1. Lecture 11 Marxism: Production and exchange

2. Marxist critiques of anthropology
The 1960s and 70s was a period of de-colonisation and the radical social movements.
Criticised the preoccupation with social and cognitive structures. Need to focus on the ‘real’ economic interests.
Questioned the position of the anthropologist
Key concepts were power, ideology, domination and resistance.
Base vs. superstructure

3. Peasant and capitalist mode of production
Control over the means of production
Use value: Commodity-money-commodity
Exchange value: Money-commodity-money
The satisfaction of needs vs. the limitless accumulation of capital

4. Chayanov’s model of peasant production
Peasants do not maximise ‘profit’ or material production
Aim to satisfy a certain level of material wants
Labour is related to the household life-cycle

5. Surplus value The value of a thing is the labour used to produce it.
As labour becomes a commodity it becomes the disguised source of profit for the employer.
Workers produce more than they receive in wages, and this is appropriated by the employer.

6. Commodity fetishism
Social relations between persons are disguised as social relations between things.
Creativity no longer appears to be the result of a social relation between people, but of a thing.
Commodities themselves appear as the source of value
The commodity assumes an autonomy apart from human social activities

7. Taussig - South American Peasants
Peasants are critical and antagonistic to the new capitalist production.
Imagery of God and good, or spirits of Nature and ancestors vs. imagery of the devil and evil.
Conscious opposition of ‘use values’ to ‘exchange values’ – the satisfaction of natural wants to the limitless search for profits.

8. Practices of ‘magic’
Contract with the devil to increase output and wages
Baptism of money

9. Taussig’s analysis of fetishism
The magical beliefs are an exotic expression of the opposition between the peasant mode of production and use value (C-M-C) and capitalist circulation (M-C-M). There is a mystery whereby capital appeared to breed more of itself.
The task facing peasants was how to transmute reproductive capacities to money.

10. Morality and resistance
This process was not only unreal but also immoral.
It was seen as the outcome of a chain of events initiated by man, not an inherent property of money.
Express the opposition of peasants to the introduction of capitalist relations of production.
Capitalist relations have not yet become fully accepted as natural.

11. Political economy of informal labour in Sheffield
The organic connections between the domestic and informal economies and the wage economy
The role of domestic labour in reproducing capitalist interests.
How informal arrangements obscure capitalist relations of production and labour’s real subordination to capital.

12. The informal economy
Sheffield is one of the 25 poorest wards in England – Average official family income is £4000
One person in four is informally self-employed, half the population has multiple jobs.
‘Real’ average family income is £17000.

13. The Morris tool factory
Senior skilled workers control production and recruitment
Dual pay and labour market: formal factory work and informal subcontracting in the neighbourhood
Skilled workers: surrogate capitalists, labourer, mediators between the formal factory economy and the informal neighbourhood economy

14. Capitalist relations reproduced through informal relations
Big steel contractors can use an army of non-unionised casual workers paid off the books
Petty capitalists can command the labour of skill workers through informal relations
Skilled workers can exploit younger workers and apprentices
Men control the labour of women and children in their household

15. Marxist anthropology
Looked at unveiling underlying material conditions
Concerned with issues of power, domination and resistance
Concerned with the relation between local communities and the global capitalist system
Remained fundamentally concerned with ‘structural’ analysis rather than the agency and creativity of individuals