production in Candelaria, with an understanding shared with Althusser: in
2 See Foster-Carter 1978 for auseful survey of the "made of produetion controversy".
pre-capitalist societies, surplus tends to be appropriated by political and ideological mechanisms, where state and church institutions play a crucial
role. In capitalist societies, surplus is extracted through economic
mechanisms. However, pre-capitalism and capitalism can co-exist in a social formation and it is on this particular level of analysis that we will be able to understand the present situation in Candelaria.
There are mainly two pre-capitalist modes of production we should be aware of in this study, the feudal mode of production and the Asiatic mode of production. There is one significant difference between the two. Whereas peasants in the feudal mode of production are unfree by their relationship to their landowner, the peasants within the Asiatic mode of production pay taxesand labour service to the representatives of the state, i.e. a King. or an Emperor (Alavi 1987). SamI Amin calls the Asiatie mode ofproduction the tributary mode of production where the peasantry is subordinated to a superior "external force", the state, which extracts taxes and tributes from
the peasantry. 'The state and the ',eliteäre exteth'al in the sense that the
peasant community operatesas a self-sufficientcorporate community (Amin
1977) .
In a pre-capitalist mode of production there are two major antagonistic dasses': the tenants and ,the owners of land,either private landlords or state representatives. Capitalist dass structure can be discerned by the existence of the workers, who have no ownership in the means of production, and the capitalists, the owners of the means of production. Under capitalism, the ownership of the means of production, governs socIal relations between various groups of actors involved in the production process. The drive for production, the need for the continuous generation of surplus value through
competition, gives the capitalist mode of production its peculiar intern al
dynamism. Production depends, however, on the existence of a market where a price can be obtained that is more than the cost of production. The
profit derived from surplus value is appropriated by those owning the
means of production, the capitalists, and not by the producers, the workers.The surplus value can principally be created in three ways. Marx mentions two of them, namely absolute surplus value and relative surplus value. Absolute surplus value coincides historically with primitive
accumulation, where reinvestment in production has the purpose of
maintaining productivity at the same intensity rather than increasing it.
Primitive accumulation is mainly labour intensive. The surplus is generated by keeping the cost of inputs as small as possible; in other words by keeping wage-expenses as low as possible and the working hours as long
as possible.
The production of relative surplus value is derived from an increased
productivity and thus indudes a higher degree of reinvestment than absolute
surplus value. The driving force of the generation of relative surplus value is found within capitalism itself. McFarlane and Beresford argue that:
(...) the aim of the capitalist is to get hold of more money, to realise a
profit. To do this, he needs to struggle in competition with others; he
needs to seek new markets and organise the produetion of new commodities - even to create new needs. This in turn requires that profits, realIzed as money-capital, are accumulated and used for new investments (McFarlane and Beresford 1985, p. 34).
Surplus is extracted from an increasingly' intensified production, where productivity increases are due to higher capital-inputs in production. The high level of productivity can decrease the market-value of the product because of competition. This can lead to a market-widening (more buyers
can buy the product) aswell ,as mark6t-deepening (each buyer can buy
more), if the wage of the workers increasesproportionally with the
productivity increase.
One factor in the development toward relative surplus value is also the creation of trade unions" fightlng for warkers' interests. The unions tend, in their struggle against capital owners, to fight against any extension of the working day. The production of relative surplus value is dynamic, in the sense that the system forces the development of the means of production:
i.e. technology. Creation of relative surplus value is therefore dominant in the capitalist mode of production. Because of the division of labour and high costs of machinery created through the drive for relative surplus value, labour is in these cases subordinated under and alienated from the means of production, the machinery.
General surplus value is also mentioned as a form of surplus value by, among others, Bunzel (1979). Bunzel insists on the possibility to increase the surplus value by simply increasing both the labour power as well as the number of tools. This occurs in contexts where absolute as well as relative surplus value is produced, and indicates a quantitative increase of production and surplus value created.
However, development in third world countries depends on a variety of mechanisms within as well as outside the nation state. Taylor discusses the effects of penetration of a certain type of capitalism in a country with predominant pre-capitalist modes of production in From Modernization to Modes of Production (1981). According to him, the major effect of the penetration of merchant capitalism is a "reinforcement of already existing forms of extra-economic coercion in agricultural production in the
non-capitalist mode of production" (Taylor 1981). This is achieved by utilising and perpetuating existing relations of production or by creating forms of
landed property and relations of production similar to those during the European feudal period. He particulary makes reference to the Spanish colonizers' practices in Latin America. As Spain also colonized the
Philippines, his argument can be used here.Merchant capitalism was first of all introduced in what we today call third world countries through colonialism and imperialism, i.e. exogenous factors, in contrast to the endogenous introduction of capitalism in countries