Simple Commodity Research Articles

Subsistence agriculture in Papua New Guinea

In Papua New Guinea about 50% of the citizen population is economically active, and of this portion, only about one-fifth have wage-earning jobs. Most of the people shift quite easily from formal to informal and/or subsistence economic activity. The first form of capitalist production came to Papua New Guinea in the 1870s with the recruitment of young men to work on plantations in the central Pacific area and in Queensland, Australia. The alienation of plantation land at that time and down to the present, along with increased production of cash crops on smallholdings, has increased burdens on subsistence production. However, subsistence agriculture is now, and will remain for some time to come, the dominant economic activity in the country, and the base upon which the rest of the economy stands. It is the purpose of this paper to examine subsistence agriculture, as simple commodity production, as it exists at present. This may assist us to understand the transformational processes and resultant problems which will ensue over the rest of this century. It is concluded that the examination of subsistence agriculture, with reference to policy and planning criteria, requires renewed attention to both theory and the collection of data at the micro-level by economists. The fundamental contradiction which faces policy-makers over the next decade is that subsistence producers are primarily responsible for feeding a majority of population. Yet they are being shoved and pulled into the cash economy and/or leaving subsistence production of their own accord. This will set the tone of 'rural development' over the. next decade.

Reflections on the social relations of simple commodity production

Concepts from political economy have been used in a number of recent articles to clarify the essential characteristics of Simple Commodity Production (SCP). Here, for heuristic purposes, the author attempts to make a number of similarly general claims for the element of SCP not susceptible to the concepts of political economy. The article eschews any historical evidence and merely expands from the observation that few if any real situations of SCP occur without non‐commodified social relations playing a significant role in their reproduction. This is because SCP relies in one form or another on ‘unpaid’ labour and because it never entirely revolutionises the social relations from which it emerges. It is proposed here that, in connection with large, more capitalised enterprises, SCP may gain much of its competitive edge from the use it makes of the non‐commodified social relations in which it is enmeshed. This in turn is used to suggest that much of the developmental characteristics of SCP are as much to d...

Peasant economy, rural industry and capitalist development in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico

This article examines the dynamics of rural industrial commodity production in capitalist development. Data from fieldwork in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico, are presented and analysed around issues such as the relationship between agriculture and industry, factors influencing the incidence of rural industrial production (between households, communities and districts), the role of household demographics in rural industry, the difference between simple commodity and simple capitalist production, social differentiation and class formation as related to different rural industries, and the role of labour‐intensive rural industrialisation in developing capitalist economies. A general conclusion is that labour‐intensive industries in capitalism today may not be as uniformly retrograde as some have argued they were in earlier periods of capitalism.

Forms of production in practice: Fresh approaches to simple commodity production

Jaques M. Chevalier, Civilization and the Stolen Gift: Capital, Kin and Cult in Eastern Peru, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. In an important new book, Jacques Chevalier advances the concept ‘form of production’ by giving it explicit theoretical treatment. In doing so he reveals a number of significant differences in the way various scholars have used the concept, especially on the central question — the relationship between capitalist and non‐capitalist forms of production in peripheral social formations. This is an old problem, but one that refuses quietly to die. It thus deserves continued discussion. What makes Chevalier's book worthy of extended discussion, however, is that it provides an anthropological treatment of the cultural elements involved in creating and sustaining distinctive forms of production. It does so by elaborating some of Pierre Bourdieu's notions about social practice in creating cultural as well as material life. The two sets of issues are not as far apart as one might...

Zapotec Stoneworkers: The Dynamics of Rural Simple Commodity Production in Modern Mexican Capitalism. SCOTT COOK

Zapotec Stoneworkers: The Dynamics of Rural Simple Commodity Production in Modern Mexican Capitalism. SCOTT COOK

: Zapotec Stoneworkers: The Dynamics of Rural Simple Commodity Production in Modern Mexican Capitalism . Scott Cook.

: Zapotec Stoneworkers: The Dynamics of Rural Simple Commodity Production in Modern Mexican Capitalism . Scott Cook.

There is nothing simple about simple commodity production

This essay offers a theoretical rethinking of simple commodity production that avoids two extreme notions of capitalism: one which readily embraces all relations of production found in the pervasive world system, and another which produces a rigidly eroded model to which everything else is externally articulated. It is argued that some specific forms of SCP can be treated as variations of capitalism integral to its polymorphous logic, and therefore as subjected, under determinate conditions, to a flexibly defined process of labour's subordination (formal and real) to capital. Self‐employed labour is also re‐examined in the light of (a) the basic exigencies of capital accumulation, (b) the contradictions inherent to capitalism, especially those pertaining to the confrontation between intraverted and extroverted economies, and (c) the active struggle of all working classes against their total dispossession from commodified wealth.

Zapotec Stoneworkers: The Dynamics of Rural Simple Commodity Production in Modern Mexican Capitalism.

An analytical study of rural craft industry in the valley of Oaxaca, Mexico that produces metates or grindstones to supply a traditional regional demand which, like its object commodities, is an aspect of pre-capitalist economy. An analytical study of rural craft industry in the valley of Oaxaca, Mexico that produces metates or grindstones to supply a traditional regional demand which, like its object commodities, is an aspect of pre-capitalist economy. The metate (grindstone), with its companion mano (stone rolling pin), is unique among a series of commodities invented in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica that combine use, exchange, and symbolic values and are still manufactured, sold, and used. Zapotec Stoneworkers is the first and only detailed ethnography that explains and analyzes all aspects of the production, exchange, and use of metates and manos in rural twentieth-century Mexico. It incorporates interview and case study material of metateros (metate makers), their households, and communities, as well as extensive empirical data regarding output, pricing, and marketing in the metate industry of the Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico.

Peasants of the Nuba Mountains region

Since Sudan's independence three development plans have attempted to reorient the agricultural sector and stimulate the process of social and economic development. Believing that their inadequacies have been largely due to a misunderstanding of existing and evolving production relations, the author has attempted to focus on one region of the country where state sponsored capitalist agricultural schemes have been introduced and are leading to the modification of pre‐existing pre‐capitalist forms. He argues that production relations among the peasantry of the Nuba Mountains should best be described as consistent with simple commodity or petty commodity production. But this mode is itself undergoing a process of change as the peasants interact with the capitalist system through sale of their labour power on the nearby capitalist schemes and purchase of their agricultural implements.

Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market

This article presents an historical framework for analyzing Amer ican women's household production for the market from the late eighteenth cen tury to the early twentieth century. It argues that women's household production — particularly the making of cloth and butter and the taking in of boarders — was a crucial economic factor in both urban and rural families, maintaining with in them a simple commodity mode of production. With the disappearance of this type of household production women moved from a household income to a wage income and into the capitalist mode of production.

Household production and the national economy: Concepts for the analysis of Agrarian formations

This essay argues that the central concept for analysis of agrarian social relations is the form of production. This is conceived through a double specification of the unit of production and the social formation. The approach allows for the analytical specification of simple commodity production and capitalist relations of production in a manner consistent with the development of new concepts within political economy for agrarian structures which do not correspond to modes of production. The latter have generally been referred to as ‘peasant’, a term derived through empirical generalisation and resting on a (usually) implicit contrast with simple commodity production. The contrast can be made more rigorous through the concept of commoditisation, defined as the penetration into reproduction of commodity relations. Simple commodity production is a concept within political economy, allowing for deduction of conditions of reproduction and class relations. ‘Peasant production is negatively defined as resisting...

AN ESSAY ON THE PURE THEORY OF COMMODITY MONEY *

CLASSICAL authors like J. S. Mill (1848) and early neoclassical authors like W. S. Jevons (1875, 1884), L. Walras (1874, 1886) or A. Marshall (1871, 1887, 1899, 1923) premised monetary theory on an endogenously-supplied commodity money produced under free competition. This essay views their problem in modern dress, eschewing any attempt at exegesis or criticism of their writings. A clearer appreciation of the conceptual issues certainly assists understanding of nineteenth century monetary thought and phenomena. But it also illumines matters of perennial interest for monetary theory and proposals for monetary reform. Commodity money has been involved in several modern discussions, such as Friedman (1949), Buchanan (1962), Burstein (1963, pp. 97-100), Pesek and Saving (1967), Johnson (1967, 1969), Niehans (1969), Chen (1972), Fischer (1972), Luke (1975), all dealing with fundamental monetary issues, and a general treatment seems desirable. The subsequent analysis attempts to establish a framework within which the logical implications of a simple commodity currency can be explored rather than on normative issues as to the practicability, desirability and optimal design of a commodity-currency or commodity-reserve scheme. For fuller consideration of such issues see particularly Friedman (1949), Graham (1962), Johnson (1967) and Barro (1979). The discussion must also be sharply distinguished from recent treatments of the competitive production of bank money by Klein (1974), Gramm (1975) and others. Section I constructs a simple macroeconomic model, incorporating the production of commodity money into an otherwise-orthodox setting, with given factor supplies and demand conditions. The properties of this model are explored in Section Il, while Section III contrasts the use of commodity money with the use of fiat money. It is shown, contrary to common belief, that commodity-money production might lower economic activity and prices for a given money stock, or make them more sensitive to exogeneous disturbance. Section IV develops a limiting partial-equilibrium approach, which is used to explore the implications of previously omitted nonmonetary uses for the monetary commodity and a distributed-lag response of its production. Brief concluding remarks are in Section V. The more involved proofs are relegated to Appendices.

African peasantries: A theoretical framework∗

The paper seeks to contribute to a framework for the investigation of the specific historical conditions and contemporary manifestations of the agrarian question in sub‐Saharan Africa. The latter is distinguished, inter alia, by the timing and modes of incorporation of African social formations in the international economy, and by the forms of intervention of the colonial and post‐colonial states in the absence of features classically associated with the agrarian question elsewhere, such as large landed property, the political power of landlords, and the formation of an agrarian bourgeoisie. The forms and degrees of subsumption of peasant simple commodity production in the circuit of capital, a process in which the state plays a central role, are seen as moving towards a situation in which peasant producers are constituted as ‘wage‐labour equivalents’.

The Independent Mode of Production

The concept "independent mode of production" is examined to determine its theoretical, empirical, and political usefulness in Marxian analysis. The independent production unit is traced from its origin in the village commun ity to its fullest development in the early American social formation. It is argued that production in the independent mode of production is mostly the production of use-values and that the term "simple commodity production" can be used as an abstraction to examine the part of production which is for exchange. Polit ically, it is seen as important to make the distinction between the independent mode of production and the capitalist mode of production, especially in the United States.

Simple commodity production and wage labour in the American plains∗

Households which exclusively produce a single commodity have a dual character as enterprises and as families. Competition establishes a constant requirement for labour, while demographic variation prevents its continuous supply within the household. Using data from a county in the heart of the American wheat plains to illustrate the analysis, this paper applies a modified version of Marx's theory to the circuits of reproduction of simple commodity production, focusing on their intersection with markets in labour power. The analysis requires elaboration of the Marxist definition of class, in order to differentiate members of specialized commodity production households who work for wages as a temporary phase in the life‐cycle, from a permanent class of wage labourers. It concludes that simple commodity production, although it differs from capitalist production as well as from peasant households, requires for its reproduction a well‐developed market in labour‐power and thus an essentially capitalist economy.

Value, price, and simple commodity production: The case of the Zapotec stoneworkers∗

The concepts of ‘commodity’ and of ‘simple commodity production’ in the work of Marx and his interpreters are examined as a necessary departure point for the analysis of value and price in a Mexican peasant‐artisan stoneworking industry. The labour theory of value, which posits a close relationship between market price and average embodied labour cost of commodities in a peasant‐artisan economy, is applied to the stone‐working industry and is shown to have explanatory power in both the qualitative and quantitative sense. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the labour theory is a necessary tool for discerning and approximating the fundamental role of the labour process, as well as the structure of production relations, in determining the nature and conduct of exchange activities in a peasant‐artisan commodity/market economy.

Nonmonetary Commodity Incentives in Family Planning Programs: A Preliminary Trial

A variety of incentive schemes has been proposed to improve the effectiveness of family planning programs. In general the few that have been tried have been limited to monetary or cash incentives. Monetary reimbursement to workers has perhaps been the form of incentive payment most widely used. Family planning workers in South Korea Taiwan India and Pakistan have been at least partially reimbursed for patient referrals or for service. Finders fees have been offered in Egypt India Pakistan and Taiwan to encourage satisfied patients or other ambitious members of the community who refer clients for family planning. Taiwan has experimented successfully with coupons offering free IUD insertions for a limited time. In the Taiwan experiment the increase in patient recruitment more than offset the loss of income to the program and cost per acceptor dropped during the period of free insertion. With the exception of Taiwans free insertion coupon patient incentives have usually been limited to small cash payments given to acceptors ostensibly to cover transportation costs to the clinic (Pakistan) or as compensation for loss of time from work (India). It is generally agreed that a cash incentive offered to worker or patient will increase at least temporarily the number of patient acceptances. It is also agreed that incentives can be abused particularly if they are viewed as a substitute for adequate patient information or care. This report deals with a type of non-monetary incentive widely used in commercial sales promotion campaigns. The commodity incentive may be defined as the offer of goods or merchandise of a recognized commercial value as a reward for taking a specific action within a given time period or as a reward for achievement in a given undertaking. In Ghana it was decided to evaluate the effectiveness of a simple commodity incentive in increasing the proportion of referred women who came to the clinic for service. In the preliminary trial a commodity that would have both a real and a symbolic value was selected. Whole powdered milk was chosen as it met both these requirements. The product selected was commercially available throughout the country and had a known value. The powdered milk was also selected for the symbolic value to demonstrate to the mothers that family planning would help themselves and their children to a better life. (excerpt)