Marx goes on to say that the character of private property is expressed by labour, capital, and the relations between these two' (ibid.: 289; cf. 1845a: 278). This strikingly anticipates later and more famous formulations, like Capital's observation that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons established by the instrumentality of things'(1867a: 776). The overall argument of the 1844 Manuscripts on private property is succinctly captured in two sentences: 'material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life’ (1844a: 297). Conversely, ‘only when labour is grasped as the essence of private property, can the economic process as such be analysed in its real concreteness' (ibid.: 317).
In The German Ideology Marx concretizes this analysis somewhat but without losing its essentials. He argues there that different forms [of society] are just so many forms of the organisation of labour, and hence of property' (1846a: 78). Specifically, 'division of labour and private property are ... identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity' (ibid.: 44). For,
the various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e., the existing stage of the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument and product of labour. (ibid.: 33)
Marx elaborates:
with the division of labour . . . is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property; the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wives and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent siavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. (ibid.)
The equation of property with 'power of disposing of the labourpower of others' is one Marx employs repeatedly in texts of this period. That power, in more developed modes of production like capitalism, is certainly materialized in (and effected in part through)
ownership of physical means of production. But it is worth underlining the fact that this is not the case with the family, whose relations Marx none the less claims here to be property relations. Power over people's labour-power derives in this instance from direct, personal, patriarchal relations between individuals themselves. Modern Marxist anthropologists, not to mention feminist writers, concur with this insight.8
IV
I want now to consider exactly what relations between people would, for Marx, qualify as property or production relations. I shall show, from his own texts, that he indeed did (where historically relevant) include within this category relations which are, for traditional historical materialism, eminently superstructural'. The economic structure of society' was therefore for him a very different – and a very much broader - totality of social relations than is normally recognized. The examples I shall consider are drawn from Grundrisse and Capital, both undeniably mature' works. They are therefore not open to the sort of objections Althusserians might raise to my use of the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology immediately above. They are, however, perfectly consistent with these early texts. Since both my examples concern the economic structure’ in non-capitalist societies, they also have the additional merit of suggesting, if only by way of contrast, the rootedness of conventional, narrow definitions of the economic sphere' in specifically capitalist forms of appearance.
The section of the Grundrisse entitled Forms which precede capitalist production' is a long, and largely self-contained disquisition on various historical forms of communal property and production, their gradual disintegration, and the eventual freeing' of the elements of capitalist production. Such communal forms were to remain an abiding interest for Marx, increasingly so in his later years. A large part of his copious, and still largely unpublished, notes and manuscripts of the 1870s and 1880s are given over to this theme (1879a, b; Shanin, 1984). In Grundrisse, he distinguishes three main communal types: primitive, ancient and Germanic. All have variants. I am not concerned here with the historical or anthropological accuracy of Marx's characterization of these forms of society, which by modern standards undoubtedly leaves a lot to be desired (Godelier, 1973: part II, discusses this), nor with how his views on the character and development of communal property might have altered in later writings. I invoke these analyses simply to illustrate how he used his concepts.
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RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
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