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Anthropology · Chapter 5

Who Works, Who Owns

A mode of production is not a machine or a crop. Eric Wolf defined it as the particular set of social relations through which a society puts labour to work on nature — so the way to tell two modes apart is not to ask what people eat, but to ask who may use the land, how the workforce is assembled, and where the surplus ends up. Pick a mode below, then tap each of the three panels to open the same three questions on it.

Pick a mode

Wolf’s three modes

Six ways of making a living, three underlying arrangements. Wolf argued that the long list of subsistence types collapses into three ways of organising labour and land. Tap one to see which of the six it covers.
Six ways of making a livingtap a mode, then open its three panels

The six modes

Panels opened0 of 18

Keep these straight

Means of production — the land, water, animals, tools and machines you need in order to produce anything at all.

Relations of production — who controls those means, who does the working, and who ends up with what results. This is what a mode of production actually names.

Usufruct — the right to use land, granted by belonging to a group. It is not ownership: it cannot be sold, and it lapses if you stop using the land or stop belonging.

Karl Polanyi’s three forms of exchange — reciprocity (giving between kin and neighbours), redistribution (everything to a centre, then back out again) and market exchange (price set by supply and demand). Every society uses all three; modes differ in which one carries the weight.
These are types, not stages. It is tempting to read six panels stacked in this order as a staircase, with foragers at the bottom, and every part of that reading is wrong. Foraging peoples are not survivals from an earlier age: Hadza, Ju/'hoansi and Inuit people are contemporaries — citizens of modern states, with wage jobs, schools, land claims and lawyers. Intensive agriculture is not an upgrade on horticulture; it yields more per hectare while yielding less per hour worked, and it arrives with landlords attached. And no society has ever run on a single mode. The words “primitive” and “advanced” do no analytic work here. The three questions on the left do.