From reproduction to production

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Abstract
The concepts of liberal economics, derived from the analysis of capitalist societies, are both inadequate and inappropriate for the analysis of precapitalist societies. Marx's analysis of primitive societies focused largely on the historical succession of modes of production rather than on their inner workings. What is needed is an analysis of the type which Marx made of capitalism. The present analysis starts from Marx's distinction between land as subject of labour and land as instrument of production. Where the latter is the case (as in self-sustaining agricultural communities), the society is dominated by the production and reproduction of the material conditions of existence, of the community's members and of the structural organization; the relations of production and the organisation of the community are based upon control of the means of reproduction (subsistence and women) rather than the means of production. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the way in which capitalism utilizes agricultural communities to provide, in part, for the reproduction of labour-power in the modern wage-labour economy.

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