PRODUCTION FOR LIVELIHOOD

The classic distinction between "production for use" (that is, for the producers) and "production for exchange" was, from the beginning of an economic anthropology, at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries, interred in the graveyard of prehistoric concepts. True that Thurn-wald had adopted these concepts to set off the primitive from modern monetary economies (1932). And nothing could prevent their reincar­nation in various ethnographic contexts (see "Underuse of Labor Power" above). But when Malinowski (1921) defined the "Tribal Economy" in opposition (partly) to Bucher's "Independent Domestic Economy" (1911), the notion of production for use was effectively put aside before its theoretical usefulness had been exhausted.

Perhaps the problem was that "production for use" or "independ­ent domestic economy" could be interpreted two different ways, one of which proved indefensible—so the other was generally ignored. These phrases suggest a condition of domestic autarky, untrue for the producing units of any real society. The households of primitive com­munities are not usually self-sufficient, producing all they need and needing all they produce. Certainly there is exchange. Even aside from the presents given and received under inescapable social obligations, the people may work for a frankly utilitarian trade, thus indirectly getting what they need.

Still, it is "what they need": the exchange, and the production for it, are oriented to livelihood, not to profits. This is a second rendering of the classic distinction, and the more fundamental; more fundamen­tal than a certain exchange is the producer's relation to the productive process. It is not merely "production for use" but production for use value, even through the acts of exchange, and as opposed to the quest for exchange value. On this reading, the DMP does find a place in the received categories of economic history. Even with exchange, the domestic mode is cousin to Marx's "simple circulation of commodi­ties," thus to the celebrated formula C -> M -> C: the manufacture of commodities (C) for sale in the market in order to obtain wherewithal (M, money) for the purchase of other, specific commodities (C). "Simple circulation" is of course more pertinent to peasant than to primitive economies. But like peasants, primitive peoples remain con­stant in their pursuit of use values, related always to exchange with an interest in consumption, so to production with an interest in prov­isioning. And in this respect the historical opposite of both is the bourgeois entrepreneur with an interest in exchange value.

The capitalist process has a different starting point and another calculus. The "general formula for capital" is the transformation of a given money sum into more of the same by way of the commodity: M → C → M', the engagement of labor-power and physical means for the fabrication of a good whose sale realizes the highest possible return on an original capital. Livelihood and gain, "production for use" and "production for exchange" pose thus contrasting finalities of production—and, accordingly, contrasting intensities of prod­uction.

For one is an economic system of determinate and finite objectives while the other holds out the indefinite goal of "as much as possible." It is a difference of quality as well as quantity: in the first place of quality. Production for livelihood envisions not only a moderate quota of good things, but these of a specific useful character responding to the producers' customary requirements. Yet where the domestic econ­omy seeks merely to reproduce itself, production for exchange (value) would constantly exceed itself: in the accumulation of a generalized "wealth." It is not the production of goods in particular but of an abstract "wealth." And "the sky's the limit." By definition, M' < M is a failure of the practice M → C → M'; by competition, M' → °° is the formula of success. How sublime, Marx wrote, seems the ancient conception that made man the objective of production, in comparison with a modern world where production is the objective of man—and wealth the objective of production (1967b, vol. 1, p. 450).

To consider but one implication—of which we have already had ethnographic testimony: work in a system of production for use has unique possibilities of defining a term. Production is under no com­pulsion to proceed to the physical or gainful capacity, but inclined rather to break off for the time being when livelihood is assured for the time being. Production for use is discontinuous and irregular, and on the whole sparing of labor-power. Whereas, in production organ­ized by and for exchange value:

Le but de travail n'est plus, des lors, tel produit specifique ayant des rapports particuliers avec tel ou tel besoin de l'individu, c'est l'argent, richesse ayant une forme universelle, si bien que le zele au travail de l'individu ne connait plus de limites; indifferent a ses propres particularites, le travail revSt toutes les formes qui servent ce but Le zele se fait inventif et cree des objets nouveaux pour le besoin sociale. . . . (Marx, 1967b, vol. 1, p. 165).

It is regrettable that Economic Anthropology chose largely to ig­nore this distinction between production for use and production for exchange. Recognition of the difference in productivity between them had served the study of economic history honorably and well. In a famous case Henri Pirenne thus explained the decline of agriculture in early medieval Europe, when the economy was left without outlets by the Arab seizure of the Mediterranean and lapsed at once from commercial exchange to local self-sufficiency and from higher to lower productivity:

... the regression of agricultural methods is obvious. It was useless to make the soil yield more than was required to satisfy the needs of the cultivator, for since the surplus could not be exported it would neither improve the condition of the tiller of the soil nor increase the rental value of the land. The farmer was therefore satisfied with a minimum of care and effort, and agronomic science was allowed to fall into oblivion, until the possiblity of selling the crops should once more encourage the owners of the soil to adopt improved and more lucrative methods. But then the land would begin to be regarded as a value, and not as a means of subsistence (Pirenne, 1955, p. 99).

And now the classic opposition reappears as the "dual economy" of "underdeveloped" countries. Boeke, author of the principle, describes the contrast in performance this way:

Another respect in which an Eastern differs from a Western society is the fact that needs are very limited. This is connected with the limited develop­ment of exchange, with the fact that most people have to provide for themselves, that families have to be content with what they are able to produce themselves, so that needs necessarily have to remain modest in quantity and quality. Another consequence of this is that the economic motive does not work continuously. Therefore... economic activity is also intermittent. Western economy tends in a diametrically opposite direction . . . (Boeke, 1953, p. 39).

But as witnesses to the colonial confrontation of the two economies, anthropologists have had the opportunity to experience the historic difference as an ethnographic event. In obdurate patterns of indige­nous labor and "irrational" responses to prices, they have seen prod­uction for use—in crises, therefore in essence. For the traditional economy of finite objectives insists on asserting itself even as it is broken and harnessed to the market. Perhaps that helps explain how the rational West could live for a very long time with two contradic­tory prejudices about the "natives" capacity forwork. On the one hand, a vulgar anthropology was contending the people had to labor constantly just to survive, given their technical incapacities; on the other hand, it was only too evident that "the natives are congenitally lazy." If the first was a colonialist rationale, the second testifies to a certain deficiency of the ideology: for some reason it proved necessary to beat the people into shouldering the white man's burden. Recruited as plantation hands, they frequently showed themselves unwilling to work steadily. Induced to raise a cash crop, they would not react "appropriately" to market changes: as they were interested mainly in acquiring specific items of consumption, they produced that much less when crop prices rose, and that much more when prices fell off. And the introduction of new tools or plants that increased the prod­uctivity of indigenous labor might only then shorten the period of necessary work, the gains absorbed rather by an expansion of rest than of output (cf. Sharp, 1952; Sahlins, 1962a). All these and similar responses express an enduring quality of traditional domestic prod­uction, that it is production of use values, definite in its aim, so discontinuous in its activity.

In brief, by this characteristic of DMP—that it is a production of use values—we return to underproduction, the empirical observation of which was the beginning of inquiry. The domestic system entertains limited economic goals, qualitatively defined in the terms of a way of living rather than quantitatively as an abstract wealth. Work is ac­cordingly unintensive: intermittent and susceptible to all manner of interruption by cultural alternatives and impediments ranging from heavy ritual to light rainfall. Economics is only a part-time activity of the primitive societies, or else it is an activity of only part of the society.

Otherwise said, the DMP harbors an antisurplus principle. Geared to the production of livelihood, it is endowed with the tendency to come to a halt at that point. Hence if "surplus" is defined as output above the producers' requirements, the household system is not or­ganized for it. Nothing within the structure of production for use pushes it to transcend itself. The entire society is constructed on an obstinate economic base, therefore on a contradiction, because unless the domestic economy is forced beyond itself the entire society does not survive. Economically, primitive society is founded on an antiso-ciety.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1044