the United States', American Journal of Sociology, 81,1050-87.

Cardoso, F. and E. Faletto, 1970, Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina, México: SigloXXI editores.

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there is nothing simple about simple commodity production

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