2026/06/28 by Jörg Nowak
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #Political Economy and Marxism
paper · doi:10.1177/00368237261458729
crossref issued 2026/06/28 · crossref published 2026/06/28 · crossref published-online 2026/06/28 · openalex publication_date 2026/06/28 · crossref created 2026/06/29 · openalex created_date 2026/06/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/30 · crossref deposited 2026/08/03 · crossref indexed 2026/08/03
The debate on how to theorize the coexistence of several relations of production, forms of labor, and various modes of production in a given society has a longer history in Marxism. In the 1970s, a lively debate emerged between various schools of thought, from French Marxist anthropologists Emmanuel Terray and Pierre-Philippe Rey, to Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi and finally to South African Marxist Harold Wolpe (to name just a few) on how to conceptualize the transition to capitalism in former colonies, and how to understand the persistence of non-capitalist relations of production in those societies. One of the questions explored was to what extent these non-capitalist relations of production remain independent from capitalism, if they are dependent on capitalism for its reproduction, or if they are reconfigured and intentionally recreated by capitalist social actors in order to provide for less costly forms of social reproduction. Following these debates, the contemporary relevance of these debates for the concepts of informal labor, petty commodity production, and other forms of labor that do not resemble wage labor and involve the majority of the population in a considerable number of countries should be apparent. These earlier debates can be useful in the analysis of the interpenetration of different systems of labor in contemporary capitalism.